WASHINGTON — Even more than usual, the current Congress, which will effectively end this week, seems like the punchline of a joke:
Boy, the 118th was a crazy Congress!
How crazy was it?
It was so crazy, it:
Cue “Yakety Sax,” everyone! And that was just in the House.
The Senate, while minimally chaotic by comparison, didn’t exactly cover itself in glory either.
In the Senate:
On the just-barely-bright-enough-to-see-a-few-feet-in-front-of-you side, the government did not shut down — a live prospect as recently as last week, with former President Donald Trump urging the GOP to block necessary government funding unless Republicans pushed through a bill addressing nonexistent voter fraud.
“We’ll credit them for that, although I do think we might be lowering our standards,” joked Sarah Binder, senior fellow in governance studies at the centrist Brookings Institution.
Any one of this Congress’ big uproars ― from the vote to expel disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to multiple failed Cabinet and presidential impeachment attempts to the successful removal of onetime Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ― would distinguish a Congress on its own.
So, how crazy was the 118th, historically speaking?
“It’s fair to say it was one of the craziest ever,” Binder said.
The main competition would come from Congresses in the 19th century, which saw the chamber struggle with slavery and eventually the Civil War.
And Binder said the blame could be fairly laid on one side of the aisle in one chamber.
“All of this speaks to the utter disarray of the [House] Republican majority to a degree we’ve not seen before, certainly not in the last 100 years,” she said.
“Even if you had a fully functional majority leadership, that’s not sufficient to create a functional Congress,” Binder added. “But you certainly can’t succeed if you have a majority party that … only when pushed to its very end, [is] able to put must-pass measures on the floor.”
As of Wednesday, only 82 bills have passed both the House and Senate this Congress and been signed into law by President Joe Biden. While more are likely to be enacted during the post-election lame duck session, the 118th Congress’ productivity is almost certain to hit a modern low.
In November of 2023, Congress was on pace to enact the fewest laws since the Great Depression-era 1931-1932 Congress, which didn’t even start meeting until December of its first year. Even during the 116th Congress, the last time Washington experienced this level of gridlock — when Democrats controlled the House and Republicans the Senate ― lawmakers were able to pass more than four times as many laws as this Congress has so far.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) decried the House GOP’s inability to force through its priorities against the Democratic Senate and White House in an epic rant caught on C-SPAN in November 2023.
“One thing! I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” Roy said on the House floor, angrily holding up his index finger.
“Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor, come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats,’” said Roy, a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus
But with the November elections looming, Roy was eager to point out what he saw as the chamber’s accomplishments Tuesday.
Among the GOP’s wins this session, he argued: Non-defense spending didn’t grow much, Congress passed a sanctions bill aimed at deterring the International Criminal Court from prosecuting Israeli officials over the Gaza war, and Republicans raised border security as a top political priority.
“I think there’s a lot of things we’ve been able to do when we unify, but we could do more, and we should have done more,” Roy said.
Another House GOP member, spending committee chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), said Republicans played defense in the 118th Congress, focusing more on stopping things than getting things done.
“We kept the Democrats from doing what they did the first two years, like [the] American Rescue Plan and all that. But a Congress where we obviously didn’t control the Senate, [didn’t] have the administration, so we couldn’t push as much through as we would like,” he said.
If there was one thing it seemed like House Republicans would achieve at the outset of the 118th Congress, it was avenging the two impeachments of Donald Trump with an impeachment of President Joe Biden.
An impeachment inquiry led mainly by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) foundered largely because its major premise — that Biden participated in his son Hunter’s foreign business deals — was not true. But Comer also often overpromised on House Republicans’ material, including a dubious tip from an FBI source who turned out to have ties to Russian intelligence services.
And the committee’s hearings were routinely absurd, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) repeatedly displaying images of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts with prostitutes. The nastiest moment came when Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), in response to a personal insult from Greene, roasted the Georgia Republican’s “bleach blonde bad-built butch body.” Comer, for his part, frequently sparred with Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who he called a “clown” this week.
“Failure sometimes is hard to deal with, right?” Moskowitz told HuffPost. “And so I think the chairman’s just trying to come to grips with the fact that he wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money. Has nothing to show for it. That’s unfortunate. We could have done some really good stuff in that committee.”
In the Senate, even Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) acknowledged the 118th’s relatively short list of accomplishments.
“This has been a very, very unproductive Congress on things that we are supposed to do, like passing appropriation bills, doing a farm bill every five or six years,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.
For a moment in February, the Senate appeared very close to a huge bipartisan breakthrough on immigration. Democrats wanted money for Ukraine’s efforts to fend off Russia’s invasion, but Republicans said they wouldn’t support the aid unless Democrats agreed to stricter policies at the southern U.S. border.
So Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) collaborated with Senate Democrats on a package pairing Ukraine aid with money for more border agents, border wall construction and faster deportations of immigrants ineligible for asylum. Their bill also left out expanding pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, one of Democrats’ longtime priorities.
Trump ordered Republicans to kill the deal anyway.
Later, Biden unilaterally tightened asylum access, leading to fewer arrivals at the border, which Lankford took as half a win.
“The administration stepped forward after the bill went down, and said, ‘OK, we’ll start doing something anyway,’ Lankford said. “So that’s helpful, though they’ve only reduced the number a tiny fraction of what they were capable of actually doing.”
The apotheosis of Republican dysfunction in the 118th Congress came Feb. 6, as the party suffered a trifecta of legislative failures across both chambers. Senate Republicans walked back from the border bill they had demanded, while in the House, they lost two layup votes: one to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and another to send aid to Israel.
Binder, the Brookings scholar, said Republicans could not solely blame having a slim majority in the House for all their problems. The party’s internal divisions also made that slim margin of error hard to overcome. And those factors, along with high levels of polarization between the parties, are what’s new, she said.
“I think we’re quite used to polarization. We’re a little less used to seeing what a fragmented majority means,” Binder said, noting whichever party is in the House majority next Congress is unlikely to have much breathing room.
And the hijinks in the 118th may not even be over yet. Minutes away from the final votes Wednesday, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) confronted Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) about a racist social media post. Higgins took the post down.
Horsford threatened to file a censure resolution against Higgins the 26th such resolution introduced in the 118th Congress. In the prior Congress, there were only 16.
Igor Bobic contributed to this report.
