In her resignation statements, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor included in her reasons that she was unable to get things done for her district, particularly table legislation, and that having to defend an abusive Donald Trump and fight for her seat only to face the prospect of being in the minority after midterms was deeply unappetizing.
It appears other Republicans are thinking along the same lines. From Chuck L:
BREAKING: Trump gets nightmare Monday news as it's revealed that an "explosive" wave of House Republicans will soon resign like Marjorie Taylor Greene did — destroying Mike Johnson's Speakership.
This has MAGA world in an absolute panic…
"A few other GOP members messaged us… pic.twitter.com/1GW8ZDv9JO
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) November 24, 2025
This possibility seems serious enough to have generated a segment on Breaking Points:
While there is some truth to the argument by Saagar and Krystal that Congresscritters brought these woes on themselves, a few caveats are in order.
First, my impression is that in most countries, being what the UK calls a backbencher (there a Member of the House of Commons who is not a minister), as in an not-much-of-a-name, no special appointments legislator is indeed not an influential position. Most party members in most countries are expected to follow party discipline. For instance, it isn’t as much commented on as it should be that the reason Democrats caved on the shutdown was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to whip votes, as is normally done, and explicitly told members to vote their conscience.
In the US, parties exercise control through substantial centralization of funding and other resources. House members have barely any staff, and smallish budgets, so they can’t even buy much in the way of research. I am not sure of the Republican version of this syndrome but here is how it works on the Democrat side. From a 2011 post, Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine”:
Let’s first look at how crassly explicit the pricing is. Ferguson cites the work of Marian Currander on how it works for the Democrats in the House of Representatives:
Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million.
Ferguson teases out the implications:
Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it — you buy it, runs the challenge. They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down and the same amount later, through fundraising…..
The whole adds up to something far more sinister than the parts. Big interest groups (think finance or oil or utilities or health care) can control the membership of the committees that write the legislation that regulates them. Outside investors and interest groups also become decisive in resolving leadership struggles within the parties in Congress. You want your man or woman in the leadership? Just send money. Lots of it….
The Congressional party leadership controls the swelling coffers of the national campaign committees, and the huge fixed investments in polling, research, and media capabilities that these committees maintain — resources the leaders use to bribe, cajole, or threaten candidates to toe the party line… Candidates rely on the national campaign committees not only for money, but for message, consultants, and polling they need to be competitive but can rarely afford on their own..
This concentration of power also allows party leaders to shift tactics to serve their own ends….They push hot-button legislative issues that have no chance of passage, just to win plaudits and money from donor blocs and special-interest supporters. When they are in the minority, they obstruct legislation, playing to the gallery and hoping to make an impression in the media…
The system …ensures that national party campaigns rest heavily on slogan-filled, fabulously expensive lowest-common-denominator appeals to collections of affluent special interests. The Congress of our New Gilded Age is far from the best Congress money can buy; it may well be the worst. It is a coin-operated stalemate machine that is now so dysfunctional that it threatens the good name of representative democracy itself.
There’s even more damning material in this post. And even before Ferguson described these practices in the Washington Spectator, Jane Hamsher called out the Obama veal pen. From a 2010 post:
Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :
Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term “veal pen” means:
The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf’s permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves’ muscles, thus producing tender “gourmet” veal.
[]
About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this “food,” laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves’ experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..
I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.
And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….
Where are they on health care? Why aren’t they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?
Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?
Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.
The truth is — they’ve all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration’s ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.
So it is a bit surprising to see supposed DC insiders like the Breaking Points duo seem unaware of this dynamic, that any Representative or Senator that is interested in being re-elected, unless they are fabulously wealthy and can fund their own campaign (think Mike Bloomberg level rich) is hostage to the harsh discipline of money-dependence. The ginormous cost of running for office, thanks to the expense of TV ads, is the reason. Most countries either disallow political TV commercials or allow candidates a limited amount of free air time if they have met certain thresholds.
Second, it is a bit unfair in particular to depict Republican Congresscritters in abdicating their duties with respect to DOGE in particular. Trump was elected by a solid margin. Many Republicans campaigned on budget scaremongering or other flavors of fiscal rectitude. Democrats were notably missing in action in doing anything about DOGE save handwringing. And what were they to do? They could attempt to hold Trump legislation hostage…..which would be highly irregular for the party members of a new President. Perhaps they could encourage harmed voters to sue and file amicus brief supporting them.
Third, Trump’s spectacular vindictiveness is another reason that unhappy Republican legislators might hesitate to act. Recall that Trump called MTG a traitor. He has applied the same label to Democratic Congresscritters, all with either military or spook state credentials, who banded together to publish a commercial reminding servicemembers of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. Trump has launched FBI investigations. From Aljaazera:
The FBI has requested interviews with six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a social media video urging members of the United States military to “defy illegal orders”, according to the legislators.
The statements on Tuesday came a day after the Pentagon said it was reviewing Senator Mark Kelly, a US Navy veteran and one of the six lawmakers, over potential violations of military law…
President Donald Trump has previously accused the lawmakers of sedition and said in a social media post that the crime is “punishable by DEATH”.
All six of the Democratic lawmakers in the video have served in the military or the intelligence community.
Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of the six in the video, told reporters on Tuesday that “the counterterrorism division at the FBI sent a note to the members of Congress, saying they are opening what appears to be an inquiry against the six of us”.
Third, it is still important to point out the established pattern of Congress ceding power to the Executive Branch, as Saagar and Krystal have done. But this pattern goes back at least the Nixon imperial presidency. And it extends far beyond war powers. One of my pet beefs is the way Congress treats the economy as really not their problem and punts that largely to the Fed and the Administration. Admittedly, trying to legislate to response to big shifts in activity is hard. So how about more emphasis on policies that operate as economic stabilizers….which particularly favors social safety nets, as in spending drops in good times and rises in bad ones? Or even more boldly, a discussion of the need for a more concerted view of what growth oriented policies might be, starting with infrastructure spending?
Regardless, we can hope that Trump is hoist ahead of the midterm schedule on his petard of incompetence and bullying. Such schadenfreude!
