At 100 Days In, the GOP Has Little to Show

To understand why the Republican controlled House has failed to deliver we have to unpack the GOP clown car.

Eventual House Speaker Kevin McCarthy stands with Georgia GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene after the 8th failed vote to choose a House GOP leader. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

It’s traditional after 100 days in power to assess how things are going with our leaders in Washington. 

The “honeymoon” is over, as it were. Voters are expecting results, not excuses.

So how does the GOP House Majority’s record look, at just over 100 days in? 

From where we sit, it’s something like a clown car: stuffed with fools, stalled out on the side of the road with no clear way forward.

In The Big Picture’s installment today, we take a harder look at the failed promises, emotional distractions and rudderless agenda of the Republican House Majority. 

— George Takei

In 2022, the GOP ran on a platform of law and order, both in our cities and at our border. They blasted high inflation and promised to do something about it, though they were never specific. 

They also promised fireworks as they brought the “Biden Crime Family” and “The Deep State” into focus for voters through promised committee hearings, even creating a special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to drive that narrative.

So how do things look after 100 days? 

Let’s helicopter over the wasteland of GOP promises to make some assessments after taking in a broad look.

Legislative Fizzles

To hear Kevin McCarthy’s supporters put it, his first 100 days as Speaker have been a triumph. The House managed to pass a number of bills, including two President Biden signed: one overturned D.C.’s criminal sentencing law and the other declared the Covid-19 national emergency over.

Other bills passed out of the House included one to eliminate a recent funding boost for the IRS, two abortion measures, a resolution that would restrict Biden’s ability to release oil from the strategic reserve and a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would have authorized more book bans and further targeted the LGTBQ+ community.

The bills in this group were pure performance art. 

They went absolutely nowhere in the Senate.

But what about the primary campaign issues the GOP ran on? The GOP House passed no bills on the border. The only crime bill they pushed through related to D.C. 

What About the Economy?

Still, no actual bills! 

But the GOP is now threatening to hold the debt ceiling hostage while demanding unspecified cuts to spending. In short, they are threatening to tank the world economy in order to get their way, over spending that was already authorized and is owed.

The GOP can’t even come to agreement over which programs to cut. All they know is that Social Security is off the table after Joe Biden masterfully owned them at the State of the Union by getting them to stand up for seniors.

The Hearings Have Been a Humiliating Nothing Burger

There were a lot of big promises. Republican Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky had promised to blow the lid off of the House with revelations about the Deep State, Social Media and the Bidens. 

They supposedly had some dozen whistleblowers willing to come forward to talk about how they were mistreated and punished because of their conservative views. 

The Twitter hearings would reveal the deep connections between the government and liberal social media executives. And Hunter Biden’s laptop would finally, finally produce the damning evidence that would bring down his father.

None of that happened.

Those FBI whistleblowers? 

Democrats shredded three of the primary witnesses in a report showing they lacked any firsthand accounts of internal bias, produced no actual evidence of wrongdoing at the Bureau and trafficked regularly in conspiracy theories. Chairman Jordan has since failed to produce other supposed whistleblowers, despite claiming to have several ready to appear.

The Twitter hearings? 

They consisted mostly of GOP Representatives like Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado's Lauren Boebert complaining about how their accounts had been suspended unfairly. 

Greene complained she had been censored for her tweets. 

She said to one witness during the hearings:

“You called that COVID misinformation." 

Then added:

"By the way I’m a member of Congress and you’re not.”

Boebert used her allotted time about as productively, demanding to know from Twitter’s former head of safety whether he had personally authorized the “shadowbanning” of her account. 

When he said he knew nothing about it, Boebert challenged him with anecdotal evidence, growing visibly agitated while claiming that “Twitter staff” had informed her “last night” that he had done so.

Meanwhile, Democrats brought in witnesses who testified about how it was the Trump White House, not Democrats, that sought to influence Twitter behind the scenes, including an effort driven personally by the ex-President to get a tweet from model Chrissy Teigen removed because she had called Trump a “pussy ass bitch”—something that is now entered in the Congressional record.

Hunter Biden’s laptop?

This obsession of the GOP has also failed to produce anything new, which ultimately even caused Fox host Jesse Watters to begin to lose patience with Representative Comer. “Again, five years investigating. Nothing just yet,” remarked Watters at the conclusion of an interview with the Republican legislator.

In sum, the hearings by the “Weaponization” subcommittee have amounted to little more than a rehashing of old grievances, including how Donald Trump was treated. 

The narrative is so tired and frankly boring even Fox cut away from the hearings on Day One.

The GOP Should Have Known Subpoenas Don’t Work

When news broke—from Donald Trump himself—that he was due to be arrested in Manhattan, GOP committee chairs rushed to signal their support for him, even running political interference by issuing letters from Congress demanding documents and testimony from District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Jim Jordan went one step further and issued a subpoena to a former prosecutor from Bragg’s office, Mark Pomerantz. The subpoena threatened to reveal information about confidential grand jury deliberations and the investigation into ex-President Trump.

Pomerantz told Jordan to pound sand, but Bragg made it official by filing a 50-page federal lawsuit in Manhattan to stop Jordan from using his office to interfere with an ongoing criminal prosecution.

It’s already clear Jordan and other GOP committee chairs are stretched thin.

They presided over hearings but were obviously ill-prepared and came without receipts. Their legal teams are being forced to craft demands and issue summons that will go exactly nowhere. 

Now, on top of that, they have a federal lawsuit to defend—all this over what is likely only the first of several indictments to drop against Trump.

The Toughest Challenges Lie Ahead

If the GOP has failed to deliver much in its first 100 days of power in the House, the next 100 are unlikely to see its record improve. 

Indeed, with Speaker McCarthy’s leadership hanging by the barest thread—with any single member able to call a vote to boot him from the position—he will be hard-pressed to bring about any kind of consensus without triggering a motion to vacate the chair.

Of particular concern is the upcoming debt ceiling battle. 

McCarthy has made promises to extremist members of his caucus not to permit a “clean” raise of the debt limit, even though that is what Republicans (and Democrats) did for years under Trump. 

At the same time, the White House is in no mood to negotiate with a gun to its head on the economy, so anything but a clean debt ceiling bill is a non-starter. So far, President Biden has refused to come to the table to negotiate on the debt ceiling, but has welcomed discussions on the budget generally.

But the GOP can’t even agree on a budget.

Biden isn’t going to negotiate against himself, and the GOP is rightly terrified of the political blowback once it becomes clear what they intend to slash from the budget. The math doesn’t work unless they agree to some kind of increase in revenue, as Biden has proposed for corporations and those who earn more than $400,000 per year. 

This they appear unprepared to do, so the clown car they are currently driving continues to speed toward an economic cliff. Failure to raise the debt ceiling means that the U.S.’s financial obligations will not be paid—an unthinkable outcome that would result in credit downgrades and a global crisis in investor confidence.

Whether that is a result the GOP is actually willing to play politics with by threatening—or to even own as part of its ceaseless quest to damage Joe Biden no matter what the cost—remains unclear. 

What is clear is that we have entrusted that choice to a man with no real authority and to a party with no real principles other than to take and hold power for its own sake.

And that makes the next 100 days, when our economic recovery is most on the line, a very dangerous and scary time for the U.S.