The House Republicans’ Teen Soap Opera Is Reaching New Lows

Since basically the moment the 118^th Congress was sworn in, in January 2023, it was pretty clear that this particular cameral gathering had barely a passing interest in passing laws. That fact was resoundingly clear by the midway point of the session: At the end of 2023, the House had produced just 34 bills that were ultimately signed into law, by far the least productive year of legislation in the modern era. Those stunningly low numbers were even worse upon close examination. The majority of that few dozen were uncontroversial bills that passed with minimal or no opposition, like renaming Veterans Affairs clinics and minting a birthday coin for the Marine Corps.

2024 has carried on this least-productive-Congress-ever trend; the count is up to 62 bills, and they’re pretty much all just naming post offices.

So, it’s very clear what this Congress isn’t: a lawmaking entity. But this week, we finally got a resounding sense of what this Congress is: a high school soap opera.

It’s hard to keep track of all the PG-13, Degrassi-style drama that has beset the House, so let’s go in reverse chron:

The most explosive, highly replayed incident came from recast high school bully Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Friday. Ostensibly, House GOP members convened the gathering to pursue contempt proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland for witch-hunting honorable Republicans. (Garland’s Justice Department has indicted more national Democratic elected officials than Republicans, but that is evidently beside the point.)

The whole exchange was so ridiculous and unprovoked it’s hard to pick a snippet, but the headline dust-up was this:

“I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene said to Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez then moved to strike Greene’s words from the record, with Greene retorting that Ocasio-Cortez didn’t “have enough intelligence” to win a debate with her.

“I’ll strike my words but I’m not apologizing,” returned Greene, with the gusto of an impudent teenager. And then Crockett flew in with a jab of her own, refusing to address Greene by name but impugning a “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” At some point in the back-and-forth, the camera panned to Lauren Boebert, who attempted to trace the sign of the cross and somehow did it incorrectly.

Ah yes, the people’s House, the finest lawmaking institution in the land.

Just one day before that, the Daily Mail reported that two other Republican House reps, Georgia’s Rich McCormick and Texas’ Beth Van Duyne, were having an intracaucus affair, evidently an open secret in Congress. The two, after all, were seen getting handsy during the March 7 State of the Union.

Van Duyne quickly confirmed the two were hooking up. McCormick, meanwhile, filed for divorce from his wife of 12 years with whom he shares seven kids, just two weeks ago, along with a mutual restraining order.

“His marriage has been over for quite some time as I understand it,” Van Duyne told the Daily Mail. One detail here contains a high school vibe that’s nearly too total to be believed: “One GOP member told DailyMail.com they had seen McCormick and the colleague ‘holding hands under the table’ at a weekly lunch.”

On the same day that that romance was hard-launched, a clique of House Republicans turned up at the courthouse for Donald Trump’s hush money trial in Manhattan. Reps. Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Mike Waltz, and Eli Crane were all spotted in the courtroom, while Andy Ogles, Anna Paulina Luna, Ralph Norman, and Bob Good were seen outside.

It was essentially picture day. The members were there for no purpose other than to hang out with their pals, including the onetime biggest man on campus, and to get their photos taken in his presence. The Hill described their presence as “chatty.”

That gaggle ditched some critical House hearings to facilitate this potential yearbook spread. Their truancy required House leadership to reschedule important business. The very Oversight meeting in which Greene and Crockett went after each other had to be shifted at the last minute to accommodate the group of nine’s NYC field trip. Gaetz and Biggs both ended up missing their Judiciary Committee hearing. Their absence also imperiled passage of a bill that would reverse President Joe Biden’s hold on transfers of certain arms to Israel, which the White House said it would veto regardless.

In fact, that delinquency was enough to imperil the very basic operation of the House—the nine members counted more than the entirety of the Republican majority. If Democrats were feeling diabolical, they could have forced a motion to adjourn and completely shut down Congress while those Republican reps were away. (They didn’t.)

Legislative activity tends to give way to silliness ahead of elections. But considering there was never much legislative activity to begin with this Congress, who knows to what uncharted depths the House might succumb. With nearly all the important business of the year complete, this new schoolyard-style arrangement is likely to be the new normal for the coming months. And this is how House Republicans are choosing to spend their last months wielding the majority power that they just barely wrested back from Democrats in the midterms. About the only thing one might even expect from this Republican majority is a stopgap funding bill, which will be due on Sept. 30, and probably turned in late.

As entertainment, it’s not the highest quality drama, or even dark comedy. We’ll see if it gets renewed for another season come November.