The House GOP is now solely governing for Marjorie Taylor Greene

Republicans aren’t even pretending to govern anymore

For all the noise Republicans have made about President Joe Biden’s supposed wrongdoing, they can’t actually name what they’re after. Nor can they seem to give a straight answer.

When I caught House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, we went in circles.

“The Constitution provides that we have a constitutional obligation to do oversight,” he said. “That's what these committees have been doing.”

When I asked him about whether an impeachment could lead to a conviction in the Senate, he told me this as he was munching on a giant cookie: “We’re not talking about that. This is an investigation.”

This is a ludicrous postulation; the whole reason to open an impeachment inquiry is to ostensibly begin the process for impeachment and potential removal from office. But he could not say that because the House GOP conference has failed to say what exact actions Mr Biden committed that it thinks rise to the level of impeachment.

When I pressed him, he accused me of “jumping ahead to something that isn't even on the table right now” before retreating to the whip’s office.

Mr Emmer wishes that he had the speaker’s office on the second story of the Capitol right near the House floor. But a coterie of conservatives led by Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) blocked him from getting the gavel only hours after the House Republican conference made him their choice to replace Kevin McCarthy.

In the same respect, Ms Greene, a conspiracy-monger who spends her time speaking at conferences with white nationalists hosted by Nick Fuentes, has all but forced Republicans to pursue impeachment of Mr Biden. Indeed, a few months ago, she stipulated that it was part of the reason she backed Mr McCarthy for speaker and swallowed what she called a “s*** sandwich” by voting for the debt limit.

Republicans know this is a cockamamie impeachment effort with little merit. When I asked Rep Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin about the impeachment inquiry vote, he instead told me the real important vote that day was on allowing whole milk back in school lunches.

But Republicans fear Ms Greene and her kind. Indeed, when Mr McCarthy announced plans for an impeachment inquiry in September, Rep Matt Gaetz immediately and preposterously took to the floor to say this was an effort to delay an impeachment of Mr Biden. (This came before Mr Gaetz began the process of tossing Mr McCarthy out of office.)

Of course, as I wrote earlier this week, this inquiry vote came as the House has tons of unfinished homework before it leaves for the holidays. While the lower chamber has the “power of the purse,” the House has made little to no headway on its spending bills. A visit from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did little to move Republicans from holding support for the country hostage in exchange for a drastic rewriting of immigration laws.

And despite the fact that the House GOP made a whole deal of censuring Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for her comments about Israel, House Speaker Mike Johnson elected to pass a doomed Israel aid bill he knew would not pass the Senate but would please his base.

It is not an exaggeration at this point to say that the Republican-controlled House no longer cares about actually governing. Rather, Republicans live in fear of Ms Greene. With Donald Trump now mostly off Twitter, they live in fear of his most trusted ally in Congress’s tweets and her ability to gin up the base against leadership for being insufficiently devoted to the Mr Trump or her.

Shortly after Mr Emmer and I parted ways, Paul Ryan — the speaker during Mr Trump’s first two years in the White House — walked into his office. With his hair slicked back and sporting a beard, Mr Ryan, who spent his entire time leading the House feigning ignorance about the worst impulses of the right, seemed to embody a time when Republicans at least pretended to care about policy.

Perhaps he could provide advice to Mr Emmer about how to pass impeachment so Republicans could know what’s in it.