Fox News Host's Bleak View of House Republicans: 'Disaster'

Fox News host Trey Gowdy said some choice words about House Republicans while interviewing political consultant Karl Rove on Sunday.

Republican lawmakers have raised eyebrows ever since the party narrowly flipped the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections. The GOP lawmakers have found little to agree on since they took control of the House, starting their tenures with a tumultuous House Speaker vote that eventually saw Kevin McCarthy's election as speaker and his subsequent downfall nine months later.

Republicans have since elected Rep. Mike Johnson as speaker of the House, and Johnson's influence on rallying the party before next year's elections remains to be seen.

The GOP lawmakers hope to flip the Senate in 2024 while maintaining control of the House, giving them the majority in both congressional chambers, but Gowdy questioned the achievability of this goal on Sunday, when he discussed the state of House Republicans with Rove, a Fox News contributor.

"The House, my old stomping grounds, has been a disaster as of late," said Gowdy, who served as the U.S. representative for South Carolina's fourth congressional district from 2011 to 2019. "They replaced a speaker out of personal spite. They cannot even bring a Republican bill to the floor. Will there be a residue from that come next fall, or will it not matter in a year?"

Rove said the Republican outcome of next year's elections depends entirely on how the party acts in the next 12 months. However, if infighting continues, it might face a tougher challenge.

"It depends on what happens between now and then," Rove said. "If we keep doing what we're doing in the House, then it will matter. Republicans in the House have made their chances of keeping the majority more difficult by how they've acted, and a small group has continued to basically block the ability of the House of Representatives to advance a broad, optimistic, upbeat agenda that causes them to say 'well, this is what I'm for.'"

Newsweek has reached out to Rove and Johnson's press director via email for comment.

In 2024, each one of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be up for election, given the 2-year terms. In 2022, Republicans gained a 222-213 majority over the Democrats, although the outcome of the midterm elections was not the "red wave" that many Republicans predicted.

There are 33 of the U.S. Senate's 100 seats up for election in 2024, 10 of which are held by Republicans, three by independents who caucus with Democrats and 20 seats are held by Democrats. There also is a special election to fill Republican Ben Sasse's seat. U.S. senators serve 6-year terms.