With Few Wins to Highlight, House Republicans Head Home to Chase Votes

Far-right Texas Republican and reigning champion of Stateside incendiary floor rhetoric, Representative Chip Roy stood before the House in November and delivered a scorched earth takedown of his own party.

For the 12th time, I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one, that I can go campaign on and say we did.” One!” He challenged somebody – anybody! – to “come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”

It may not have been the best thing to say to his colleagues but what Mr. Roy said had some truth to it. In 10 months spent in the position, House Republicans did not accomplish much more than the removal of their first speaker McCarthy and making further life unbearable for the second elected speaker Johnson, who received the support of the majority of Congress Republicans solely because no one could name him the culprit or offense for the faction’s division.

It is 2017 and the party record has not become more productive since Mr. Roy’s catastrophically devastating speech.

On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson was pressed to turn to Democrats to get the required votes to pass a short-term spending bill to prevent a government shutdown just before the 2024 election. It finally sailed through by 341 to 82, a majority of the Republicans voted in support of the bill.

It effectively neutered Mr. Johnson politically in the eyes of his far-right supporters who wanted to include in any deal deep spending cuts and a provision demanding the presentation of a birth certificate before being allowed to register to vote.

When those aims were frustrated, legislators fled to the airports with no intent to go back to Washington before the November polls.

And as they go back to their constituents to persuade them they have a right to remain in Congress and maintain a broken House majority, they have very few lights to point at and claim credit for. The must-pass legislation like laws to increase the debt ceiling and spending bills that only rarely avoid government shutdowns that are always looming advanced slowly, and only because the Democrats provided most of the vote for those measures.

Their probe into the Biden family did not ensnare the only Biden that counted, a current president, and did not lead to the impeachment so many pledged to deliver to their voters two years ago. Their queries ceased to be relevant anyway, once in July Mr. Biden declared that he would not run for a second term.

Since becoming the speakership last October, Mr. Johnson has had to look over his shoulder and think about what former President Donald J. Trump and the MAGA members in his conference want. But those directions tend to frustrate GOP legislators, resulting in lost votes, unclear communication, and scrabbles for position within the party, giving Democrats a renewed confidence for picking up more House seats this November.

“It is not the most eventful legislative session for them to campaign on,” said Molly Reynolds, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Bogged down in internal strife and feuds, Republicans have time and again thwarted their partisan communicational bills from being voted on the floor. Republicans have referred to their fractured conference as a clown car at various moments over the last two years. And some of them even attempted the second time to rid themselves of their own chief, failing to depose Mr. Johnson from the position. The only reason he survived is the Democrats decided to rescue him when it comes to Ukrainian financing.

“The message voters get when they tune into Congress is that Republicans don’t give a damn about governing for the American people, they just like to fight,” Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, who works with Kamala Harris’s campaign. “The party is viewed as a prisoner to its aggressive and radical MAGAbase.

At times the House has been able to coalesce to pass crucial legislation — but a conservative majority often emerged to divide that vote and give a Democratic agenda. When it came to extending an expiring warrantless surveillance law that national security officials said is necessary for intelligence gathering and combating terrorism, right-wing House Republicans opposed it after Mr. Trump told them in all capitals on Twitter to knock it down. Mr. Johnson was able to advance the measure only after he truncated the extension from five years to two.