With a new leader at the gavel and a new election looming, House Republicans are gearing up for a fight to keep and expand their slim majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
And on Tuesday, the House GOP’s campaign arm announced a new record in fundraising that’s going to help them do it.
With the heat of the presidential campaign surrounding every vote in 2024 and Democrats flush with cash, the stakes can’t get much higher.
In a Tuesday news release, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced it had raised $9 million in November, a record for the month in a non-election year.
The amount eclipsed the previous record in an off-year November by $1.8 million, according to the news release.
Trending:
“House Republicans stepped up to the plate and helped the Committee hit a fundraising grand slam — led by Speaker [Mike] Johnson and our incredible leadership team,” NRCC Chairman Richard Hudson said in the news release.
“With partners like this and an incredible political environment, extreme House Democrats should dread yet another cycle in the minority.” The release shows the committee has $41.4 million in cash on hand to wage battle in 2024.
It’s hard to exaggerate how important that is. While media attention is going to focus on the presidential race — understandably, considering that a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appears to be the most likely makeup of the contest so far — the Founders designed the House to be the most powerful part of the elected branches of government because it is the one most directly accountable to the American people.
Will Republicans gain House seats in 2024?
It was the election of a GOP majority to the House in the 2022 midterms that put a halt to the Biden legislative agenda — and made possible the investigations that have turned up a growing mountain of evidence that Biden is as much the head of an organized crime family as he is the head of state.
It was the election of a Democratic majority to the House in 2018 that stalled then-President Donald Trump’s efforts in Congress — and led to the disgraceful impeachment trial of 2020 that’s mainly memorable today because of its hints about the extent of first son Hunter Biden’s corruption in Ukraine.
And in 2024, House Speaker Johnson isn’t going to have many votes to spare if he’s going to keep his post.
As The Associated Press reported Thursday, Republicans had only a nine-vote spread of 222-213 before New York Republican George Santos was expelled from his seat on Dec. 1. After former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced he is resigning before the new year, that number is dropping to seven.
A Democratic victory in the special election to replace Santos, scheduled for Feb. 13, according to the AP, would bring it to six — 220-214. And as the AP noted, Ohio Republican Bill Johnson is expected to leave Congress by March 15 to take a job as president of Youngstown University in northeastern Ohio.
When you can count a House majority with the fingers of one hand (and a thumb), there’s not a lot of wiggle room.
Fortunately, the power of leadership in House committees — particularly Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer and his Hunter Biden investigation as chairman of the Oversight Committee — is secure, thanks to the partisan majority, but the thin line means passing legislation on a partisan vote is complex.
“It just makes everything harder. It’s just that simple,” Oklahoma GOP Rep. Tom Cole told the AP.
“You have to have perfect attendance, which is hard to get. And you have to have perfect agreement, which is damn hard to get.”
But there’s not much in American politics on the national stage that’s easy in the 21st century. The Democratic Party has been hijacked by its most unhinged elements — its House leader, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, used the occasion of Johnson’s Oct. 25 election as speaker to ludicrously compare the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, among other national disasters.
That is the kind of lunacy Johnson and the House Republicans are facing across the aisle.
According to a report in The Hill on Tuesday, the House Democrats’ fundraising arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had reported $47 million in cash on hand in October, putting the DCCC ahead of the number the RNCC reported Tuesday.
That means the fight is going to be hard. It’s going to be long. And it’s going to get very expensive.
Conservatives and Republicans who want to keep control of the House need to remember that.
The stakes in 2024 are already higher than just who’s going to be sworn in to the presidency in January 2025. And they keep getting higher.
