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Representative Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, had a positive spin on the five days and record-breaking 15 voting rounds it took him to win the gavel in January. Because it took this long, he said after the ordeal, now we learned how to govern.

But as the first year of the 118th Congress draws to a close, the numbers tell a different story one that doesnt involve much governing at all.

In 2023, the Republican-led House has passed only 27 bills that became law, despite holding a total of 724 votes.

That is more voting and less lawmaking than at any other time in the last decade, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a far less productive record than that of last year, when Democrats had unified control of Congress. The House held 549 votes in 2022, according to the House clerk, and passed 248 bills that were signed into law, according to records kept by the Library of Congress, including a bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades.

The list of this years accomplishments is less ambitious and more bare minimum, such as legislation to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits that helped pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe. The tally also includes two temporary spending measures to avoid government shutdowns. The House cleared the must-pass annual military policy bill last week before leaving for the year, though it is not known when President Biden will sign it into law.

The numbers reflect the challenges that have plagued Republicans all year and are likely to continue, and maybe even get worse, in 2024: a tiny majority that requires near unanimity to get anything done; deep party divisions that make unanimity all but impossible; and a right wing whose priority is reining in government, not passing new laws to broaden its reach.

The raw number of laws passed is not always the best way to capture the productivity of a Congress, because some catchall bills incorporate dozens of smaller, sometimes highly significant, bills that hitch a ride. But this year was grossly unproductive even by the lower standards of whats possible in divided government and after taking into account the reality that not all bills are created equal. In 2013, for example, when Republicans controlled the House and Democrats controlled the Senate, just as they do today, the House passed 72 bills that were signed into law.

Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Congresss productivity issues this year reached a low point. She attributed it to deepening political polarization and to the fractured House Republican conference with its too-slim-to-govern majority.

Democrats as a party are much more interested in having government do things, Ms. Reynolds said. A lot of what Republicans are motivated by is the pursuit of ideological purity. The ideological difference around the role of government makes it harder to imagine the sets of things on which the Republican House, especially with its divisions, would get together with a Democrat-led Senate and a Democrat president.

Despite the low number of bills signed into law, the House saw a frenzy of activity on the floor. That included numerous votes for numerous speaker candidates (19 across two historic speaker elections), multiple attempts to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress (three), failed and successful votes on censuring Democratic lawmakers (six) and dozens of votes on hard-right amendments to appropriations bills that ultimately did not pass, or proved to be non-starters in the Senate because they were laden with conservative policy priorities.

The mismatch between the number of votes taken and the number of laws passed is something far-right House Republicans might consider a win. One of the demands the faction made of Mr. McCarthy in January as they were withholding their support to make him speaker was to open up the legislative process and allow more votes on the floor.

And some of the votes happened because House members defied the speaker and forced them against his wishes, like a resolution to impeach Mr. Biden over his border policies and a move to censure Representative Adam B. Schiff of California and fine him $16 million.

Its a good reminder that not every vote is in pursuit of an actual legislative product, Ms. Reynolds said.

Some Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at their inability to get things done. If we dont change the foundational problems within our conference, its just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver, Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota vented to reporters in October after Mr. McCarthys ouster.

But those foundational problems remain.

Rebellious right-wing Republicans, angry at Speaker Mike Johnson for relying on Democrats to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown, voted to block two major spending bills from coming to the floor.

That marked the fourth time this year that House Republicans broke a longstanding code of party discipline by refusing to back procedural measures proposed by their own leaders that must be passed to bring legislation to the floor. That did not happen once under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the House for a total of eight years, or under the previous two Republican speakers, Paul D. Ryan or John A. Boehner.

When it came to the politics of retribution and revenge, however, the House had a historically productive year. It sometimes took multiple attempts, but Republicans were ultimately successful at formally censuring three Democratic members of the House: Mr. Schiff and Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

Before this year, only two members had been censured in almost four decades.

I suspect that has something to do with the breakdown on the Republican side of party leadership, said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University. Theres no restraining of members from going to the floor.

It took the House three tries, but it also made history when it voted to expel Mr. Santos, making him the first person to be expelled from the House without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.

Republican leaders tried to frame the year as productive, in its own way.

In his end-of-year recap, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, said Republicans had succeeded in passing legislation to confront rising crime, unleash American energy, lower costs for families, secure President Bidens wide-open border, combat executive overreach and burdensome agency rules, and refocus our military on its core mission of national security.

But many of those bills amounted to political messaging tools that would stand no chance of passage in a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Other than the must-pass bills, those that did make it into law addressed the smallest of small-bore issues, such as the 250th Anniversary of the United States Marine Corps Commemorative Coin Act and a bill to designate the clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Gallup, N.M., as the Hiroshi Hershey Miyamura V.A. Clinic. On Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden signed into law the Duck Stamp Modernization Act of 2023, which allows waterfowl hunters the use of electronic federal duck stamps instead of physical ones to meet licensing requirements.

In his farewell speech to Congress, Mr. McCarthy highlighted as one of his hallmark achievements of the year a successful effort to prevent a new law. The measure blocked a rewrite of the criminal code for the District of Columbia that would have reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses while increasing them for others.

The president threatened to veto it, Mr. McCarthy said, but we did it anyway, and we stopped him and it became law.

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House Dysfunction by the Numbers: 724 Votes, Only 27 Laws Enacted - The New York Times

It may take weeks to find out whether the decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to declare Donald J. Trump ineligible to be on the state primary ballot will hold.

But its short-term political impact was clear by the time Mr. Trump stepped off a stage on Tuesday night in Iowa, where he learned of the ruling shortly before a scheduled campaign rally began.

Allies of the former president posted on social media that the ruling was an outrage, one that the U.S. Supreme Court needed to rectify.

Colorados top court found that Mr. Trump had incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and should be barred from the ballot under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Trump could remain on the ballot regardless the Colorado justices put their ruling on hold as appeals are likely to proceed but Mr. Trumps team was hardly dwelling on that detail.

Even if Mr. Trump remains on the ballot, any court having said that Mr. Trump incited an insurrection will be used against him in a general election, in ways his advisers know could be damaging. But the Republican primary is different. Officials with Mr. Trumps rival G.O.P. campaigns privately feared that the decision would be seen as an overreach by Democrats, one that could bolster his current lead among Republicans in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, and in the primaries immediately after.

For years, events that would thwart other politicians have at best slowed Mr. Trumps forward motion, with the prominent exception of his loss in the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Throughout 2023, Mr. Trump has exploited as political fodder events that would have sunk other candidates such as being indicted four times, on 91 felony charges with a Republican electorate that has been told Democrats are threatening their way of life.

Since March, Mr. Trump has perfected a playbook of victimhood, raising campaign funds off each indictment and encouraging Republican officials to defend him. Many including some who are fearful of Mr. Trumps hold on the partys core voters have obliged.

Democrats and the comparatively few Republicans who want to see Mr. Trump stopped have described his criminal legal travails as of his own making, and tried to highlight the details of the crimes he is accused of committing. They vary widely and include charges he conspired to defraud the United States with months of election lies aimed at subverting the transfer of power as well as charges stemming from mishandling classified documents.

But Mr. Trump has repeatedly collapsed all those cases into what he has called a witch hunt, one aimed at stopping his candidacy as opposed to holding him accountable. He and his allies are already folding the Colorado ruling into that same narrative.

Mr. Trump who rose in politics in 2011 fanning a fringe lie that President Obama, the first Black U.S. president, may not have been eligible to serve now finds himself contending with his own eligibility to hold office from the fallout of his actions after he lost in 2020. But while most Republicans rejected his lies about Mr. Obama, a large number are backing Mr. Trumps claim of being wronged.

Even people who dislike Mr. Trump intensely feared the ruling to toss him off the ballot will merely help him with a Republican electorate that will see it as interfering with an election, at a time when Mr. Trump is regularly described by Democrats as a threat to democracy.

This vindicates his insistence that this is a political conspiracy to interfere with the election, Ty Cobb, who worked as a lawyer in the Trump White House and who has since condemned his behavior, told CNN. Thats the way he tries to sell this, added Mr. Cobb, who mocked that claim of a broad conspiracy but nonetheless predicted the U.S. Supreme Court might unanimously overturn the Colorado ruling.

Mr. Trumps campaign emailed out that portion of the interview.

REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT FIGHT BACK! was the subject line of a second fund-raising email from Mr. Trump later in the night.

Mr. Trump said nothing about the ruling at his Iowa rally, as Republicans filled the void for him. His Republican opponents the few who remain from a once-crowded field once again were left having to walk a line around the man theyre trying to beat.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is mocked daily by Mr. Trumps team for his footwear and who has struggled to replace the former president as the new generation of the MAGA movement, may as well have been articulating Mr. Trumps own defense in his statement.

The Left invokes democracy to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse, Mr. DeSantis wrote in a social media post.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey whose core message has been that Mr. Trump is unfit for office, said that voters, not the courts, should decide whether he is president. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has made significant gains in recent polling, made a similar statement.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the most vocally pro-Trump of any of the candidates this cycle, said he would withdraw from the Colorado ballot unless Mr. Trump is restored.

Mr. Trumps team is confident such a restoration will happen. Privately, several of his advisers agreed with Mr. Cobbs assessment that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up his appeal and side with him. It remains to be seen if that happens, or if the justices decide to let the ruling stand. If they do the latter, similar lawsuits would most likely be filed in other states, although a number of 14th Amendment suits have already failed elsewhere.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, Mr. Trumps team, which was surprised by the Tuesday ruling, made quick work of trying to turn it into another galvanizing moment of victimhood. Their approach echoed something Mr. Trumps oldest mentor, the ruthless lawyer and fixer Roy M. Cohn, who battled prosecutors himself, once said.

I bring out the worst in my enemies, Mr. Cohn once told the columnist William Safire, and thats how I get them to defeat themselves.

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Indicted or Barred From the Ballot: For Trump, Bad News Cements Support - The New York Times

A California Republican candidate for Congress is demanding that the state add the term "MAGA Conservative" to the ballot ahead of the primary election.

Chris Mathys, a Republican candidate for California's 22nd Congressional District filed a lawsuit this month against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber for rejecting a request that the terms "MAGA Conservative" and "MAGA Conservative Republican" be added to the state's ballot as a designation for candidates like Mathys.

"I am looking forward to my day in court. My campaign believes that the best description of who I am and what I do is "MAGA Conservative," Mathys said in a statement obtained by Newsweek. "We believe that our request is on par with other terms used by candidates before us. The First Amendment guarantees freedom concerning expression and the right to petition."

Supporters of the MAGA, Make America Great Again, movement have continued to gain popularity. The slogan was coined by former President Donald Trump, and many of his staunch supporters, such as Republican Representatives Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, are seen as members of the movement.

In April, a poll conducted by NBC News found that 52 percent of Republicans said that they view the MAGA movement positively. However, among all respondents, only 24 percent viewed the MAGA movement as positive and 45 percent viewed it as negative.

According to a complaint viewed by Newsweek, Mathys first made the request to add the terms to the state's ballot in November, but it was denied by Weber, who explained state law in a letter.

"The designations 'MAGA Conservative Republican' and 'MAGA Conservative' do not constitute a current profession, vocation, or occupation," Weber said.

Shortly after the letter from Weber, Mathys filed a lawsuit saying that his self-identification as a "MAGA Conservative" and "MAGA Conservative Republican" should be left to voters and that "it is not different than the terms incumbent/businessman or legislator/attorney, those are also adjectives followed by a noun."

Mathys also said in the complaint that the denial by Weber is a violation of his First Amendment rights "when they unilaterally reject a candidate's description of who he or she is or how he or she describes themselves."

In response, Weber filed a court document reviewed by Newsweek saying that the terms that Mathys wants added are not allowed under California law.

One portion of the document stated that "the designation 'MAGA' is understood in the present context as an acronym for 'Make America Great Again' which is a trademarked campaign slogan...and is therefore prohibited as a ballot designation under California Code of Regulations section 20716(d)."

Mathys is running against incumbent Republican Representative David Valadao. State Senator Melissa Hurtado and former Assemblyman Rudy Salas, both Democrats, are also running. According to the statement obtained by Newsweek, Mathys is scheduled to appear in court for his lawsuit on Friday.

Newsweek reached out to Mathys and Weber's office via email for comment.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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Republican Demands 'MAGA' Be Added to California Ballot - Newsweek

Former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday defended six Nevada Republicans who were recently indicted in connection with a scheme to overturn his 2020 election loss, claiming without evidence that they were victims of political persecution by the Biden administration.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly rebuffed accusations this month that he has antidemocratic inclinations by pointing his finger at President Biden. He often claims without evidence that Mr. Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election.

At a campaign event on Sunday in Reno, Mr. Trump sharpened that attack by pointing to the indictment this month in state court of six members of Nevadas Republican Party who had acted as fake electors in a scheme intended to overturn Mr. Bidens 2020 victory. Those charged in the case, which was brought by Nevadas attorney general, included Michael J. McDonald, the state partys chairman.

Theyre a bunch of dirty players, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Biden and Democrats. Look at what theyre doing right here to Michael and great people in this state. Its a disgrace.

Mr. Trumps comments in Nevada, which is expected to be a crucial battleground state, are among the many ways he has sought to question the integrity of the election process and to raise doubts about results he opposes.

The former president, who also faces charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him. And he broadly accused Democrats of cheating in elections, without evidence.

Both parties are eyeing Nevada next year, when a Senate seat will also be on the ballot. The state has voted for Democratic presidents consistently since 2008, but other races have been more competitive. A poll released last month by The New York Times and Siena College found that Mr. Trump was leading Mr. Biden in Nevada by 10 points.

Still, Republican primary candidates have not campaigned much in the state, where Mr. Trump remains dominant in polls, and where the party-run caucus has adopted rules expected to tilt the outcome in his favor.

Mr. Trumps speech in Reno focused heavily on Mr. Biden, offering a possible preview of attacks he may wield if he wins the Republican nomination and the two face off next fall.

As he conjured up a dark vision of America plagued by crime and overrun by violent and mentally ill immigrants, his campaign displayed a new slogan, Safer With Trump, on screens around him. (His campaign has unveiled a similar message, Better Off With Trump, with regards to the economy.)

As he often does at rallies, Mr. Trump asserted that leaders of unspecified countries were releasing patients from insane asylums and sending them to the United States. Fact checkers have found no evidence, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibal and serial killer.

Thats what we got, Mr. Trump said of Lecter. Weve got him coming in. And this is not good. Thats like an explosion waiting to happen.

Mr. Trumps anti-immigrant rhetoric has grown more severe as he campaigns for the third time. In New Hampshire on Saturday, he told the crowd that immigrants were poisoning the blood of our country, a comment that previously drew condemnation because of echoes to language used by white supremacists and Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Trumps stop in Reno was part of an unusually busy campaign schedule in which he gave speeches in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada the first three nominating states in five days. He is scheduled to return to Iowa on Tuesday.

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Trump Defends 6 Republicans Charged in Scheme to Overturn His 2020 Loss - The New York Times

The question of whether Donald Trump is eligible to appear on Marylands Republican primary ballot is under consideration by the secretary of state, her office said Wednesday, one day after a Colorado court disqualified the former president from that states election.

Maryland Secretary of State Susan Lee, a Democratic former state delegate and senator from Montgomery County, has wide latitude under Maryland law to determine who is recognized as a legitimate candidate. She was appointed secretary in January by first-year Democratic Gov. Wes Moore.

Marylands primary is May 14, and the secretary must have the presidential primary ballot finalized by Jan. 22. Thats the deadline for the secretary of state to give me a letter to provide the State Board of Elections with Democratic and Republican candidates for the primary, said Jared DeMarinis, Marylands elections administrator.

Maryland election law says it is in the Secretarys sole discretion to determine, within party rules, whether a candidate is generally advocated or recognized and can be on the ballot.

A presidential candidate may also become eligible by submitting a petition with the signatures of at least 400 registered voters from each congressional district.

Trump, a Republican who lost his reelection bid for the presidency in 2020, is the leading contender for the GOP nomination next year.

In a 4-3 opinion, Colorados Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Trump is ineligible under a section of the 14th Amendment, Section 3, barring people who engaged in insurrection from becoming candidates. The section says candidates who took an oath to support the Constitution will be ineligible if they shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

In the ruling, which is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the judges had to first consider whether Trump engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as the 2020 presidential election vote count was being finalized. Then the judges in the majority determined the amendment applied and state law barred him from the ballot.

The Supreme Court, as it should, will reject all these challenges, Maryland Republican Party Chairwoman Nicole Beus Harris said in a prepared statement Wednesday. The people have the right to decide, not a small group of biased judges.

Lees office hasreceived emails or letters from about 100 members of the general public on the general topic of keeping Donald Trump off the ballot, her office said in a Dec. 6 reply to a Public Information Act request filed by The Baltimore Sun.

The office confirmed in a November email and again Wednesday that the issue is under consideration by the secretary.

Lee was not available to be interviewed Wednesday, and DeMarinis said it would it be inappropriate for him to comment on how or whether the 14th amendment provision would figure in her decision.

The Colorado suit was filed in Denver in September by a group of Colorado Republican and independent voters assisted by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

According to The Associated Press, dozens of lawsuits challenging Trumps eligibility on similar grounds have been filed in several states, with no others succeeding so far. Among other cases with significant backing, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in November that Trump could remain on the ballot there because political parties have discretion over their primary ballots. And, AP reported, a Michigan judge has ruled that Congress should decide if Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump. That ruling was appealed Monday.

In its response to The Sun, Lees office declined to release five internal documents on grounds that they were privileged.

It did release correspondence from people writing, often passionately, urging Lee not to permit Trumps name to appear on the ballot.

Trump is an existential threat to our Democracy and must not serve in any elected capacity, wrote one Marylander on Aug. 29. Names of the writers were redacted.

We are aware of this issue, a Lee representative wrote back, thanking the Marylander for your thoughts on the matter.

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Will Donald Trump be on Maryland primary ballots in 2024? Secretary of state has broad discretion - Baltimore Sun