House Republicans’ humiliating year, explained

There’s nothing quite like starting the year with 14 consecutive rounds of failed speaker votes.

Just one week into 2023, House Republicans had already endured a humiliating leadership race full of infighting and chaos. And while that was a low point for them, things arguably went downhill from there.

Since then, the GOP followed up its first wave of speaker drama with another equally tumultuous contest, expulsion votes on one of its own members, failed attempts to get much of its policy agenda out the door, and floundering investigations of President Joe Biden.

Spending a year dealing with political and personnel problems left the party with little to show for itself policy-wise ahead of an election year in which Republicans hope to expand on their narrow House majority. And it has given Democrats plenty of ammunition to use in making the case the GOP shouldn’t be trusted to govern.

According to the New York Times, this is the most unproductive the House has been in years, even compared to other instances of divided government. In 2023, the House passed just 27 bills that became law, a far lower figure than the 72 it passed in 2013 when Congress was similarly split.

It was always going to be difficult for Republicans to leave a mark given Democratic control of the Senate and White House, but in the past, parties in the GOP’s position have stayed better united on their policy priorities and put pressure on the administration while sticking together on their demands. Although there’s still time to turn things around next year, at this point in the term, it seems as though this House will be remembered for being the one in which Republicans were seriously in disarray. Below is a rundown of some of the moments that defined that mayhem.

Speaker drama (round one)

For four days, members of the House’s right flank like Rep. Matt Gaetz refused to back Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the role of speaker because, they argued, he hadn’t sufficiently committed to their interests and wasn’t conservative enough.

That led to round after round after round of failed votes. On the 15th round of voting, McCarthy was finally able to secure the majority he needed to ascend to the role, but not without making some serious concessions that greatly diluted his power.

Those concessions included putting multiple members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee, an agreement to curb government spending, and changes to a policy known as the motion to vacate, which would allow any one member to introduce a resolution to remove McCarthy from the job.

That last concession would come back to haunt McCarthy later in the year, when House conservatives would use it to protest his handling of government funding legislation. The whole speakership debacle also foreshadowed the ideological divides that would come to plague Republicans for the duration of this year and make not just keeping a leader, but producing concrete legislation, difficult.

Debt ceiling

A segment of the House Republican conference has long threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling — something that could spark economic calamity — if they don’t get the spending cuts they demand.

The debt ceiling is the limit that the US is able to borrow, and if the country defaults on it, it’s unable to pay its bills. Congress has to either raise or suspend the debt ceiling every few years to ensure that the US doesn’t default. If it were to do so, there’d likely be cascading negative effects on the US and global economies: The US could have a lower credit limit, interest rates could go up, and unemployment could surge. Despite these concerns, fiscal conservatives have long suggested they’d be open to defaulting if it meant that they could secure the social spending changes they demand.

This year, those lawmakers, which include members of the Freedom Caucus, urged then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy to take a hard-line stance in negotiations with Democrats. Specifically, they called for major cuts to climate spending and new work requirements for Medicaid in exchange for any willingness to raise the debt limit.

McCarthy did take a strong position in negotiations, to the point that questions were raised about whether the US, which typically comes down to the wire on debt ceiling deals, might actually default this time. In the end, with days to spare, GOP leaders wound up settling for a debt ceiling deal that didn’t include many of these requests. While they were able to secure some Republican wins — like the repurposing of roughly $20 billion in IRS funding and a cap on non-defense spending — the cuts wound up being far less than what some members had urged. The deal was generally seen as a compromise for all involved; not a loss for the GOP, but not a win, either.

Conservatives were incensed, setting the stage for later confrontations between the party’s right-most members and the rest of the caucus. “The concessions made by the speaker in his negotiations with President Biden fall far short of my expectations,” Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), a Republican who opposed the deal, wrote on Twitter.

Investigation flops

One of Republicans’ chief promises when they entered office was that they’d be launching a series of investigations, including many that centered on the Biden administration and alleged biases the federal government has against Republicans.

These investigations have focused on everything from Twitter’s handling of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop to the White House’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to the purported “weaponization of the federal government.”

By and large, as Vox’s Christian Paz has reported, many of the investigations have been nothing short of flops. The laptop investigation failed to find anything incriminating President Biden in misconduct, and the Afghanistan investigation didn’t turn up any useful knowledge to use against Democrats the way the Benghazi investigation did years earlier. Overall, not only have inquiries into President Biden failed to turn up any concrete evidence linking him to wrongdoing, these endeavors haven’t generated a lot of discourse, and the impeachment effort in particular has been unpopular.

According to a December Marist poll, voters were split on Biden’s impeachment inquiry, with just 48 percent approving of it. That figure is lower than the percentage of voters who approved of Trump’s two past impeachment inquiries, according to the Washington Post.

Although some of these efforts, like Republicans’ recent launch of Biden’s impeachment inquiry, might help rally the GOP base, they also endanger battleground members given they aren’t especially backed by the broader public. That makes these actions more risky for House Republicans, whose ability to maintain a majority hinges on these battleground members, 17 of whom are in districts that Biden also won.

Speaker drama (round two)

As if the January drama wasn’t enough, Republicans had yet another speaker debacle in October when the far-right faction of the GOP conference joined with Democrats to oust McCarthy from the speaker’s job.

The trouble began when McCarthy opted to work with Democrats to pass a short-term spending bill that kept the government open. Each year, Congress has to pass 12 appropriations bills, often consolidated into a larger package, to allocate the funds needed to keep the government running. Conservatives had hoped that McCarthy would leverage a potential government shutdown to force Congress to pass individual long-term spending bills that contained the cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid they wanted.

McCarthy’s decision to avert a shutdown followed other actions that had upset these far-right members, including the concessions he had previously made on the debt ceiling deal.

As a result, Gaetz opted to use the motion to vacate to force a vote on removing McCarthy, which was ultimately successful.

After McCarthy was booted, Republicans faced even more problems as the far right opposed other speaker options that were proposed, and moderates opposed the conservative options the far right wanted. Multiple people were floated as potential options, including longtime leadership member Rep. Steve Scalise from Louisiana and former Freedom Caucus Chair Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan. None were able to get the support needed to become speaker.

All of this culminated in the election of conservative member, election denier, and relative unknown Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) to the position.

The same fault lines that sparked the McCarthy drama, however, haven’t disappeared. Instead, they’re expected to re-emerge in 2024 when the House will have to figure out how to handle the passage of long-term spending bills as another funding deadline approaches in January.

Johnson will have to navigate these tensions on those bills — as well as on the Biden impeachment inquiry — as different factions of the party push for competing paths forward.

Failed abortion bills and culture wars

Beyond investigations into Biden, House Republicans kicked off their term with a laundry list of goals they hoped to achieve.

Chief among these were policies that would restrict abortion rights. Like the investigations, however, this goal proved fraught and revealing of the divisions in the caucus. Though some far-right members agitated for a national abortion ban, there was rapid blowback to such harsh proposals —with poll after poll after poll showing that Americans are in favor of at least some abortion access. In lieu of considering a national abortion ban, the House voted on a slate of abortion bills that would put limitations on federal funding for abortions and require care for infants if an abortion failed.

These had no chance of making it through the Democrat-controlled Senate.

A similar dynamic played out on legislation like the annual defense bill, which lays out the military budget that the US has each year. House Republicans used their version of the bill to restrict funds that the federal government can provide for servicemembers to travel for an abortion, and to limit funding for gender-affirming surgeries for trans servicemembers. Those amendments did not make it into a final compromise bill with the Senate.

While both bills were wins for a chamber that has struggled to pass even basic legislation, they also marked another failure by House Republicans to get their policies into law.

“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a far-right member said in November during a floor speech criticizing Republicans’ failures on spending cuts.

George Santos and a winnowing majority

After the 2022 midterms, the House GOP’s majority was narrow: In those contests, Republicans only won a nine-seat majority, after winning 222 seats to Democrats’ 213.

A combination of circumstance, bad luck, and misconduct have further winnowed that majority thanks to the scandals of former New York Rep. George Santos and some lawmakers’ decision to leave the House of their own volition.

Santos’s expulsion was the latest embarrassment for the GOP, and marked the first time a House lawmaker had been expelled in roughly two decades. His removal followed a 23-count federal indictment, extensive coverage of the lies he told about his work and educational history, and a scathing review by the House Ethics Committee.

In addition to Santos’s departure, there have been many other resignations on the Republican side. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has said he’ll leave his post before the end of 2023, and Bill Johnson (R-OH) has said he’ll leave his post in 2024, meaning their seats will be vacant until they can hold special elections in their districts (though both are expected to eventually be replaced by Republicans).

That means Republicans could be operating with fewer votes to spare in the new year. With McCarthy gone, they’re only able to lose three votes to keep their majority. Those narrow margins could give any small group of GOP lawmakers outsize control over policy or force them to keep relying on Democratic votes for key bills. “Hopefully no one dies,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) lamented in a tweet on this issue. (That post also suggested that Republicans will have only a one-vote majority which isn’t the case.)