The 118th Congress — marked less by legislation and more by the challenges Republicans faced in electing a speaker and then replacing him — was not a particularly productive session. Republicans themselves have admitted it, and now Democrats are attacking them for it.
In a new digital campaign called “USELESS,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is launching a series of ads Tuesday in which they intend to highlight the failures of the Republican-controlled House.
In a preview of the campaign shared exclusively with NOTUS, Democrats plan to call the current Congress “the most unproductive Congress in nearly a century.”
The campaign will feature a website that targets vulnerable GOP incumbents, highlighted burn book-style, with rotating photos of different legislators and a comparison to the accomplishments of the past Democrat-controlled House, which the DCCC says passed 117 more pieces of legislation.
“House Republicans have wasted their majority with chaos and dysfunction, and the public is tired of it,” DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton said in a statement. “In a word, they’re ‘useless.’”
Of course, up until this moment, it hasn’t been Democrats making this case.
Republican Rep. Chip Roy famously took to the House floor at the end of last year to implore his GOP colleagues to give him “one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did.”
“Explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done,” Roy thundered.
More recently, other Republicans have told NOTUS that there’s “a lot that we’ve left on the field.”
“On every significant piece of legislation, we have surrendered to the White House and to the Democrat-controlled Senate,” Rep. Bob Good of Virginia told NOTUS.
“I don’t think there’s been a lot of accomplishments,” Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona also said.
Those comments could now come back to bite Republicans, who have fueled the impression that the GOP majority is dysfunctional.
Although Democrats aren’t putting money behind actual TV ads, the new digital campaign features branding and messaging that can be used by campaigns going into election season, as well as “microsites” that target individual lawmakers.
“While Republicans wasted time fighting amongst themselves, threatened shutdowns, and pushed an extreme, unpopular Project 2025 agenda, Democrats invested in infrastructure, expanding veterans benefits, lowering prescription drug costs, and manufacturing jobs,” a release from the DCCC said.
Meanwhile, the National Republican Campaign Committee wasn’t impressed with the DCCC blaming the GOP for a lack of productivity — or putting hardly any money behind a campaign to blame Republicans for the dysfunction.
“Extreme House Democrats sent inflation skyrocketing and opened the border; having no solutions to the problems they created, they are scrambling to find a message with an unpaid microsite a month until Election Day,” NRCC press secretary Will Reinert said. “It’s a bold choice to place a microscope on Democrats’ repeated refusal to join Republican-passed bills to secure the border, unleash energy production, and bring down costs.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.