It was a historic year in the U.S. House — not in a good way
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The U.S. House of Representatives made plenty of headlines but not much legislative progress in its first session since Republicans regained control of Congress’ lower chamber.
The House’s record unproductivity in 2023 accompanied one of the narrowest margins in the country’s history, with GOP lawmakers outnumbering their Democratic counterparts 221 to 213 at the end of the year, representing a majority of just three votes in the body of 435 members.
With Republicans divided over top line spending numbers, how to avoid government shutdowns and whether to approve foreign aid, the slim red majority was devoted for weeks at a time to party infighting.
Republicans’ inability to work together in the face of divided government bodes poorly for early 2024 after the party, now under new leadership, shelved must-pass legislation for January and February.
Here’s a look at what the House has, or hasn’t, accomplished so far in the 118th Congress.
2023 by the numbers
The House of Representatives took 724 votes in 2023 — mostly for bill amendments — the most in over a decade.
But only 34 of the 329 measures advanced by the House became law, the lowest number in almost 100 years, rating poorly even when compared to unproductive Congresses during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which both saw around 70 laws passed.
In a sign of protest against House leadership, some GOP lawmakers torpedoed four procedural votes to bring bills to the floor. This is the most rules to fail ever in a single year.
The House was in session 174 days this year, which is fairly normal.
All 435 seats were filled, and members present, during 89 days of the year.
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Congress doing its job — or not
Congress’ biggest accomplishment of 2023 may have been simply to avoid causing economic chaos.
During the spring, House Republicans leveraged the country’s impending default on its debt to negotiate decreased budget levels for 2024. Democrats framed the move as holding the economy hostage. Republicans complained about Democrats’ unwillingness to come to the table. And the most conservative members of the House decried the debt limit bill for not cutting enough spending and for attracting more Democratic support than Republican.
The subsequent appropriations process saw Republicans walk away from the amounts agreed to in the debt ceiling deal as they sought greater spending reductions in the 12 annual spending bills. But amid GOP disagreements over how to proceed through “regular order,” lawmakers failed to pass more than a handful of the measures, which were dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate anyway, necessitating last-minute temporary funding measures in September and November to keep the government open. With Republicans unable to agree on an alternative, both “continuing resolutions” were Democratic-supported extensions of 2023 funding levels, angering fiscal hawks.
The U.S. House did succeed in passing one major piece of legislation in 2023. The 3,000 page National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, was passed at record levels, allocating $886 billion to the Department of Defense, which included a 5.2% pay raise for service members, $14.7 billion to counter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific and provisions ending the teaching of critical race theory in military academies. However, the bill left out other provisions banning taxpayer-funded abortion travel, military coverage of transgender medical care and warrantless searches of American communications.
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Punted to 2024
Legislative inaction in 2023 has set up a real headache for the House in the first parts of 2024.
In an unsuccessful attempt to appease the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., went along with a novel “two-step” continuing resolution to extend funding beyond the November deadline that was set in September’s shutdown near-miss. Government funding is now set to expire in two tranches: one on Jan. 19 and the other on Feb. 2. So far, the House has passed seven of the 12 spending bills, while the Senate has only passed three. But even once the two chambers have each passed all dozen spending bills, they will need to be reconciled in a way that a majority in the House and Senate will support.
Also awaiting lawmakers when they return from the holidays is a massive supplemental aid package for the wars in Ukraine and Israel tied to border security funding. The combined package comes after a request from the Biden administration for $105 billion in military aid, including $60 billion to Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel and $14 billion for immigration enforcement at the southern border.
Ousters and expulsions
Intraparty quibbling, as well as personal wrongdoing, resulted in unprecedented drama among House members in 2023.
The House went through 19 rounds of voting in two separate House speaker races this year, which took up a total of 14 legislative days. The House was speaker-less for a total of nearly 22 days, the most since 1962.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., needed 15 ballots to secure the gavel in January — the most since the 36th Congress in 1859, and the first time in 100 years to need multiple ballots. Johnson was elected to the position after four rounds of voting, three of which were failed attempts by Rep. Jim Johnson, R-Ohio.
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Following McCarthy’s decision to move forward with a clean extension of government funding in September, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., filed a motion to vacate the speaker of the House. A handful of Republicans joined Gaetz, and all House Democrats, to boot McCarthy from the House’s top leadership position. This was the first time in U.S. history a speaker was ousted.
Former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., was expelled in a 311-114 vote after an Ethics Committee report found he had had lied to donors and spent campaign funds on Botox treatments and extravagant trips with his husband, among other things, and exploited “every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” Santos is the first House lawmaker to be expelled since 2002, and only the sixth ever.
Three members of the House — Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. — were censured. This is tied with 1870 for the most ever.
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