House Republicans hoping — or expecting — to win control of the chamber in November huddled at a retreat in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, this week to plot out their election plans and an agenda for once they take over.
The GOP needs to gain five House seats to reclaim the majority, a number that should be eminently reachable. “But while Republicans have numbers on their side in the election, what they would do with a majority is very much a work in progress,” Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press reports.
For the moment, at least, Republicans are talking about more than just obstructing President Biden’s agenda. “House Republicans are spending their time doing a lot more brainstorming about what they should bring to the floor, rather than what they should block,” Politico notes. “House Republicans have spent months drafting their policy wishlist, tackling issues like border security, energy production, inflation.”
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarty of California outlined some priorities in an interview with Punchbowl News. “McCarthy declared the first thing he will do if Republicans take the majority is get rid of proxy voting and remove the magnetometers from around the House chamber,” Punchbowl says. “And the GOP’s first pieces of legislation will include an energy independence package, a ‘Parents’ Bill of Rights,’ a bill to secure the border and one to target the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S.”
McCarthy reportedly added that he plans to investigate the origins of Covid-19 and the embarrassing process of U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also told Punchbowl that he wants Congress to use a 20-year window instead of 10 years when projecting the federal budget.
The bottom line: For all the House GOP’s optimism, managing a Republican majority has proven daunting for recent party leaders — and would undoubtedly pose challenges for McCarthy in an era when former President Donald Trump still holds tremendous sway with members of the party.
“Hard-right members of the conference are ascendant, creating headaches with their inflammatory actions and statements,” the AP’s Amiri writes. “Many in the party are likely to welcome new rounds of brinkmanship over government spending and the debt. And some Republicans are already agitating for partisan investigations of figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, that could easily overshadow their legislation.”
And Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico’s Huddle suggests that the fate of party leaders’ plans “may be up to a small faction of their GOP conference, who are already eager to deprive Joe Biden of political wins at any turn. And it’s that same group that could determine whether the GOP can govern at all, on those more rudimentary chores like funding the government and raising the debt limit.”
