Welcome back to The Red Letter.
Today we’re looking at a Congress that has all the power in the world and almost nothing to show for it. Only about 5 percent of the bills introduced this year have even made it to a floor vote. Five percent. That’s not gridlock, that’s paralysis.
And here’s a truth one Republican, Nancy Mace, was willing to say in the New York Times, of all places, Nancy Pelosi was a more effective House speaker than any Republican this century. Meanwhile, today’s Republican majority controls the House, the Senate, and the White House… and still has no real governing victories to point to.
But this story gets even more revealing when you look at it through the lens of gender. Republicans love putting women in the spotlight but what they’re offering is usually tokenism, not power. As Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times, the party valorizes a very specific kind of woman: someone who rejects feminism and proves, by simply surviving the men around her, that no one needs it.
And yet the women who do speak up, like Marjorie Taylor Greene who called out the “good old boys club” to congresswomen iced out of key roles, all describe the same dynamic: Republicans like having women around, especially beautiful ones, as long as they smile, clap, and don’t disrupt the patriarchy driving the agenda.
It’s a party that doesn’t just sideline women, it increasingly mocks the idea that women deserve political power at all. We’ve seen attacks on women without children and even fringe voices questioning whether women should vote. It’s not subtle.
So today, with so much at stake like border security, affordability, health care and basic governance the question is whether this Congress is failing because Republicans can’t lead… or because they don’t want women to.
Steve Schmidt joins me to break it all down: the dysfunction, the gender politics, and what it means for a party that has the power to govern and is choosing not to.
Stick around until the end, when I get a little emotional talking about how one of the most important people in my life taught me to focus on the people without voices in my reporting.
Thank you Cat, Ira Krakow, Social SLP, John H, P. J. Schuster, and many others for tuning into my live video with Steve Schmidt! Join me for my next live video in the app.
