Farm & Food File: A do-little House tees up more do-littleness for 2024

Time seems to take longer in Washington, D.C. Case in point: If you were a Republican on Capitol Hill, 2023 was endless.

At its start, the year arrived with a new GOP-led House and a new hope that this off-election session would be legislatively productive because 2024, a presidential election year, already loomed like an impending tornado.

But the year started poorly with January’s four-day, 15-ballot intraparty brawl that finally delivered the speaker’s gavel to GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy.

The bitter, deeply personal battle left wounds on many Republicans and drained McCarthy of any real power from the start.

With little mojo in his own caucus and none with Democrats, McCarthy spent most of his waking hours juggling GOP-tossed swords until Oct. 4, when eight of his own party members yanked him feet first from the speaker’s podium.

The end, preordained by McCarthy during January’s dealmaking to become speaker, was ugly and unprecedented.

“The 216-to-210 vote,” noted Reuters later that day, “marked the first time in history that the House removed its leader.”

Stripped of his power, McCarthy — in another display of his uncanny inability to read the room — boldly assured mutinous colleagues that he’d remain in the House.

Eight weeks later, his dream, year and career in tatters, the California Republican announced his resignation at year’s end, another casualty of the too-long 2023.

He’s not alone.

By mid-December, noted the website Ballotpedia, “38 members of Congress — seven members of the U.S. Senate and 31 members of the U.S. House — announced they would not seek reelection in 2024.”

That’s eight more than two years ago and the election still 11 long months away.

McCarthy, however, wasn’t the cause of this year’s House dysfunction. He was just a symptom.

In fact, since his firing, the House GOP remains so disorganized it has yet to move any required legislation through its own caucus, let alone through the House.

For example, McCarthy’s firing “left Congress in uncharted waters … to update farm subsidy and nutrition programs, pass government funding bills and consider further aid to Ukraine.”

Three months later, every item on this short list not only remains undone under new Speaker Mike Johnson, each seems even further from completion than when McCarthy was struggling to soothe the House’s GOP bellyachers and backbiters.

Worse, opined Punchbowl News, a daily report from Capitol Hill, Johnson’s indecisive, do-little style of leadership portends even more do-nothingness for 2024.

For example, the House’s failure to take up legislation to reauthorize a foreign surveillance law, FISA, before leaving for Christmas was “yet another terrific example of … Johnson’s speakership: He is either unwilling, unable or disinterested in making big decisions.”

Who can blame him? The second he was handed the speaker’s gavel — after yet another bloody brawl — his GOP colleagues put a target on his back.

Just look at his five immediate Republican predecessors and their fate: Gingrich, deposed; Hastert, deposed; Boehner, deposed; Ryan, deposed; McCarthy, fired.

Is Johnson just the next GOP Caesar to be chopped and diced into salad by his own party’s knife fighters?

That story will be written in the first four months of 2024 because he faces a legislative calendar that is as relentless as the march of time itself.

In January, he must pass “tranche one of government funding,” the first part of the much-delayed 2024 federal budget, noted Punchbowl. In February, “tranche two of government funding” looms.

March brings the reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, and in April, our old friend, FISA reauthorization returns.

And don’t forget, the overhaul of the 2023 farm bill that was punted into 2024 after House Republicans could neither agree on its spending levels nor its spending priorities. Repubs spent the first part of the delay blaming each other for that failure.

But, alas, the new year always brings new hope.

Unless you’re a member of the House Republican leadership where any day might bring a new speaker