Stakes High for House Republicans With Midterms Approaching

Republicans have come to a critical juncture, with less than a year to go before their control of Congress is at stake, but they say the way to hold on to power is more legislative aggression, not less.

“We have a short time to fix a very large problem that the Biden administration left us, and we did that. Look at how quickly that we secured the border,” House Republican conference chair Lisa McClain, R-Mich., told The Daily Signal on Tuesday at the Republican Study Committee’s media row event. “My view is we need to continue those bold, aggressive actions for the American people because we don’t have a lot of time to do it.”

In just 11 months, Republicans will attempt to hold on to their narrow majorities in the House and Senate.

A consensus has emerged that Republicans will have to counter Democrats’ narratives on affordability and offer their own vision.

“I think we need to do a better job of messaging,” Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal. “Republicans are going to be fine in the midterm. We just need to make sure that we get the message out there that we are correcting the after effect, if you will, of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.”

“I think that we need to be more aggressive in terms of talking about what the real issues are,” Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., told The Daily Signal. “We saw the [losses in] … elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and I actually think that we need to be holding the Democrats accountable for the crises that they created and also describing the things that we are doing to attempt to resolve them.”

A big part of Hageman’s vision for a Republican affordability plan is health care—ambitiously restructuring the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.

Obamacare “has exacerbated every single problem in the industry, and the Republicans do need to seize this moment and actually come up with a better plan of how to provide health insurance and medical care to the American people,” Hageman said.

President Donald Trump and Republican leadership in both chambers have been attempting to attack this issue. Throughout the shutdown, Democrats emphasized the issue of expiring enhanced premium tax credits. 

The White House has floated proposals of a temporary, reformed extension of the tax credits.

 In the Senate—where this issue came to prominence amid Democrats’ shutdown of the government—Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., have proposed setting up flexible health care savings accounts as an alternative to the tax credits, which they view as inflationary and prone to fraud.

In the House, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., has introduced a similar proposal of “MAHA accounts.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., is currently working on finalizing a health care package.

The stakes of the moment are high. If President Donald Trump were to lose his trifecta, it would likely hamstring attempts to pass ambitious, conservative legislation. With a majority, House Democrats would also be able to impeach and stymie the administration.

Claiming ‘Affordability’ for MAGA

The president appears to understand the importance of winning the narrative and has worked in recent days to counter Democrats’ attempts to frame themselves as the party of affordability.

“They just say the word,” Trump told reporters in a cabinet meeting Tuesday of Democrats’ affordability narrative. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it—‘affordability.’ I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”

Trump would continue to call the affordability narrative a “con job” at an oval office press event on auto industry deregulation and blame Democrats for the country’s lingering inflation.

House Republicans now have a precious eleven month span to try to show the American public that they are the party of affordability. 

Republicans had previously hoped to protect their majority with redistricting across the country. But with retaliatory redistricting coming in California, it is unclear how many seats Republicans will be able to net through this strategy.

Some Republicans say they need to focus on passing popular legislation which yields tangible benefits for Americans.

“Joe Biden put us into a massive hole to take time to dig out of. Some people want to fix affordability by just shoveling more government money out the door. That will only make things worse. More money in the economy will be inflationary,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., told The Daily Signal. 

“Instead, we need to do things like reduce regulations, make it easier for people to go out and build projects in this country, Start businesses, do energy exploration,” Johnson continued. “Those chickens take time to come home to roost, but that needs to be the agenda of this Republican majority.”

The Speaker’s Future

In recent days, Speaker Johnson has faced criticisms from House GOP members, and outlets such as The New York Times have speculated on how long he will retain the gavel.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., recently told The Wall Street Journal that “the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership” if Johnson were up for election tomorrow.

But the speaker says he is in it for the long haul.

“Absolutely,” he said Wednesday when asked if he would be running for to lead the Republican conference again next Congress. “We’re going to continue this agenda. We have had one of the most successful, productive congresses in the history of this institution. We’ll put it up against any in history and we did that because we were able to keep everybody together even with the smallest margins in history.”

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