The Rough Road Ahead for the Republican House
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Photo by Lingjing Bao.
Legislating–and democracy as a whole–is a collective action problem. In order to create laws and policies that tackle the issues that the United States faces and guide the nation into the future, the 535 members of Congress must cooperate to pass the bills that become law. Under any circumstances, this is a great challenge. Senators and representatives from across the country have their own constituencies, ideologies, and interests, and managing those competing factors makes any success in Congress a huge accomplishment. Add on the existence of two starkly divided political parties who rarely agree with each other, and a management challenge becomes the nation’s hardest juggling act. The leadership teams of each party in the two chambers of Congress exist to take on this challenge, working to corral the members of their caucuses into working together and creating policies that fulfill the party’s priorities. This theory meets reality on Capitol Hill, and as the 118th Congress begins, it is clear that the reality of congressional politics for the next two years will be one where the thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives makes the collective action problem of legislating all but impossible to solve. Due to Republicans’ poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections, Republican House leadership under the newly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy will likely struggle to pass meaningful legislation and will be greatly weakened by concessions made to members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
To understand the difficulties that await McCarthy and the House Republican caucus in the next two years, it is useful to compare their situation with what Democrats faced over the last four years. The Democratic party gained a majority in the House in the 2018 midterms, but a large contingent of its members opposed Nancy Pelosi’s bid for the speakership, seeking a new cohort of younger leaders and changes to how the House operated. After intense negotiations within the caucus, Pelosi was able to secure the speakership through a series of deals on committee memberships and lawmaking priorities that loosened the speaker’s control over the legislative agenda. She also agreed to a limit on how long she would be able to hold the speakership before stepping aside for a younger generation. However, she also set up large obstacles to any efforts to remove her from the position in the meantime by making it more difficult for members to bring up a vote on a motion to vacate: a mechanism by which the Speaker of the House can be forced out of the position.
After making these deals that appeased her opponents within the party’s caucus while eliminating potential avenues to oppose her leadership, Pelosi proceeded to lead House Democrats for four years, including the first two years of the Biden administration, which saw the passage of major legislative initiatives such as the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all while managing a slim majority since Democrats lost House seats in the 2020 election. These victories came despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles in Congress that threatened to derail Democrats’ entire agenda. For instance, the Build Back Better Act, an enormous climate and social policy bill that President Biden campaigned on, was derailed by opposition from Senator Joe Manchin. Following this defeat, though, the bill’s provisions were scaled back and repackaged into the Inflation Reduction Act, a push that Democratic leadership forged in cooperation with Manchin. The example set by Speaker Pelosi over the past few years is one of authoritative leadership in the House, where large pieces of legislation passed despite narrow margins, competing interests, and near-uniform Republican opposition.
Led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House majority of the 118th Congress will struggle to replicate such success. Just like House Democrats after the 2020 election, Republicans now hold a slim majority in the House and can only afford to lose four votes when passing legislation along party lines. This gives each individual member of the Republican House caucus significant leverage over legislation and the ability to influence matters by threatening to withhold their vote. House Democrats under Pelosi were able to walk this tightrope thanks to the deals made between her and her Democratic opposition. McCarthy’s dealmaking has so far failed to effectively manage the disarray within the Republican caucus, with the party having been gripped by infighting before the new Congress even began.
In November, after the 2022 midterms, when House Republicans elected their leaders, dozens of members of the far-right Freedom Caucus opposed McCarthy’s leadership, seeking fundamental changes to the House’s functioning that would further strengthen the party’s rank-and-file membership. In the weeks leading up to the speaker election at the opening of the new Congress, McCarthy and his allies failed to reach a compromise with these members of the Freedom Caucus. That failure was brought to the fore in the chaotic, historic, days-long speakership election fight that only saw McCarthy elected as speaker after fifteen ballots and large concessions made to right-wing holdouts. These concessions greatly reduce McCarthy’s power as speaker and all but guarantee that the next two years in the House will be characterized by legislative gridlock and Republican infighting.
The rules under which the House operates can be arcane and convoluted, but they intimately shape how the chamber and its members behave. In order to gain the support of many members of the Freedom Caucus, McCarthy has had to agree to change the House’s rules in ways that will obstruct swift lawmaking. One cause of Republicans’ discontent with the House’s rules is the recently passed omnibus spending package that Democrats pushed through Congress in December. Individual members had little say in how the package was assembled, and unhappy Republicans saw it as a wasteful abuse of the powers of House leaders. In response, they have pushed McCarthy to institute a waiting period between a bill’s proposal and vote, as well as allow more opportunities for representatives to propose amendments to spending bills when they come up for a vote. This gives individual members a greater say in the legislative process–weakening leaders such as McCarthy who usually have outsized influence over large omnibus packages–but also threatens to hamper lawmaking as each amendment proposed would need time to be debated and voted on. The potential consequences of this shift were summed up by former House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer, who referred to the change as “filibuster by amendment,” since the processing of amendments could dramatically impede legislative action.
In addition, Republicans are moving to restrict earmarks, which are specific provisions in spending bills that route money to representatives’ home states and districts. Earmarks are often criticized as wasteful “pork barrel” spending, but they help accelerate legislation by enticing representatives to support bills that they otherwise might not care to vote for. These changes to earmarks and amendments are two of the most prominent rules changes, but there are others with similar effects that will limit the number of scope of the omnibus bills that leadership often use to push through large amounts of legislation all at once. With Republicans advocating for major changes in government spending and the need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling looming within the year, these changes to amendment, earmark, and omnibus rules will all have major obstructive consequences for the legislative process.
These rule changes give more power to individual members and slow down spending bills, weakening the speaker and House leadership in a time when they tend to dominate fiscal policy in Congress. Some other concessions that McCarthy made to his opponents more directly limit his power. During her speakership, Nancy Pelosi made it very difficult to bring up a motion to vacate and attempt to force her out of office. In negotiations with the Freedom Caucus during the recent speaker election, though, McCarthy agreed to change the rules around the motion, enabling any single member of the House to initiate the vote. This means that if McCarthy’s actions as speaker ever run afoul with those who opposed his speakership bid and tensions boil over, his detractors could easily force the chamber back into the chaos of electing a speaker. With this, McCarthy will be on a very tight rope when attempting to push his party through tough issues: it was exactly this single-member motion to vacate rule that ousted John Boehner from the speakership in 2015. Aside from the motion to vacate, McCarthy’s powers as Speaker are also eroded by his promise to put three members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee decides which bills get a vote on the House floor, and under what procedures, such as whether and how amendments can be made. The committee is therefore very powerful, and it usually operates under significant influence from the Speaker of the House. The inclusion of three of McCarthy’s harshest critics among Republicans will reduce his control of the legislative agenda and ensure that the Freedom Caucus’ approach to legislation is influential, meaning more conservative legislation comes to a vote, and more time-consuming amendments are allowed.
As the 118th Congress engages in more legislative business in the months ahead, the full implications of these rule changes and concessions will become clear. The divisions within the Republican House caucus have already curtailed Republicans’ early legislative initiatives. Coming into power, Republican leaders planned to quickly vote on a set of resolutions that they described as “ready-to-go.” When the time came, however, opposition within the party–from moderate Republicans on some measures and from hard-right members on others–has prevented some resolutions from being voted on. The biggest substantive matter that Congress has had to deal with so far is the fiscal policy fight caused by the looming debt limit. Republicans are united in their desire to reign in government spending in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, but different factions have different plans for doing so. These divisions have prevented the party from providing a cohesive plan to bring to the negotiating table with President Biden. These examples show that divisions within Republicans’ small House majority are already impeding legislative progress, and as Congress engages in more business in the coming months, the House’s rule changes will likely make the whole process even harder.
The changes made to the functioning of the House with Kevin McCarthy’s election as Speaker will greatly change how the chamber functions. The changes are motivated by a desire among some members of the Republican caucus to empower individuals, weaken leaders, and slow down and open up the legislative process. The ideals that these changes derive from are laudable, but they run up against the political realities of how hard it is to tackle the collective action problem of lawmaking. The weakening of the Speaker, demise of earmarks, proliferation of amendments, and other changes under the McCarthy speakership will all make the work of Congress much slower and more difficult. Add on the facts that the Republican majority is extremely slim, its caucus is divided, and Democrats control the Senate and White House and are united in opposition to the Republican platform, and it is all but certain that the 118th Congress will bring little in the way of major legislation. What it will bring is the spectacle of protracted legislative conflict, with the ordeal of the election of McCarthy as speaker as merely the opening act.
David Eckl (CC’23) is a Staff Writer at CPR studying Political Science and East Asian studies. When not binge watching C-SPAN coverage of Congress, he can be found watching Formula 1 or the New York Rangers.