Republicans Ran a Dysfunctional House. Voters Shrugged and Re-elected Them.

A historically long and divisive fight to choose one speaker.A near default on the federal debt, followed by a mutiny on the House floor and multiple government shutdown scares.

The ouster of the speaker, followed by weeks of paralysis and another vicious fight over who should lead next.For almost two years, House Republicans have barely been able to overcome their own intraparty feuding to keep the government functioning.But despite it all, they emerged on Wednesday night, when The Associated Press declared that Republicans had effectively won control of the House, with a wafer-thin majority almost identical to the one they have now.The apparent success of their battle to keep control of the House of Representatives suggests that they paid little political price for the chaos and dysfunction they presided over, a period when Congress struggled to carry out even the basics of governing.And it suggests that members of both parties overestimated how much voters would judge them by their job performance.In January, House Republicans will be part of a governing trifecta led by President Donald J.

Trump and helped along by a Republican-led Senate.That poses its own perils for the G.O.P., which is still operating with a punishingly small margin in the House, and will now be expected to produce major legislative results as a result of its unified power.But the lesson of the past two years, said Brendan Buck, who served as a top adviser to two Republican speakers, may be that in Congress, “it’s riskier to do big things than to do nothing at all.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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