Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.
Representative Chip Roy, the far-right Texas Republican and reigning king of the fervid floor speech, stood before the House last November and tore into his party.
“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one, that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” He pressed someone — anyone! — to “come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
It was not a helpful sound bite for his colleagues, but Mr. Roy had a point. After nearly 11 months in control, House Republicans had little to show for themselves beyond ousting their first speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and then making life miserable for his successor, Mike Johnson, who won the job only because exhausted Republicans saw him as a compromise who had yet to offend any of the party’s warring tribes.
The party’s record has not grown more productive since Mr. Roy’s eviscerating speech.
On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson was forced to once again rely on Democrats to provide the bulk of votes to pass a stopgap spending bill in order to avert a government shutdown just weeks before the 2024 election. The bill passed in a lopsided vote of 341 to 82, with the majority of Republicans supporting it.
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Not everyone was able to rattle off achievements they were proud of. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a vulnerable Republican from Florida, would not answer when asked what she had to tell voters back home about Republican achievements in Congress over the past two years. At first, she told a reporter to wait for her outside the House chamber to chat after votes. But then she was out of time. “I have to run to a fund-raiser,” she said, promising that a staff member would get in contact with a full answer to the question.
No answer ever came.
