Sunday marks the end of the year, and with it the last day of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s truncated final term in the House. The California Republican gave his farewell speech on Dec. 14, right before Congress fled town for the holidays. “There’s so much we had been able to accomplish in a short amount of time,” McCarthy told a mostly empty House chamber, bleakly echoing the oddly upbeat tone he took in a Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing his departure.
McCarthy was right, in a sense. The first year of the 118th Congress was a time of major, history-making moments. Just not the sort that you generally want to see next to your name in the history books. If anything, it was easy to become numb to the string of unprecedented moments of chaos that we saw from this Republican majority. When you sit back and catalog the House GOP’s 2023 though, it feels impossible that they packed so much drama into one calendar year and yet produced so little of substance.
The first year of the 118th Congress was a time of major, history-making moments.
We saw the first speaker election to stretch past the first ballot since 1923, as McCarthy struggled to win the full support of his caucus. Over the course of four days, it would become the longest race for the speaker’s gavel since 1856 — a record that would fall just a few months later. (Somehow that’s entirely par for the course: Even McCarthy’s dubious distinction managed to get upstaged.) McCarthy won on the 15th ballot after offering major concessions to the farthest right wing of the GOP caucus. That neither side bothered to put the details of that deal into writing would haunt and bedevil him for the rest of his time atop the House.
We saw Republican leadership under McCarthy fail to govern in ways that would be unthinkable when Democrats hold the gavel. One small example: It’s up to the majority to provide the votes to get a bill to the floor for debate under what’s known as a “special rule.” For the first time in two decades, one of those rules failed to pass when far-right conservatives revolted against McCarthy’s deal with the White House to raise the debt ceiling. Then we promptly saw it happen again just two months later in September, as those same members of the chaos caucus tanked the GOP’s own defense spending bill — twice.
We saw the first successful motion to vacate the chair when McCarthy was removed from power in September. As part of the deal that he’d cut to become speaker, the threshold for bringing such a motion to the floor was dropped to allow any one member to make a run at the king. After months of threats, it was finally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who pulled the trigger on the motion, ostensibly because McCarthy had depended on Democratic votes to avoid a federal government shutdown. Democrats were in no mood to save McCarthy after he reneged on his own deal on spending for the next year, which left him unable to muster enough support to avoid becoming the latest GOP speaker to succumb to the caucus’ intermittent cannibalism.
It’s hard to believe that we have another year of this Republican-led House to live through. We saw the House paralyzed for weeks in the aftermath, as the second fight over the speakership in 10 months dragged on. The GOP managed to churn through three nominees in short order as each elbowed his way in, only to bow out in turn. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, went through two failed votes on the House floor before yielding; Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota both tapped out before they could get publicly humiliated in a floor vote, when it became clear they wouldn’t be able to win over skeptics. In the end, the House turned to Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., to become speaker, setting him up with literally an identical set of challenges to those McCarthy faced, albeit with a (now-ended) honeymoon period with the MAGA wing. We saw then-Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., become only the third member of Congress to be expelled from his seat since the Civil War and the first since 2002. Santos could be the mascot for the precarious situation in which McCarthy found himself: He was forced to keep an alleged fraudster in power because of how slim a majority the GOP had won in the midterms. It feels fitting that McCarthy, the consummate people pleaser, didn’t vote at all on the resolution that finally saw Santos removed, despite no longer having skin in the game. And as a result of all of this turbulence, we saw the fewest number of bills signed into law in the first year of a Congress in recent memory. Things aren’t looking any better for January, when Congress returns, as McCarthy’s exit now means that the GOP majority will have shrunk to three votes. That will soon dwindle to just two after Rep. Bill Young, R-Ohio, leaves as well. That whisper-thin margin means that Johnson will likely have to scramble for votes to avoid a government shutdown — and leaves him in no better position than the one McCarthy got shanked for. I know nobody is looking forward to the 2024 presidential election cycle (and all of the attendant races for House and Senate) kicking into high gear. But at the same time, it’s hard to believe that we have another year of this Republican-led House to live through.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
