Republicans Warn Democratic House Would Force Congress To Function

Republicans warned Sunday that Democratic control of the House could push the United States into a constitutional crisis known as Congress doing things. With election forecasters giving Democrats a strong chance of winning the chamber on Nov. 3, GOP officials said the country now faces the possibility of hearings, subpoenas, budget negotiations and other rarely activated provisions of the nation’s founding document. A small Democratic net gain could make Hakeem Jeffries speaker, exposing millions of Americans to committee chairs who ask administration officials questions and occasionally expect answers.

President Donald Trump sounded the alarm over the prospect that voters might establish divided government without first obtaining his written permission. “Nobody has ever seen checks and balances like these people want,” Trump said. “They want checking, they want balancing, probably every day, and frankly our country cannot survive that much accountability.” Speaker Mike Johnson urged Republicans to remain calm, noting that losing the House would release GOP lawmakers from the exhausting burden of legislating while allowing them to appear nightly on television and blame Jeffries for grocery prices, airport delays, rain and the premature arrival of autumn.

Democratic strategists have embraced the radical campaign tactic of reminding voters what happened during the previous two years, a maneuver Republican officials condemned as an unfair exploitation of publicly available memory. Party leaders also warned that Democratic committee chairs could revive oversight, require witnesses to testify under oath and debate legislation before voting on it. Such a system would replace the current streamlined process in which lawmakers await instructions from Trump, praise the instructions on social media and then explain that any resulting failure was engineered by Democrats. Republicans remain confident voters will reject representative government and preserve the nation’s sacred constitutional principle that one-party control is freedom.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.