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After Rep. Ken Buck unexpectedly announced that he was resigning from Congress, the Colorado Republican told reporters, “This place keeps going downhill and I don’t need to spend more time here.”
This was not an uncommon sentiment. Since the far-right House Republican Conference took control of the chamber, legislative progress has slowed to a pace unseen in nearly a century. Retirements are up. Lawmakers are struggling mightily to complete basic tasks. It’s become increasingly easy to argue that this is the worst Congress ever. A recent Punchbowl News report concluded, “This is the most chaotic, inefficient and ineffective majority we’ve seen in decades covering Congress.”
It’s against this backdrop that the House Republican Conference left the nation’s capital this week for an annual retreat, held this year at a historic luxury resort in West Virginia. According to an Axios report, the gathering is “aimed at unifying the conference.”
That goal might be easier to achieve if more GOP members were willing to show up. Roll Call reported:
The first order of business at the House GOP’s annual retreat, which kicked off Wednesday, was a press conference on expanding the majority, though less than half of that majority planned to attend the retreat. ... [A] spokesperson for the Congressional Institute, which sponsors the Republican Issues Conference, said just over 100 members of the 218-member majority had RSVP’d they were going.
One lawmaker told reporters for Axios and Politico this week, in reference to the conference’s retreat, “I’d rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver.”
In other words, we’ve reached the point at which members of the House Republican Conference are divided over an event intended to unify.
Roll Call’s report added that Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow was scheduled to deliver a keynote speech at the gathering, but he “dropped out at the last minute.” Donald Trump, not surprisingly, isn’t showing up, either.
A Semafor report added that the House GOP’s retreat “already has the feel of a dysfunctional family vacation,” and quoted one Florida Republican who said he was skipping the retreat because “he’d already bought the material to clean his boat this week.”
Evidently, party leaders focused on “unifying the conference” will have to try again some other time.