House Republicans Made the Biggest Political Blunder in a Generation

The GOP had a winning hand and inadvertently gambled it away

House Republicans made a huge unforced error this Congress, perhaps bigger than any miscalculation since they impeached Bill Clinton. The Clinton impeachment ordeal created the political climate that resulted in the first sitting president to gain house seats in their 2nd midterm election in decades. This election cycle’s misjudgment may not ultimately have the same impact on the results as the election of 1998, but it is potentially very significant in the realm of missed opportunities and wasted potential.

The error is related to the topic of immigration but is not from the headlines of today; it’s not the Mayorkas impeachment efforts or the Texas border standoff with the federal government currently in session, escalated by most of the country’s GOP governors. These occurrences are just symptoms of the error. Their original sin was committed soon after Thanksgiving 2023, when they tied the border issue to the proposed funding of Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. Just bringing the border up as a negotiating tool greatly reduced its power to affect the election in their favor.

House Republicans obviously wanted to use the Ukraine defense funding issue as a bargaining chip. They had several practical options of demands for their side. They could have imposed their ultra-conservative wills onto some popular right-wing talking point of the day, and perhaps make a dent in policy that they could promote to their constituents, even if it didn’t necessarily satisfy their hunger for the reddest of meat.

Admittedly, today’s Republican Party is not known for being a haven for policy wonks. Their main purpose is essentially to keep their base angry while at the same time prevent them from threatening theirs and their families’ lives, so they were somewhat limited in how to effectively balance these competing discontents. But one of their first publicly endorsed options in budget negotiations was IRS reform, or, in reality, castration.

When Speaker Mike Johnson first brought up reducing the manpower and resources of the IRS, it was largely ridiculed as a budget bargaining chip, since by diminishing the effectiveness of the entity that brings in the revenue to fund the budget, you’d be potentially creating more problems than you solve. But it wasn’t really about solving problems, it was about propping up a boogeyman (the IRS stormtroopers) and offering ways to slay it to their base. It seemed to play pretty well at the time, but perhaps it didn’t, because the IRS didn’t last long as a publicity prop.

So they turned to their most potently powerful hot topic of the day — of the century for that matter — which was and still is immigration, now referred to as “the border”. The border has been a simmering, progressively escalating issue for decades and has recently come to a head because border crossings and apprehensions are at all-time highs. It has been trending this way for years, even during the Trump administration, with a small anomalous blip downward during the Covid shutdown year of 2020. But fair is fair, and Biden has presided over the largest ramp up in illegal immigration numbers in 25 years.

Other than Trump himself, the issue of the border riles up the GOP base more than anything else. Whatever one thinks of southern governors’ efforts to ship migrants to northern “liberal” cities in order to bring attention to, and garner support for, the issue of the border crisis, these efforts look like they have been effective. Polls show that immigration is now the number one issue among voters, and has been climbing for months. At the time of the House Republicans’ decision to bring in border policy as part of an ultimatum on Ukraine funding, the peak immigration numbers hadn’t even been reached yet; that happened in December of last year, the data of which would not have come out until early January.

So that means that the problem got worse after they decided to bring it into the negotiations, and, therefore the topic got hotter and hotter and was being used in the media as a political cudgel against the Democrats. Even centrist and more liberal media outlets were starting to bring it up in the daily headlines. Democratic big city politicians were complaining about it. It was something that no one could afford to ignore any longer. It was becoming an increasingly essential ingredient in the diet of rabid right-wingers: redder and redder and juicier meat, getting even more appetizing by the day. It was exactly what Republicans needed and wanted in order to help alleviate the electoral problems the Party obviously has with every other aspect of their behavior and policy platforms.

But the problem was that by bringing this into the negotiations and using it as an ultimatum then, they effectively took the issue off the table politically now and in the future, as we approach election day. It immediately lost its electoral power, even as it remains a hot button issue. This is because they effectively took ownership over the problem and ceded to the Democrats, who controlled the Senate and the Presidency, the ability to share the blame.

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and much of this may seem obvious now. But I noted this back in late November 2023, and was genuinely puzzled when they brought it up at that time. I wrote an article on December 13, 2023, about this entitled “Immigration is the New Abortion”. It compared the immigration issue to the abortion issue in that the Republicans should “be careful what they wish for”. Their victory over Roe v. Wade will likely play a huge part in their electoral downfall in this election cycle and future ones to come. By the same token, by demanding that the Democrats help them solve the border crisis, which is something Democrats and at least a portion of Republicans have been trying for a long time, they’ve offered to share the issue with those other factions instead of letting Democrats own it themselves.

I’d like to make it clear that I am in full support of passing a comprehensive immigration bill. I don’t even care so much about what is in the bill, as long as it’s somewhat reasonable and addresses current problems. Really, there should be a new immigration bill every few years that addresses new problems that may arise and fixes any issues with the previous bills. But this support doesn’t mean I’m blind to the political realities of the day, notwithstanding how cynical and sickening they are.

The fact is that the Republicans had the perfect issue to run on. Their previous attempts at scaring the public with reports of huge migrant caravans on the verge of storming through our border fell flat electorally, but considering how important of an issue it has been with voters, it may have contributed to keeping their losses closer than they otherwise would have been. Also, with illegal border crossings hitting new records and being a daily crisis reported on by all media outlets relentlessly, these scare tactics likely would have played out more favorably for them this time.

But instead, the Democrats and more level-headed Senate Republicans called their bluff and have agreed to solve this issue. They’ve recently been negotiating what looks to be one of the most conservative immigration bills in our recent history, which includes complete border shutdowns if certain criteria are met. Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill and shut down the border that day if it got to his desk. And now House Republicans are coming up with reasons why they can’t or won’t bring up the bill for a vote. They are on defense now and will be easily labelled as the reason the border remains a crisis when the 2024 election comes. And if the border issue dies down and is less of a crisis in the coming months, the Biden administration can claim victory on the border issue, since, after all, they are the ones in power.

This was a terribly played hand by House Republicans. It was like being dealt a 21 in blackjack and telling the dealer “Hit me”. There was no winning this political battle for House Republicans. They should have held on to the hand they had.

On the other hand, this demand has spurred actual bipartisan efforts to come to an agreeable solution to the border problems of the day, something unthinkable just a few months ago. The pressure is now on Congress to get something done on the issue, since it has been built up to be perceived as a crisis yearly for decades. This is the closest we’ve come in a long time to passing a comprehensive immigration bill, and the momentum seems to be on the side of it eventually getting done. It could be a political error with an eventual national happy ending.