Fifteen rounds of voting. That is how many times a vote was held with the purpose of electing a Speaker of the House in January of 2023. After four days of constant voting and many objectively bad concessions, Kevin McCarthy was elected to be Speaker of the House. For clarification, the Speaker of the House has a vital role that allows the House to function. The Speaker brings legislation forward and acts as a representative for the majority party in the House. Ever since the start of House Republicans gaining control of the House last year, there have been nothing but blunders, which have resulted in nothing but obstructions and chaos coming from the House of Representatives.
After Kevin McCarthy was elected to the role of speaker, an immediate crisis came about in the form of the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling (or debt limit) is the amount of money the federal government is legally allowed to borrow to deliver legal obligations. In the spring of last year, the government approached this limit, and the House GOP manufactured an entire crisis from it. In essence, House Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling unless they were able to negotiate spending cuts. Despite the debt ceiling being raised three times in the Trump administration with no issue, House Republicans only now refused to raise the ceiling in order to get a win for themselves. After months of negotiations and stress from the general public about the debt ceiling, a deal was finally made to raise it. This deal benefited Democrats the most, however, because it did not contain any of the massive spending cuts Republicans originally wanted. In the end, the debt ceiling was raised, and some minor spending cuts happened. Republicans were upset with Kevin Mcarthy they were not able to get any spending cuts that they desired.
In September of last year, amid allegations with no substantial evidence, Kevin McCarthy began an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Many Republicans have been calling for this impeachment inquiry against the President to happen based on alleged counts of bribery. Despite not holding a vote within the House to officially start the inquiry for a few weeks, it still went on despite objections to it being simply a “fishing expedition” meant to find any sort of evidence. Despite the ongoing inquiry happening for five months now (with allegations going back years), no evidence of bribery has been found. Any possible evidence is ruled out or quickly debunked. This is just another example of obstruction and distraction the House GOP has been making.
Near the end of September, the government ran out of money and was getting close to shutting down. Many Republicans and Democrats went back and forth on negotiating a deal to pass a spending bill to keep the government open, but talks were getting nowhere. Eventually, Kevin McCarthy negotiated a temporary spending bill that would delay a government shutdown. House Republicans rewarded Kevin Mcarthy by making a motion for him to be fired from the Speakership. Back when McCarthy was trying to get the votes for Speaker of the House, he negotiated a new rule that only one member of Congress needed to file a motion to vacate the Speakership. This one congressional member ended up being Matt Gaetz of Florida. A vote was held, and McCarthy lost his job as speaker. It took over a week to find a replacement for McCarthy in the form of Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Mike Johnson has continued the trend of making a lot of noise in Congress and not really focusing on any meaningful legislation. For example, House Republicans said they were willing to pass foreign aid if it included new border legislation. This bill was negotiated between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and included revisions to the asylum process along with foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. After the announcement of this came about, Mike Johnson declared the bill dead due to the inclusion of foreign aid. This is in spite of him and other House GOP members asking for foreign aid to be included with border legislation.
This brings us back to the question asked in the title of this article; have current House Republicans accomplished anything meaningful? The short answer is sort of. To start off with the positives, even though it was a manufactured crisis, the debt ceiling crisis was resolved in the House. The government shutdown has continued to be avoided despite it still potentially looming in the background as a long-term solution has still not been negotiated. The House did expel George Santos after a report came out from the House ethics committee showing he lied about his entire background and has committed crimes such as fraud. Also, there have been attempts to expand the child tax credit, giving more families tax breaks. Despite these positives, it has come to people’s attention that this current House has only passed 27 bills that eventually became law. This is such a small amount of bills that it begs the question of what House Republicans have even been doing. The reason almost no substantial bills have been passed is that the House GOP has been more focused on obstructing Democrats rather than passing these pieces of legislation. This past year of leading the House could come back to haunt Republicans in the November elections if they do not manage to pass substantial legislation.
Credit: NBC News