When control of Congress and the White House falls under one party, it’s easier to get legislation passed. As Democrats proved in early 2021, a tie in the Senate and rules surrounding reconciliation, bypassing cloture motions, allowed them to pass the American Rescue Plan Act, a $2 trillion behemoth of a spending bill.
However, when one party controls the House, and the other controls the Senate and the White House, it’s different. The Republican Party controls the House, while the Democrats have a razor-thin majority in the Senate and control of the White House. However, I’m getting feelings of deja vu, as it is giving me flashbacks to the early 2010s when the breakdown was the same. For whatever reason, Tea Party members in the House behaved as if the GOP controlled all of government and balked at passing spending bills that didn’t contain everything they wanted.
At least then, the speaker of the House was John Boehner, who knew what he was doing. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) appears hapless, trying to lead a conference in which so many of the members make Cocaine Bear look reasonable. Johnson better send Robert Hur a thank-you card because the special counsel’s report about President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified information is the only thing that kept the embarrassment by the House off the front page for several days.
Forget the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas debacle. Forget the Israel funding debacle. Forget the ridiculous impeachment inquiry of Biden. The border security bill stands alone as an exercise in failed leadership and bowing to the demands of former President Donald Trump, who wins about as well as the 1962 New York Mets.
One author of the bill was Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). Another supporter of the bill was Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). I kid you not when I say that people on social media were calling Lankford a “communist” and Crenshaw a “leftist” for supporting the bill. One might argue, “Well, that’s not the real world.” But it is. It is the activist base of the GOP that wants everything, or they’d rather have nothing.
And Republican members of the House and Senate will allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Did the bill have flaws? Of course, it did. That is why the House, if operating normally, could have come up with its own version, providing fixes where necessary, and passed it. Then, the two bills go to conference, and the differences get hashed out. That’s how Congress is supposed to work.
Instead, the House GOP leadership declared the bill “dead on arrival,” and that was that. Now, the Senate has passed a spending bill containing appropriations for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The bill contains necessary military aid for Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion, for Israel to continue its battle with Hamas, and for Taiwan to help keep China at bay.
And Johnson had the audacity to complain. He said, “Now, in the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters.”
Of all people, it was the usually buffoonish Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) who had the most salient comment about this turn of events. On X, he wrote, “The speaker said he wouldn’t pass Ukraine funding without a border deal and we got a deal and then he killed the deal because he said we didn’t need a deal and now he says he won’t pass our Ukraine funding bill bc it doesn’t include a border deal.”
The speaker knows the House cannot “work on its own.” That is not how Congress operates.
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However, it doesn’t matter because it is what the activist base wants. To them, incremental wins are nothing more than losing, which is absurd.
The 2018 midterm elections, 2020 presidential election, 2021 special election in Georgia that cost the GOP control of the Senate, a terrible showing in the 2022 midterm elections, and a special election loss in New York after the GOP won by 7 points in 2022? Those are losses, and they’ll keep piling up if the Republican Party continues down the path it has chosen.
Jay Caruso is a writer and editor residing in West Virginia.