Remember that ridiculous list of stuff the House GOP said it was going to do in the first two weeks of their majority? That was all the way back in December, before the long, arduous, and frankly hilarious Speaker election in which we all saw how far Kevin McCarthy would debase himself to tick that box on his bucket list.
Steve Scalise, the incoming Majority Leader, even sent a letter to his colleagues, and tweeted it out for the whole world to see, listing the eleven bills the House was definitely going to take up in the first two weeks of the session.
Four weeks in, they’ve considered 6 of them. They’ve helped out rich tax cheats, cemented their forced birth agenda, and set up their new “investigative” panels. As far as actual policy goes? Ha.
The first order of business, after passing a bunch of nonsense rules about how they’d balance the budget and end all the programs that help people, was the big gift to the people they do want to help, the rich people who cheat on their taxes. That’s the bill that would rescind more than $70 billion Congress sent to the IRS last year. The one that the Congressional Budget Office said would actually cost the nation more than $114 billion in lost revenue over the next decade.
The next order of business was all the forced birth bills, setting down the marker that a national abortion ban is their ultimate goal, no matter how unpopular that idea is with actual people who vote.
They did squeeze in a vote on a bill purported to be about prohibiting sales from the Strategic Oil Reserve to China, but was really about yet another Hunter Biden conspiracy theory, a bill that did absolutely nothing to do what the GOP said their goal was: lower gas prices for Americans.
Then they took a week off to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Kidding. They were just taking a week off.
The other big promises they made have fallen by the wayside, in part because they actually require some real work. Like writing legislation and making policy work. Also, because the extremist agenda they’re trying to force on the whole conference isn’t going down so well for some House members.
Consider the “Border Safety and Security Act,” from Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (TX). As Gabe Ortiz reported last week, “backlash” from potentially “dozens” of moderate Republicans stopped it from being rushed to the floor. One of those Republicans, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) bot the bill sent back to committee, the Homeland Security Committee that Majorie Taylor Greene sits on. They’ll have to fight it out there.
They’ve also haven’t even been able to bring up the promised symbolic resolution opposing efforts to defund law enforcement, or a criminal justice bill aimed at making prosecutors prosecute more. That bill is supposed to provide “transparency in our criminal justice system by letting the public know how many cases prosecutors are declining to prosecute, the number of offenses committed by career criminals, and the number of criminals released.”
And while McCarthy was able to take the unilateral action of kicking Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell off of the Select Intelligence Committee, he had to struggle to garner the votes he needed to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
All that big talk from the House GOP? All they’ve got to show for it so far is a bunch of extremist bullshit, nothing that would do anything to help the American people. Oh, and the weakest speaker in modern history.
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