Twelve years ago, a Democratic-controlled Congress was on the verge of passing landmark legislation to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system—the biggest domestic priority of then-President Barack Obama and a decades-long goal of his Party. Republicans were nothing short of apocalyptic. Outside the Capitol, conservative protesters were chanting, “Kill the bill!” and holding signs that said, “Doctors, Not Dictators.” Inside the Capitol, John Boehner, the House minority leader at the time, gave a famously impassioned speech from the House floor. “Look at how this bill was written,” he said. “Can you say it was done openly? With transparency and accountability? Without backroom deals that were struck behind closed doors? Hell no you can’t!”
Minutes later, the Affordable Care Act passed by a slim margin of 219 to 212, a complete party-line vote. Republicans planned to use the new law to galvanize their base in the upcoming midterm elections. They succeeded. The Grand Old Party would go on to win seven seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, taking over the lower chamber. It was, as Obama put it, a “shellacking.”
But on Friday, with another Democratic-controlled Congress on the precipice of passing another piece of landmark legislation—a sweeping climate, healthcare, and tax bill that punctuates a line of recent victories for President Joe Biden—Republicans on Capitol Hill barely put up a fight.
There were no major protests. No newsworthy remarks from Republicans on the floor in a last-ditch effort to sink the bill, looking for their Jimmy Stewart moment. While House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke for almost an hour decrying the measure shortly before the vote, it paled in comparison to the more than eight-hour speech he gave last November in protest of an earlier version of the same bill.
No, House passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which advanced out of the Senate last weekend, seemed like a foregone conclusion. By 6 p.m. lawmakers approved the measure by a vote of 220 to 207, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk.
What seemed at times like a half-hearted effort from Republicans in opposing the legislation on Friday came about as they were reeling from the fallout of the FBI executing a search warrant on the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump.
Since the news on Monday, Trump and his allies have painted the effort as part of a politically motivated “witch-hunt.” But on Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the agents were looking for classified documents related to nuclear weapons that Trump took from the White House. And hours before the vote on Friday, a federal magistrate in Florida unsealed the warrant and property receipt from the search, showing that nearly half of the documents the FBI had seized were marked classified or top-secret. The warrant also revealed that Trump is under investigation for potential violations of the Espionage Act and other federal statutes.
Many congressional Republicans tried to brush off the latest revelations on Friday, with some arguing that members of Trump’s inner circle leaking to the media were the real concern. “We’ve got problems with people betraying their confidential information to get it to The Washington Post,” Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, tells TIME. “And that’s a problem.”
Others were more circumspect. Rep. Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, says the public needs more information about why the FBI conducted such an intrusive search. “It’s a high threshold to say it was an immediate national security threat,” he tells TIME. “If it wasn’t an immediate national security threat, I think there’s a lot of questions they need to answer.”
Mullin, a member of the…
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