Congress in limbo as House speaker drama drags on
Sarah Westwood
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Newly elected members of the House have nameplates on their offices and their belongings inside the doors.
They’re wearing the lapel pins that identify them as members of Congress and showing their families the halls they’ll walk as lawmakers.
ENDGAME: THREE WAYS THE HOUSE SPEAKER CHAOS COULD FINALLY BE RESOLVED
Yet the protracted slog over whether House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) deserves a promotion to speaker has frozen the lower chamber in time.
All legislative work has stopped.
Sitting lawmakers can’t look at classified documents or use the House’s secure facilities for meetings. Committees can’t proceed with oversight plans months in the making. Swearing-in ceremonies are on indefinite hold.
Dozens of newly hired aides have nothing to do while their bosses sit in political purgatory.
And all aides face the prospect of going without a paycheck if the stalemate continues past the end of next week.
“We have a third, one of our three branches of government, offline right now. That is a very dangerous thing for our country, and it cannot continue much longer,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told CNN on Wednesday.
House Democrats, who watched with what seemed to Republicans like glee at the disarray derailing the first days of the GOP agenda, have voiced increasing concern about the effective shutdown.
While none have made serious moves toward supporting a consensus candidate to break the stalemate, some have said they would consider backing a Republican who made concessions to the minority — as long as that person isn’t McCarthy.
The ability for lawmakers to provide constituent services has also grown more complicated during the state of limbo.
Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) complained his staff members were unsure whether they could legally help constituents with routine problems, such as solving a passport problem or assisting a veteran, with the House technically not operative.
The IRS reportedly turned away a congressional office looking to help a constituent, citing the lack of a sworn-in congressman at the helm of the office.
That upheaval has confused members on both sides of the aisle.
Democratic congressional offices reportedly received guidance that they could not take on new constituent cases while the House remained leaderless.
The Democratic offices later received updated guidance reversing the ban, blaming the confusion on the “ongoing chaos.”
With a narrow four-seat Republican majority in the House and Democrats in control of the Senate and White House, Republicans had little prospect of turning bills into law at the start of the 118th Congress.
But their major plans for investigating the Biden administration remain on ice during the uncertainty and could be diminished significantly if the impasse yields a deal with Democrats to give the gavel to a centrist Republican.
That’s because one condition for attracting the support of Democrats open to the possibility, such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), is to give Democrats equal subpoena power and to increase their numbers on key committees, diluting the ratio of GOP members.
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One bright spot in the delay, at least for the viewing public, has been the remarkable access to deal-making on the floor thanks to the watchful eyes of C-SPAN cameras.
Under normal operations, the speaker of the House controls the C-SPAN cameras and typically does not permit the lens to wander around the floor, zooming in on personal interactions between lawmakers.
With no speaker, however, C-SPAN controls the cameras, allowing for the close-ups of intense conversations between unexpected groups of members that have contributed to the riveting drama of the speaker vote.