Nothing is more certain in life than death and taxes, but the success of a House rules vote was once a close third. This is a key procedural maneuver setting up debate on legislation in a congressional chamber where the majority party, and usually the speaker, historically has substantial control over the agenda.
Revise that to “had substantial control.” Before the current Congress, a House rules vote hadn’t failed in two decades. There have been six such failures under the current Republican majority, setting a modern record.
One analysis found that House Republicans had the lowest success rate on party unity votes of any majority party in more than 40 years. This describes roll calls on bills, amendments, and resolutions that break down along party lines.
The only majority with a lower success rate, CQ Roll Call found, was in 1982. That’s when a bloc of mostly Southern Democrats defected to help a larger-than-usual Republican minority pass elements of President Ronald Reagan’s legislative agenda, forming a bipartisan conservative majority on some topics despite liberal Tip O’Neill maintaining his grasp on the speaker’s gavel.
Republicans now hold the speakership but have a less functional conservative majority than when O’Neill tried and failed to stop the Reagan tax cuts. It is hard to imagine the current GOP majority passing anything of that caliber.
House Republicans can barely elect a speaker. It took 14 ballots to install then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy in the top job at the beginning of the new GOP House majority at the beginning of last year. The California Republican lasted only until October and is no longer even a member of Congress. McCarthy was the first speaker ever removed, and it was only the second time such a floor vote was even attempted after House Speaker Joseph Cannon, for whom the Cannon Office Building is named, quelled the rebellion in 1910.
It then took three weeks for Republicans to settle on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as McCarthy’s replacement. Three previous candidates nominated by the Republican conference, including two current members of the GOP leadership team and a committee chairman who is also a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, failed to win the necessary support to become speaker.
By February, at least one Republican lawmaker had publicly floated ousting Johnson as speaker if he brought Ukraine aid to the floor. This led to a centrist Democrat gauging colleagues’ support for a change to the rules to make this more difficult after his party left McCarthy to twist in the wind last year. (It is not clear at this writing whether Democrats will ride to Johnson’s rescue.)
The disarray has seasoned lawmakers streaming toward the exits. Four House committee chairpeople will not be seeking reelection this year. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, was viewed as an up-and-comer. He had already spurned GOP entreaties to challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) in a bid to retake the upper chamber majority. Now, the 39-year-old Iraq War veteran is leaving Capitol Hill altogether, saying, “The Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives.”
Some House members are leaving to run for Senate. But we have also seen Republicans depart both houses of Congress to become university presidents. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s (R-WA) statement about serving “in new ways” and signing off with “The best is yet to come” sounded more like someone who lost an election than the sitting House Energy and Commerce chairwoman.
Others are more direct. Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, announced that he was leaving Congress after his colleagues struggled to find the votes to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “Our country — and our Congress — is broken beyond most means of repair,” Green said in a statement. “I have come to realize our fight is not here within Washington, our fight is with Washington.”
Key pieces of legislation remain stuck in limbo, with the House having the constitutional duty to originate tax and spending bills. There has been a bicameral stalemate over border security. Lawmakers have so far avoided a government shutdown, but it is unclear for how long. Members across the ideological spectrum are frustrated.
Last year, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a leading conservative, implored his colleagues to “give me one thing — one! — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!”
It is a vicious cycle. Republicans make campaign promises to grassroots voters, then fail to keep them. The electoral consequences include increasingly exacting primary challenges, leadership fights, and general election defeats that further deplete the ranks of Republicans in Congress and further diminish the party’s ability to deliver for its voters. Rinse and repeat.
While the House is the most obvious example of this dysfunction, it is not the only one. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is slowly seeing his power over the Republican conference ebb as a new generation of senators tests party discipline in the last redoubt of the GOP establishment.
McConnell is arguably the most conservative Senate Republican leader since Robert Taft. But he does not represent the more populist strain of conservatism that is ascendant right now, and his involvement in primary contests has put him in competition with conservative groups dating back at least to the Tea Party over a decade ago. All of this has left McConnell, long celebrated as one of the GOP’s most skillful legislative tacticians, deeply disliked by all sides and one of the least popular national elected leaders.
And, of course, the titular head of the Republican Party remains former President Donald Trump, who is poised to clinch the nomination for the third straight election cycle. His last remaining major opponent, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, has tried to brand him as a chaotic mess who violates political norms.
“Donald Trump is in court today. There will be a verdict on another case tomorrow. And he has a trial starting March 25. Meanwhile, he’s spending millions of campaign donations on legal fees,” Haley posted on X. “All of this chaos will only lead to more losses for Republicans up and down the ticket.”
This has been a long-running theme. “I agree with a lot of his policies, but the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” Haley told a crowd in South Carolina last year. “We have too much division in this country and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.”
But Trump’s intraparty foes have been brandishing the “chaos” label against him for eight years to little obvious effect. Jeb Bush dubbed Trump the “chaos candidate” almost from the beginning. Trump is currently favored by 75% of GOP voters nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
None of this happened overnight, however. Every recent Republican House speaker dating back to Newt Gingrich, leader of the 1994 revolution that ushered in the first GOP majority in the lower chamber in 40 years, has tangled with the conservatives who helped bring them to power. Nearly all of them surrendered their gavels rather than keep fighting the rebels. The sole exception was Dennis Hastert, who went to prison for bank fraud related to sexual abuse that long predated his speakership.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was a movement conservative favorite. His plans for entitlement reform were thought to be the GOP blueprint for restored fiscal discipline. Ryan was also the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2012. Those plans now lay in tatters.
Ryan’s running mate, Mitt Romney, was perhaps the last gasp of the Republican establishment’s power over the party’s presidential nominating process. But each Republican nominee dating back to then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992 received a warning shot from an anti-establishment challenger before winning the nomination.
Romney had several. At various points, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann all threatened him in state and national polls. Santorum narrowly beat Romney in Iowa. Perry was governor of Texas and Santorum a recent former Pennsylvania senator at the time. But Cain was a pizza mogul and Bachmann a niche member of the House.
When Trump announced for the presidency in 2015, the warnings were over. Many Republicans concluded that the lesson from Romney was that nice guys finish last. And Republicans finally gave the nomination to an insurgent of sorts, dethroning the party’s governing class. Primary voters haven’t looked back since. Romney is retiring after a single term as a senator from Utah, vocally disillusioned with his party and the national political climate.
At the same time, a similar dynamic was playing out in Congress. Frustrated by leaders they never thought delivered, Republicans did two things: They tried to purify the Republican members through the primary process and influence legislative outcomes by withholding their support from leadership on close votes.
Then Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who spearheaded the Senate Conservatives Fund before a short stint as president of the Heritage Foundation, decided the size of the GOP caucus mattered less than its commitment. “I decided my work could no longer be with other senators,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I would have to find ways to work with the American people to elect a new class of senators.”
DeMint’s outfit fought for the nomination of hard Right Senate candidates in Republican primaries, even, and sometimes especially, when this meant going against the rest of the party apparatus.
“I’ve been criticized by some of my Republican colleagues for saying I’d rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who believe in the principles of freedom than 60 who don’t believe in anything,” DeMint told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010. “Let me make myself even clearer: I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters.”
Many Republicans agreed. But while Republicans gained 63 seats in the House in what proved to be a true red wave election that November, winning a majority, the party failed to take over the Senate for another four years. Some of the primary winners flubbed their general elections.
In the House, conservatives from safe red districts banded together to push the Republican conference to the right from within. They reserved the right to tank bills that they opposed. The most disciplined such group, the Freedom Caucus, was founded on Jan. 26, 2015. By Sept. 25, they had claimed their first Republican speaker’s scalp with the resignation of John Boehner.
“It’s become clear to me that this prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable harm to the institution,” Boehner told reporters at the time. “This isn’t about me. It’s about the people. It’s about the institution.”
There is nothing wrong with any of this in principle. Republican leaders often found themselves at war with the party’s voters on topics such as immigration. Federal spending and deficits often ballooned when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, leading the Right to conclude that it did not have much to show for these majorities. A leadership vacuum grew inside the GOP. Trump was among the flawed and unconventional figures who sought to fill it.
In practice, some of these developments have accentuated the cycle of Republican frustration they were meant to alleviate. Republicans seldom had the majorities big enough to enact or sustain the sweeping changes their members and supporters farther to the right demanded.
At the moment, Republicans hold a bare two-seat majority in the House, while Democrats control the White House and Senate. It is exceedingly difficult to govern under those circumstances. And any Republican defection, from the right or the left, can blow up anything that can’t attract compensatory Democratic support.
Given that math, it is far more surprising that McCarthy was able to deliver deals avoiding a default on the debt and a government shutdown than that the details of those deals would fall far short of what the Right wants.
McCarthy made his already arduous path even more difficult when he agreed to a lower threshold for initiating the process of removing the speaker. While that may have seemed necessary at the time to break the dozen-ballot deadlock for the gavel, it ended up being a devil’s bargain. Johnson could be the next victim.
Leadership has tried to take the reins through the abandonment of regular order. There is a history of up-and-down votes on massive omnibus spending bills, decorated like Christmas trees with wasteful items, with minimal time to debate, amend, or even read the final product. This has only further emboldened the revolt.
“Every member of Congress should have a full five days, at a minimum, to review any piece of legislation,” wrote Justin Amash, the former Michigan Libertarian congressman who is now mulling a Senate run. “If even one word or punctuation mark changes during that time, the clock restarts.”
The marginalization of individual lawmakers in the legislative process has also incentivized bad behavior. If House lawmakers don’t have much power to shape bills, there are other ways to look successful to their constituents: by becoming cable news or social media personalities while in office. This also helps them build national fundraising bases, which further empowers them to disregard leaders they no longer need for infusions of campaign cash.
While “the Squad” may object to a Democratic spending bill for not going far enough, they will rarely defeat it on the floor because, as believers in the efficacy of activist government, they prefer something to nothing. Freedom Caucus members are far more skeptical of what the government can do for their voters and, therefore, are more inclined to take nothing.
Republicans also sometimes lack sufficient popular support for their priorities. After seven years of failure to coalesce around an alternative to Obamacare, for example, public opinion had turned against repeal by the time Republicans had the opportunity to do so via unified control of the federal government. When Roe v. Wade finally fell after a half-century of labor, the electorate was completely unprepared for a meaningful shift in abortion policy — and so was the GOP. The party and country are equally ill-prepared to confront the looming entitlements crisis, having done nothing to lay the groundwork for necessary reforms and increasingly running away from them.
To lead and legislate in a democratic republic requires winning elections and sustaining public support. On some of the biggest topics of the time, Republicans have not done this work.
All of this would be hard enough to resolve on its own. But Republicans are also now divided even on some basic questions that once united them: America’s role in the world, the size and scope of the federal government, and religion’s place in the public square. With razor-thin majorities, small groups of dissenters can have an outsize influence.
Only two things have saved Republicans from electoral disaster: political polarization and the Democrats’ own extremism. One could read the above litany of Republican failure and conclude Democrats are in store for big wins come November — and they might be. But the public polling suggests that it is equally possible Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress despite this track record.
Recent national elections have been competitive, including 2020, when Republicans actually gained House seats as Trump lost the White House, and last year’s elections. Every presidential election since 2000 has been close, except for 2008, and even then, Barack Obama won less than 53% of the popular vote.
Republicans were shut out of the presidency for 20 years after the Great Depression but won it eight years after the 2008 financial crisis. George H.W. Bush lost 16 percentage points between 1988 and 1992 due to a mild recession that was over for more than a year before Election Day. The pandemic and inflation running at a 41-year high each caused far smaller electoral shifts.
There are no easy solutions to any of these problems. But step one would seem to be to restore regular order to the House, where it is sorely needed. If House Republicans are lucky enough to retain their majority this year, they will also need to end the revolving door to the speaker’s chamber.
An air of reality needs to return to Republican promise-making and -keeping. No more confident assurances that Democratic presidents can be forced to sign bills repealing their signature legislative achievements.
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This will be hard to do as long as Republicans face a legitimacy crisis with their own voters. The one exception, Trump, appears to be the least interested in actual governance. But one way or another, generational change is coming to the party’s leadership class. Someone with longer time horizons than this November may, at some point, conclude there is political upside to Republicans resolving their intractable problems before Democrats begin to figure out theirs.
The Republican Party has a governing problem. The first step is to admit it.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
