What would Republicans do with a House majority?

ASK ANY physicist: big ideas can fit into tight spaces. Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives, is an unlikely fan of extreme concision. Yet the man who will probably be the next Speaker of the House if Republicans retake control of the chamber after the midterm elections in November managed to fit his party’s agenda on a single two-sided notecard. “They have no plan to fix all the problems they’ve created,” Mr McCarthy said of his Democratic rivals at the big unveiling held on September 23rd in Monongahela, Pennsylvania (intentionally set in Washington County rather than Washington, DC). “So, you know what? We’ve created a Commitment to America,” he said, brandishing the postcard plan for rescuing the republic from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Republicans have a long-standing problem with explaining what they stand for. For years the party has been better defined by what it is against—critical race theory, defunding the police, socialism and wokery. Donald Trump was not a policy guy. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has not released a formal agenda, perhaps because many of the specifics would not be popular. Rick Scott, a senator from Florida who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, learned this lesson after releasing a lengthy policy agenda. Democrats leapt upon its insistence that all Americans pay some federal income tax and that safety-net programmes, including Social Security and Medicare, be renewed by Congress every five years.

Mr McCarthy’s Commitment to America is consciously styled after the Contract with America released by Newt Gingrich in 1994, ahead of his successful takeover of Congress. The new version is comparatively brief and unspecific. Standard Republican platitudes about curbing wasteful spending and promoting tax cuts and deregulation to boost growth feature prominently. The few specific policy recommendations—cutting permitting time for energy projects, offering signing bonuses for 200,000 new police officers and barring transgender women from female sports—are not as bold as the 1994 edition, which pledged to slash congressional committee staff by one-third, create a modest child allowance and remake the welfare system.

That is not for lack of trying. Various task forces of Republican lawmakers laboured for months to craft a specific agenda. But the caucus, which spans all the way from Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ultra-Trumpy conspiracy theorist who has called for the defunding of the FBI (and who was seated right behind Mr McCarthy as he spoke in Pennsylvania), to social moderates such as Nancy Mace, seems united only by its choice of enemies.

“If you like freedom, you should support the freedom of any two people to marry whoever they want, right?” says Ms Mace, who represents a district in South Carolina. “If you’re going to ban abortion, you need to make sure women have access to contraception.” Unlike the progressive left, which has been effectively whipped into submission by Nancy Pelosi, the current Speaker, conservative House Republicans have been unafraid to torpedo their own leaders. They sent John Boehner and Paul Ryan, the last two Republican Speakers, to early retirement.

In the likeliest scenario, which would see Republicans winning a House majority and Democrats hanging on to the Senate, the prospects for substantive legislation would decline to zero. Currently, with both houses in Democratic control, the ten senators required to override a filibuster have a veto. From January, the number of vetoes would increase. Mr Biden’s formal one and the implicit veto held by members of the House Freedom Caucus (an influential group of conservative Republicans) would make three. The result would be something like the latter half of Barack Obama’s presidency, in which Republicans extracted maximal leverage when must-pass legislation such as budgetary reauthorisation or re-upping the debt ceiling approached.

This would be the case even though there are subjects on which Democrats and Republicans actually agree. “I think you could see criminal-justice reform,” says Brian Ballard, a Republican lobbyist in Washington and Florida. And, he adds, “there’s this weird, growing kind of consensus that high-tech barons of today are like the oil barons were a few generations ago.” Both parties are hawkish towards China and favour spending to prevent a possible military takeover of Taiwan. Dislike of big business is bipartisan now. “The days of the Chamber of Commerce being the chief policy officer of the Republican Party are gone,” says Mr Ballard. But translating shared animosity into legislation is difficult. Republicans are sceptical of businesses for their overzealous embrace of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment, for instance, whereas many Democrats argue that large corporations are not taking “stakeholder capitalism” seriously enough.

Not passing legislation would leave a Republican House plenty of time for other pursuits. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky who is the favourite to chair the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has already penned his agenda. The first person of interest is Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has a messy history of drug addiction and a worrying penchant for dodgy overseas business dealing—and whose leaked laptop is probably authentic but also a treasure trove of damaging information. “The reason we’re investigating Hunter Biden is because we believe that he has compromised Joe Biden,” says Mr Comer. “We believe that a lot of the decisions he’s made on energy policy are based on shady business deals with Hunter Biden.”

Ms Mace, the moderate Republican representative who also sits on the oversight committee, agrees on the need for the investigation. “I don’t dabble in conspiracy theory, but when Mark Zuckerberg gets up there and admits that the FBI told him to bury the Hunter Biden laptop [story] three days before an election, that gives me heartburn.” Mr Comer has been labouring unsuccessfully to access the “suspicious activity reports” that American banks have filed against the president’s son. With majority control of the committee, the Treasury Department would be obliged to provide them. The other priorities could also be unpleasant for the president. “Number two: the covid origination. Number three: border security,” rattles off Mr Comer.

There are already some clamours for the House to impeach the president if Republicans win a majority. The exact charge varies. The most Trump-aligned members are also calling for Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, to be impeached over the administration’s handling of the border. Both would be spectacles with little chance of success. Mr Comer is shrewd enough to see that. “We’re going to have members that get a lot of retweets and stuff about impeaching, and at the end of the day—I say this all the time—the House can impeach, but the Senate’s not going to convict,” he says. “But at the end of the day, we’ve got to fix the problems that Joe Biden’s created.” ■

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