As House Republicans spend their last week trying to make the case for another two years of chaos and wasted time, they return to their districts having passed the fewest amount of bills in decades, missed nearly every deadline to fund the government, and appeased the far-right with dozens of votes to re-shuffle the Speakership. In the Oversight Committee alone, they have wasted hundreds of hearings and millions of dollars doing Donald Trump’s bidding instead of solving the real issues facing Americans. The committee only managed to pass 23 bills in the House over the course of 22 months in power, with just three signed into law. In his final report, Oversight Chair James Comer proudly bragged about having held over a hundred hearings and interviewed over a hundred witnesses, sent out hundreds of investigative letters, and sent dozens of subpoenas – all for nothing. It is clear that the useless MAGA House Republican majority has been completely and utterly ineffective.
SPOTLIGHT: The House Oversight Committee Wasted Thousands of Hours on Hearings That Led Nowhere. On Oct. 4, the House Oversight Committee released a report bragging about the past 22 months of failure. By their own count, the Committee conducted:
- 135 hearings
- 600+ investigative letters
- 51 subpoenas
- 112 interviews with government witnesses
…all for nothing.
The MAGA committee, led by Chair James Comer, wasted much of their time on a bogus impeachment investigation into President Biden that turned up nothing. Comer and his MAGA House Republican cronies failed to uncover a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing by the President whatsoever, instead pushing debunked conspiracy theories, factual inaccuracies, and downright misinformation. When the impeachment push fizzled out, Comer and his fellow MAGA House Republicans then shifted their baseless political stunts to Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, continuing to use Congress as an arm of the Trump campaign and ignoring the important priorities of Americans across the country.
The MAGA-Run House Enacted The Fewest Amount of Laws In Decades. As of October 2024, the 118th Congress managed to enact just 106 laws – slightly less than half the number of laws published by this point by the 117th Congress – making it the least productive Congress in decades. In all of 2023, the MAGA Republican-led House passed just 34 bills, with few becoming law. Even the historically unproductive Republican-led 112th Congress of 2011 to 2013, which saw a lengthy government shutdown that cost taxpayers billions, had passed more bills by October 2012. House Republicans wasted weeks of legislative time consumed by public in-fighting over the Speakership and refused to work with the Democratic Senate on crafting bipartisan legislation.
The MAGA-Run House Missed Nearly Every Key Deadline. The MAGA 118th Congress has had a track record of missing key deadlines on basic governing, enacting must-pass government funding bills six months behind schedule in 2023. The House has passed stopgap spending bills to keep funding the government only with Democratic support, and still has yet to come to an agreement on fully funding the government for another year, with the latest stopgap bill expiring on Dec. 20. MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson has already proclaimed that there will be no omnibus spending bill passed during the holiday season, making another stopgap bill kicking the deadline further down the road likely.
House Republicans Spent Their Majority Defending Trump and Attacking Their Political Enemies. Instead of addressing Americans’ vital priorities, House Republicans were more interested in serving as an arm of the Trump campaign, attacking Trump’s political enemies. Less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign, MAGA House Republicans advanced resolutions with no purpose but to malign the Vice President, announced new investigations, pushed baseless conspiracy theories, and even introduced bogus articles of impeachment. These efforts are nothing more than their latest partisan political stunts designed to hurt Harris and Walz ahead of the 2024 election and help Trump return to the White House.
The MAGA-Led House Appeased The Far-Right and Spent Months Pushing the Trump Project 2025 Agenda. While Republicans presided over a historically unproductive session, they worked to appease the far-right faction of their caucus and amplify the Trump Project 2025 agenda. They wasted weeks appeasing the far-right by removing Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the behest of MAGA figures like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and replacing him with MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump–aligned “architect of election denial” with Christian nationalist ties. Johnson is a member of the Republican Study Committee, which proposed a budget enacting key parts of the Project 2025 playbook related to the economy and health care. The RSC budget sought to destroy abortion access, put IVF at risk, repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, ban Medicare from negotiating prescription drugs, and raise drug prices – all key parts of the Trump Project 2025 agenda.
House Republicans Refused To Act On Americans’ Vital Priorities Like Immigration and Border Security. Instead of addressing top priorities like immigration and border security, MAGA Republicans chose to spend their majority pushing the Project 2025 agenda through partisan stunts. During the 2022 midterm elections, they campaigned heavily on the issue and promised to address it if they won a House majority. They spent millions campaigning on border issues and putting on elaborate political stunts like sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard to critique policies imposed or exacerbated by the Trump administration. Republicans have been using immigration and border security as a talking point for well over a decade, yet have taken no action to address the situation at the southern border over the past 22 months. MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson refused to even consider bipartisan legislation painstakingly crafted in the Senate after Trump asked Republicans to tank the effort to help his re-election bid, calling it “dead on arrival.” They held more than 50 hearings focused on the southern border – but instead of coming to the table with solutions to help fix our immigration system, House Republicans refused to take action and exploited the crisis for political gain.