This is what happens when the institutionalists give up on the institutions
By Michael Jones
Another week, another series of governing failures in the Republican-led House of Representatives.
Members flew back to Washington on Tuesday evening for votes only to learn yesterday afternoon that House GOP leadership would send them home early to start the President’s Day recess. The House won’t gavel back in until Feb. 28. A partial government shutdown looms three days later.
The schedule was derailed after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) realized he wouldn’t have the votes to open debate and ultimately pass a bill reauthorizing the government’s spy powers and pulled it to avoid the floor embarrassment. It’s the second time Johnson has yanked the bill from consideration in his 113 days as speaker.
Moments later, the New York Republicans I wrote about in last week’s column faced rebuke from 18 members of their own party who struck down a procedural vote on a tax bill that never really stood a chance. It’s one thing for the opposing team to reject your priorities; it’s another for members on your side of the aisle to sink a priority that will definitely alienate the New Yorkers with their voters this November.
These debacles occur so often they’ve come to be expected. But this isn’t normal.
What’s worse is that governing will become even more difficult as the few undeniably conservative but serious-minded institutionalists who remain in the House GOP bolt for the exits.
Take, for example, Mike Gallagher, a 39-year-old Republican from Wisconsin. The four-term congressman was recently so well-regarded that the Senate GOP campaign arm tried to woo him into challenging Sen. Tammy Baldwin for the state’s US Senate seat. He declined because he said he had unfinished business in the House.
Last Saturday, Gallagher announced he was leaving Congress altogether after intense blowback from the conservative movement for his vote against the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who serves as the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China that Gallagher leads, told me in an interview in the Capitol basement this week that the “Trumpification” of the House Republican Conference is driving people like Gallagher out the door.
“It’s causing retirements, it’s causing people to reconsider whether to stay in Congress,” he said. “And those are the exact same people that we need to kind of have, the kind of people who care a lot about doing things in a bipartisan way, getting things done, being practical about solving problems that everyday Americans have.”
Krishnamoorthi added that it’s no longer enough to support conservative policy priorities. In the MAGA era, passing the Trump purity test is all that matters.
“I’m telling you this: It’s going to be harder and harder for that caucus to be governed as we can tell by the number of speakers we’ve had this year,” he said. “But it’s also going to be harder to get things done in a bipartisan way. And to me, nothing endures the way that bipartisan accomplishments do, so I’m concerned to say the least.”
Gallagher joins several powerful Republicans who’ve had enough of the legislative branch. House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) will retire at the end of her term, as will Rep. Patrick McHenry, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee.
Granger is 81, so who can blame her for riding into the sunset? But the 48-year-old McHenry, like Gallagher, was in the prime of congressional career. Last week, Rep. Maxine Waters, McHenry’s counterpart on Financial Services, told reporters the two had a “decent relationship.” And during his time as temporary speaker after Kevin McCarthy was ousted, he earned the respect of colleagues on both sides of the aisle for the stability he brought to the chamber as House Republicans searched for a replacement.
While more House Democrats have announced their intent to retire or seek another office in 2024, the GOP resignations are a sign that even those with the most power in Congress see the writing on the wall: This is Trump’s party and my time is spent in a different position or out of electoral politics altogether.
The power vacuum some of these retirements create will likely be filled with MAGA loyalists, adding to the gridlock and chaos that has mired the current Congress with far-right conservatives calling so many of the shots in the House.
Look no further than the past year to see why that’s less than ideal.
House conservatives forced McCarthy to endure 15 ballots and surrender all sorts of concessions—including lowering the threshold to remove him to one member and stacking the House Rules Committee with enough hardliners who can block bipartisan bills from receiving floor consideration—to become speaker.
These same conservatives forced McCarthy to renege on a budget agreement he reached with President Joe Biden last May that set the funding levels for the fiscal year and ensured the US didn’t default on its debt for the first time in the nation’s history.
And after demanding Democrats agree to a policy crackdown at the border last October, it was the MAGA right in Congress who killed the legislation last week after former President Donald Trump admitted a border crisis, rather than a solution, is better for his campaign.
It’s also House conservatives who’ve wasted their slim majority impeaching Secretary Mayorkas for what amounts to a policy disagreement and investigating President Biden in hopes they’ll find evidence of wrongdoing so they can impeach him too. They’ve been unsuccessful to date.
Meanwhile, the government isn’t fully funded. And in a few weeks, the president will release his budget for next year, kicking off a new appropriations process before Congress has completed the old one. And lawmakers still haven’t passed the farm bill or the aforementioned spy powers legislation, which were up for reauthorization last year. The Senate has a hand in some of this gridlock. But House Republicans have proven themselves to be paltry governing partners.
To be clear, institutionalism, for its sake, shouldn’t be the end game. Sandra Peri persuasively argued as much in The Atlantic in 2021:
But these institutions are valuable only insofar as they advance certain indispensable principles: democracy and the rule of law, for instance. Shielding them from reform even when they run counter to their fundamental purpose hardens dysfunction, and breeds cynicism in voters who are left to believe that change, even change they voted for, is impossible. Institutionalism for its own sake is not protective—it’s corrosive.
Equally corrosive is a party within the most powerful branch of government succumbing to the impulses of a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted wannabe dictator who uses institutional power as a tool for settling scores instead of improving lives and keeping Americans safe.
President Biden may very well beat Donald Trump at the ballot box again. But the defeat will be less potent if the former president’s lackeys continue to fill the halls of Congress, denigrating them with their no-at-all-costs approach to policymaking when democracy is in such a fragile moment and people are experiencing such pressing challenges.
Also discouraging: How dispirited young people and communities of color feel about the power of their vote. Little to no progress has been made on the issues they care about the most, so instead of doubling down on their electoral participation, we risk a generation who feels it’s not worth it.
This isn’t unique to millennials, Gen Z, or Black and brown people. Young people and those disenfranchised the most have historically represented smaller voting blocs than the white and wealthy. But the former groups have more to lose than the latter.
The bottom line: It may not seem like much, but in our democracy, your vote is sometimes all you have. So this November, you might as well use what you’ve got. The future of the Congress may well depend on it.
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
