John Boehner and Eric Cantor are the new sherrifs in town, but their first week leading the House didn't go off without a few hitches. GOP finds governing isn't easy

Speaker John Boehner and House Republicans celebrated a historic return to power this week, promising to slash spending, reform Congress and keep in mind that they can be yanked back out of office if they fall out of touch with the public.

They also learned just how tough it is to run the House.


From the substantive to the absurd, the opening week of the 112th Congress provided GOP leaders a series of object lessons in the difficulty of getting all 242 members of their majority marching in the same direction at any given time.

First, there was an epic opening-eve freshman fundraiser hosted by Rep.-elect Jeff Denham that featured the country music stylings of Lee Ann Rimes and a rare invitation to the press to attend and report on the event at the high end W hotel. The bash clashed with the image Republicans have worked to construct of citizen-legislators cleaning up the profligate ways of Washington.

Next came the Republican rank-and-file’s outright rejection — by voice vote — of a draft rule that would have publicized the committee attendance records of members of Congress. It turns out that folks who are on the hook for raising money, meeting with constituents and lobbyists, holding press conferences and serving on multiple committees weren’t too thrilled with the idea that potential political rivals of either party could throw a few missed hearings in their faces on the campaign trail.

When it came to the health care law repeal, a promise to send bills through the committee process before bringing them to the floor was swept aside. Of course, lawmakers spent much of the last Congress debating that law — and the bill’s just two pages long — but critics noted that it’s hard to keep a promise to put bills through committee if they’re scheduled for floor action before the committees are constituted.

In another challenging moment, Republican aides went scrambling for calculators when it was pointed out that they would fall far short of the $100 billion in savings the GOP promised in the Pledge.

Perhaps most embarrassing to the new majority, the first several votes of Reps. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) had to be nullified because the two failed to attend the House’s opening-day swearing-in ceremony and cast votes despite not yet being members of the 112th Congress. Democrats declined to let them handle the fix quickly, forcing an actual floor vote on subtracting their votes from past roll calls but blessing their other legislative activities, including Sessions’ introduction of several bills when he wasn’t actually a lawmaker yet.

Republicans took a few hits from both sides for not living up to the letter of every promise.

“What a week it’s been. Since we’ve been sworn in, the Republican broken promises have been dizzying,” Rep. Louise Slaughter, the Democratic leader on the House Rules Committee, said on the floor Friday.

“I actually don’t think it would be possible to fall from grace any faster than this,” Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots told the Daily Caller when the $100 billion figure had to be re-tabulated.

The first-week miscues did little to distract from Boehner’s themes of austerity and humility, nor did they dampen the GOP’s joie de vivre. But they added up to an important reminder that governing isn’t as easy as it looks — and that mistakes will be magnified as the new majority comes under scrutiny.

“Every once in a while things are going to fall through the cracks,” said Jack Howard, who worked for speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert. “The real trick is how you bounce back. You can’t let it stop you, you can’t let it slow you. You’ve got to keep moving forward. It’s like ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!’”

Howard, who now works at the lobbying firm Wexler and Walker, said Boehner and company not only averted debilitating debacles but staged the first week as well as they could have hoped.

“The Boehner people orchestrated about as good an opening day ceremony as I’ve ever seen,” he said, rating “the events, the messages, the tone” as “pitch perfect.”

Indeed, the lion’s share of major media coverage of the first week of Republican rule in four years was largely positive.

Still, Democrats, re-acclimating themselves to minority status, were quick to point out each time Republicans broke from their own standards.

When Republicans asked the House to ratify a resolution “fixing” the unconstitutional votes of Sessions and Fitzpatrick by dropping them from the official tallies — a resolution unveiled the day after the new Republican majority led a reading of the Constitution on the very same floor — Democrats used the moment to excoriate the GOP from going back on promises to run the House in a more transparent fashion and for not living up to the requirements of the founding document.

“What we’re dealing with today is perhaps the most basic test that we have of whether we’re going to take legislation seriously,” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said during debate on the resolution. “For the first time in American history, the first time in the history of this body, we are going to pass a fix of a constitutional infirmity with — wait for it — four minutes of debate, when we didn’t have the bill until just now, and I strongly urge my colleagues to think about the precedent this sets.”

The resolution referred to the votes of Sessions and Fitzpatrick on roll calls three through eight of the first session of the 112th Congress as “nullities.” It was adopted, 257-159, with 27 Democrats and all of the Republicans who voted supporting it. Sessions and Fitzpatrick both voted “present” — and now, officially, they’re accounted for in the record.