Liars, expulsions and near-fistfights: Congress plumbs the depths in 2023
Before House Republicans left for their holiday recess this month, they addressed one last matter of business. They did not take up an aid package for Ukraine or pass an appropriations bill to fully fund the government through the fiscal year.
The House chose instead to vote along party lines to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, even though Republicans have failed to uncover any proof that the president financially benefited from his family’s business dealings.
“Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies,” Biden said of the vote. “The American people deserve better.”
The vote was a fitting end to a year defined by new lows on Capitol Hill. From removing a House speaker to expelling an indicted member and issuing threats of violence, 2023 saw Congress explore new depths of dysfunction. And it all started with a dayslong speakership race.
The battle for the gavel (part one)
After a disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, Republicans took control of the House in January with a much narrower majority than they had anticipated. That created a math problem for Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California and the conference’s presumed speaker nominee.
Instead of the uneventful process seen in past speakership elections, McCarthy failed to win the gavel on the first ballot, as roughly 20 hardright members of the Republican conference opposed his ascension. The gridlock forced the House to hold a second round of voting, marking the first time in a century that the chamber failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot.
The standoff lasted for four long days and necessitated 15 ballots in total. Just after midnight on 7 January, McCarthy won the speakership with a wafer-thin majority, in a vote of 216 to 212. He would hold the job for just nine months.
On the brink of economic collapse
As soon as Republicans (finally) elected a speaker, attention turned to the most pressing matter on Congress’s agenda for 2023: the debt ceiling.
The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, warned that the debt ceiling, which represents the amount of money the US government is allowed to borrow to pay its bills, had to be raised or suspended by early June to avoid a federal default and prevent economic catastrophe.
Despite those urgent warnings, hard-right members of the House Republican conference appeared prepared to let the US default on its debt in an attempt to force steep government spending cuts. With just days left before the expected default deadline, both the House and the Senate passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025.
The bill passed the House with a vote of 314 to 117, as 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats supported the measure. But 71 House Republicans opposed the bill, accusing McCarthy of cutting a horrendous deal with Biden. One Freedom Caucus member, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, mocked the deal as “insanity”.
In retrospect, the Freedom Caucus’s attacks on McCarthy marked the beginning of the end of his speakership.
The indicted senator from New Jersey
As House Republicans clashed with each other, the Senate grappled with its response to a member accused of corruption so rampant that it bordered on comical. In late September, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey, was charged in connection to what prosecutors described as a “yearslong bribery scheme”.
The indictment accused Menendez of exploiting his role as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to promote the interests of the Egyptian government in exchange for kickbacks. A raid of Menendez’s home, conducted in 2022, revealed that those kickbacks allegedly included a Mercedes-Benz convertible, $500,000 in cash and 13 gold bars.
Even as more of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate called on him to step down, Menendez insisted he would not resign, claiming he had been “falsely accused” because of his Latino heritage.
Pete Aguilar, a Democrat of California and the highest-ranking Latino member of the House, said of those claims, “Latinos face barriers and discrimination across the board in so many categories, including in our justice system. This is not that.”
The chair is declared vacant
The next near-disaster for Congress came in September, when the government appeared to be on the brink of a shutdown that would have forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to go without a paycheck.
But that fate was avoided because, with just hours left before the government’s funding was set to run out, McCarthy introduced a mostly clean bill to fund the government for 45 days. In the House, the bill won the support of 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans, but 90 Republicans opposed the legislation.
Democrats and hard-right Republicans alike said McCarthy had “folded” in the funding negotiations, failing to secure the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. Outraged by the bill’s passage, Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, introduced a motion to vacate the chair, forcing a chamber-wide vote on removing McCarthy as speaker.
The motion passed, with eight Republicans joining House Democrats in voting for McCarthy’s ouster. Seated in the House chamber, McCarthy let out a bitter laugh as he became the first speaker in US history to ever be ejected from the job.
The battle for the gavel (part two)
McCarthy’s removal prompted another speakership election, and this one somehow proved even more chaotic than the days-long spectacle that unfolded in January.
Republicans initially nominated the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for the speakership. But Scalise was forced to withdraw from the race days later because of entrenched opposition to his nomination among hard-right lawmakers. The caucus then nominated Jim Jordan of Ohio, who attempted to pressure his critics into electing him as speaker by holding multiple unsuccessful chamber-wide votes. Jordan dropped out of the race when it became clear that opposition to his speakership bid was only growing.
The election reached its peak level of absurdity on 24 October, when Tom Emmer of Minnesota withdrew from the race just hours after becoming the conference’s third speaker nominee in as many weeks. By then, it appeared even Republicans had grown tired of their manufactured crisis. Republicans’ fourth and final speaker nominee, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, won the gavel in a party-line vote, bringing an end to weeks of turmoil that had become the subject of nationwide mockery.
‘You are a United States senator!’
The fourteenth of November was a special day on Capitol Hill because it offered an opportunity for members of both the House and the Senate to embarrass themselves.
In the House, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy as speaker, accused McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidneys. Burchett then chased after McCarthy to confront him, but the former speaker denied the allegation.
“If I’d kidney-punched him, he’d be on the ground,” McCarthy told reporters.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican of Oklahoma, challenged one of the witnesses at a committee hearing to a fistfight. Mullin had previously clashed with the witness, the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, over social media and suggested they settle their score with a physical fight.
“You want to do it now?” Mullin asked.
“I’d love to do it right now,” O’Brien replied.
“Then stand your butt up then,” Mullin said.
“You stand your butt up,” O’Brien shot back.
The chair of the committee, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, then intervened to prevent any violence and offered this pointed reminder to Mullin: “You know, you’re a United States senator.”
From Congress to Cameo
The House kicked off the final month of the year with a vote to expel George Santos, a freshman Republican from New York who had been indicted on 23 federal counts related to fraud and campaign finance violations.
Santos had been plagued by controversy since before taking office, as reporters discovered he had fabricated most of the life story he shared with voters. A congressional investigation uncovered that Santos had spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account on Botox treatments, luxury items at Hermès and payments to OnlyFans, an online platform known for its sexual content.
Faced with that mountain of evidence, more than 100 House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to expel Santos. The 311-114 vote made Santos only the sixth member of the House ever to be expelled from Congress.
Without his day job, Santos has turned his attention to Cameo, which allows D-list celebrities to make money by filming short personalized videos for fans. Reports indicate Santos is already raking in six figures on the platform.
Goodbye, Kevin
Santos is not the only House members leaving Congress this year. McCarthy announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he would resign from the House at the end of December. McCarthy’s decision brought an end to a 17year career in the House that encapsulated the Republican party’s shift away from small-government conservatism and toward Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” philosophy.
Despite his humiliating fall from power, McCarthy expressed unbroken faith in Americans’ goodness and in “the enduring values of our great nation”.
“I’m an optimist,” McCarthy declared.
That makes one of us, Kevin.