In all of 2023, a dysfunctional Congress passed only 27 bills. Worse still, other than kicking the can down the road by passing short-term extensions of funding, what they passed was mostly things like renaming some Veterans Affairs clinics and commissioning a commemorative coin for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps.
Republicans took a record 15 humiliating votes to elect a speaker, then removed that speaker even though he was the party’s best fundraiser, then they spent more weeks in fruitless attempts to name a new speaker before settling for someone whose only attribute was that he was too unknown to have dedicated enemies. Then there was the resignation of the former speaker, deeply embarrassing failures to simply count their votes, internal divisions of every description, a Republican member expelled from Congress, and the deep, deep ignominy of destroying the border deal they had spent the entire year demanding just to please Donald Trump.
The walls on the Republican side of the House and Senate may not actually be inscribed with mene mene tekel upharsin, but they might as well be. Weighed and found wanting is an excellent description of Republicans in Congress—and it doesn’t take a Biblical prophet to read this message. As CNN reports, faced with a chaotic party engaged in consuming its own to benefit a candidate who has already taken them to defeat in the last three election cycles, some big-name Republicans are heading for the exits.
As of Monday, 23 Republicans in the House and Senate have announced they won’t be seeking reelection in 2024. That includes five committee chairs.
One of those departing is House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green, whose announcement featured this statement: “Our country—and our Congress—is broken beyond most means of repair.”
Of course, there is a solution. Under Democratic leadership in 2022, Congress passed 310 bills, 95% of them with bipartisan support. It’s amazing what can be done when congressional leadership doesn’t have to wait for the word from Mar-a-Lago before taking a step.
With Congress mired in dysfunction and Trump running on a retribution tour that promises nothing but fire and brimstone for his enemies, the Republican platform for 2024 is shaping up to be exactly what it was in 2020: a pledge of Trump loyalty and nothing else.
Other than leading the crowd in chants of Trump, Trump, Trump, Republicans at all other levels have exactly nothing left to run on in 2024. Republicans haven’t just tied their party to the same guy who led them to failure in 2018, 2020, and 2022, they’ve made following this pie-faced piper the only measure of Republicaness.
As the self-immolation over the border deal showed, it’s not enough for Republicans to just swear fealty to Trump. They have to surrender all ideas of independent agency. They don’t just have no platform, they’re not allowed to have ideas. Even candidates who have made a show of endorsing Trump and enjoyed his favor in the past can find themselves the target of some of that boundless retribution if they cross an invisible line.
The recently ousted speaker has serious doubts about American voters joining in just so Trump can give a thumbs down in a round of vengeance games. “America doesn’t want to see the idea of retribution,” said McCarthy. Except retribution is all Trump has left to sell. Well, retribution and sneakers.
“Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term,” wrote former national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton went on to describe Trump’s fondness for humiliating people, and his unwillingness to consider anything that doesn’t offer a benefit for himself.
This is all Trump is concerned about. Trump, and Trump alone, is all that remains of the Republican Party.
Add on 91 felony counts, a recent loss in a huge fraud case, and a second round of losses to a woman he sexually assaulted in a department store, and the Republican Party is left bending the knee to a three-time loser who is going to spend most of 2024 in court and stands a very real chance of spending 2025 in jail.
No platform. No plan. And a heavily damaged candidate who has already enjoyed a seven-year string of unbroken losses. Republicans have nothing to run on but chaos, and nothing to look forward to but the fear that they’ll be Trump’s next target.
“MAGA disowns her and anyone else that associates/works with her,” read a recent Trump campaign social media message targeting the campaign’s 2020 communications director for working last year to elect DeSantis. “TRAITOR!”
This is a recipe for Republican disaster. And while Republicans may not want to admit it, they can certainly see the storm ahead. Those high-profile departures from Congress aren’t happening because they’re tired of looking at Rep. Matt Gaetz’s sneer (or at least, not only because of that). Republicans are running for the exit because they don’t want to face the idea of being back in the minority, and no longer able to waste all the House time mumbling about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
If Trump wins, Republicans can see that they’ll have no agency and be reduced to marching in lock-step with the great leader no matter what. As one unnamed lawmaker told CNN, “Some of them say, ‘I don’t want to have to endorse him, I don’t want to have to serve under him.’ That’s something else that is weighing in a lot of the private conversations I’m having.”
If Trump loses, Republicans realize that they’ll be consigned to the back bench where they can continue their internal squabbles and try to rebuild their wreck of a party. With no policies. And they still might find themselves forced to wear ridiculous red hats and even more ridiculous gold shoes as a pledge of allegiance to the dying heart of a dying party.
Neither one of these prospects looks like a lot of fun. Which is making that exit sign more attractive every day.
Ohhhhh yeah! Democrats kicked ass and then some in Tuesday’s special election in New York, so of course we’re talking all about it on this week’s episode of “The Downballot.” Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard explain how Tom Suozzi’s win affects the math for Democrats’ plan to take back the House, then dive into the seemingly bottomless list of excuses Republicans have been making to handwave their defeat away. The bottom line: Suozzi effectively neutralized attacks on immigration—and abortion is still a huge loser for the GOP.
