The Worst-Case Scenarios of the Republican House

Outside of investigations, the GOP will try to use leverage from must-pass bills to force through ideological priorities.

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The Republican House of Representatives appears to have all the makings of becoming the worst-run government entity in American, or maybe world, history. At most, Republicans will have a four-vote advantage in the House. And the willingness of the Freedom Caucus to reject anything not contoured to their far-right beliefs will make it impossible to find a working majority for much of anything. Post office namings could be tied up for weeks; there’s no telling with this fragile majority. There aren’t even 218 votes at this moment for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.

The House GOP’s main output will take the form of twenty-kajillion investigations of the president’s son and sundry federal agencies. But Republicans do understand how to use their leverage, even if they can’t always get their fractious caucus to agree on the outcomes. That’s why the most interesting prediction about the majority came from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), himself a Freedom Caucus stalwart, about the “big moments” Republicans could exploit. He mentioned four of them: the debt limit, surveillance reform, funding the government, and the farm bill.

Jordan is signaling a series of hostage-taking events, where he and his caucus use a handful of must-pass bills to force Democratic concessions. This will be the defining feature of the next two years, the only moments where anything might deviate from the status quo. The question is: Will Republicans be able to manufacture gains out of self-created crisis?

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The first item on Jordan’s agenda, the debt limit, could have been neutralized in this lame-duck session, but that possibility is looking more and more remote. Though Democrats could use the budget reconciliation process to raise the debt limit without Republican votes, opposition from (surprise!) Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has put an end to that talk, if not others. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has sought cooperation from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on a bipartisan debt limit extension, hoping that McConnell would want to wrest away debt limit hostage-taking from the more intractable elements of the House GOP. But that hope has fizzled, as Senate Republicans are quite happy to use the debt limit to force policy changes.

Republicans have already proposed Social Security and Medicare changes as their price for the debt limit increase; they have a potential partner in Manchin. President Biden and fellow Democrats have rejected that out of hand. But with a gun pointed at the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, what Democrats would be willing to accept to defuse the situation is unpredictable.

What prevented this kind of grand bargain in 2011 was that Republicans wouldn’t go for tax increases in exchange for Social Security cuts. I’d expect similar resistance here. But there is another factor. Under current law, practically all of the Trump tax cuts for individuals are set to expire after 2025. Biden’s budgets assume that those tax cuts will be allowed to expire, but the House majority is almost certainly going to run on making them permanent.

Republicans do understand how to use their leverage, even if they can’t always get their fractious caucus to agree on the outcomes.

That’s probably a bigger threat in any debt limit or government funding negotiations. At the end of 2012, then-Vice President Biden and McConnell reached a deal to make virtually all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, over the objections of Democratic senators. At the time, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid preferred going over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” and then negotiating over what tax cuts to put back. Preemptively extending the tax cuts is one concession that some Democratic observers fear could be the price of a debt limit deal. (Which is more than a little loopy considering that making the tax cuts permanent would increase the debt.)

The biggest item Republicans will gun for in a government funding deal is the $80 billion granted to the Internal Revenue Service over the next ten years in the Inflation Reduction Act. This was a major campaign issue for Republicans, where they dubiously claimed that it would fund 87,000 IRS agents, whom they depicted as a neo-Gestapo. Expect the House GOP to try to claw back IRS funding as a condition for keeping the government open. They will also probably try to add in some immigration measures, from boosting border patrol resources to restarting construction of the border wall.

One question is whether the administration sees the need to secure more funding to support Ukraine against Russia, which Republicans have been lukewarm about, as important enough that it will trade away other priorities. A deal that funnels IRS funding to the war effort is not out of the realm of possibility.

You could also see energy concessions. Lobbyists have been lining up with a series of requests, like blocking the Biden administration from mandating electric heat in homes and tightening energy efficiency standards in furnaces, or forcing approvals of such projects as the Keystone XL pipeline. While a lot of this will fall under oversight, in an attempt to create bad publicity around the clean-energy incentives in the IRA, you could see riders blocking or mandating various agency initiatives in a government funding bill.

The farm bill, which is negotiated every five years, is due up in 2023, and it usually gets through as a compromise between rural members who want robust agricultural supports for their constituents and urban members who want the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) maintained or expanded. This could be one year where Republicans try to make SNAP cuts in the farm bill, though it won’t be easy to disrupt the typical equilibrium. More likely, Republicans will try to take out conservation and climate-related measures.

What Jordan is thinking on surveillance reform is a little more obscure. The USA Freedom Act expires in December 2023, and it includes a series of measures from the PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. There have been bipartisan rebellions over warrantless spying in the past, and this is another opportunity. But it would be unlikely to see unrelated measures get wrapped up in the USA Freedom reauthorization.

While all of these hostage-taking events are theoretically possible, they will be difficult for Republicans to manage when there is such little cohesion within their caucus. “Everybody’s relevant, nobody’s irrelevant,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told The Wall Street Journal when asked about the House majority. The priorities of any one member of the House GOP can overwhelm the delicate negotiations in a debt limit or budget bill, and Republican weakness could kill their negotiating position.

However, there are fewer and fewer Republicans who can be relied on to join with Democrats to get stopgap funding or debt limit measures over the line. What Biden, and the new Democratic leadership team of Schumer and presumptive House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), must watch out for is chaos, where the votes don’t exist to get anything done. That could wind up being an even worse scenario than Republican success.

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