Lawmakers returned to Capitol Hill Monday night after a nearly six-week hiatus on the campaign trail. Hours after House Republicans confirmed Jim Jordan as minority speaker and Senate Republicans re-elected John Thune as minority leader, the mood among returning House members was unmistakable: fed up with a midterm loss that followed two years of holding the levers and still failing to deliver on the issues that mattered most.
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In an exclusive interview with The Gateway Pundit, one of the few House Republicans who won re-election made clear the problem was not limited to the other party.
“We are sending legislation over to the Senate to die,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-TN, said. “I think somebody like myself would have the opportunity to stop something procedurally because of the spending, or if it was this Democratic Socialist movement is pushing through the legislation through. I try to stop it, regardless of what leadership said. We’re going to lose our country, and we need to address some of these things.”
Asked about the absence of the results of the SAVE America Act and DOJ reform after years of Democrat control, Burchett said Republicans campaign on fighting the weaponization and then refuse to act when they hold power.
“I think it’s the people we’re electing are gutless,” he said. “I really do. They have no guts.”
The environment after the contested 2020 election was unlike anything conservatives had faced. Democrats held the White House, the Senate, and the House. The Justice Department and FBI pursued Trump associates, Republican lawmakers, and private citizens with tools that had rarely been aimed at the political opposition.
Parents who spoke at school board meetings were flagged. Pro-life activists and Christians praying outside abortion clinics were raided. January 6 defendants, many charged for non-violent conduct, received sentences that sent a clear message about the cost of protesting.
Big Tech systemically banned accounts and removed content that questioned official narratives on the election, COVID policy, and public health. Intelligence and law-enforcement resources were directed at American citizens at a scale that fueled backlash, including among some lifelong Democrats who later voted for Trump or left the party.
Trump himself faced nearly 90 felony charges across four separate indictments after the August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, including the classified-documents case that grew out of that search. The charges turned the legal system into the central battleground of the 2024 election.
Republicans later won the White House, the House and the Senate, taking full control of the federal government. The SAVE America Act, requiring proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote, passed the House at least three times. It repeatedly died in the Senate. More than 10 million border encounters and roughly 2 million known gotaways were recorded under the Biden administration.
President Trump said after the midterms that “the Senate is killing our country” and that bills are sent there “when you want it to die.”
President Trump: “The Senate has to act. The Senate is getting nothing passed and it’s just killing our country…The Senate is killing our country. Nothing is getting through the Senate. Our voters saw that, and that’s one of the problems we had, in my opinion, the biggest.” https://t.co/fX26CnR0Xd
— CSPAN (@cspan) November 7, 2026
Burchett pointed to other failures that contributed to the midterm losses. He said Republicans could have addressed fuel prices amid new supply and record profits for oil companies.
He also criticized the watered-down stock-trading bill that passed instead of the stricter measures he and Rep. Anna Luna had advanced.
“They don’t trust us because of the stock trading bill,” Burchett said. “We passed a very watered-down bill. They should have passed a bill that Luna and I worked on. Basically, you just can’t own stocks, individual stocks. You have to put on a mutual fund, and that’s what I do.”
Members of Congress can still buy and sell individual stocks while they sit in closed briefings and vote on legislation that moves those same stocks. Burchett and Rep. Anna Luna, R-Fl., pushed a bill that would have banned members and their families from owning individual stocks and forced them into mutual funds.
The House passed a weaker bill that left individual stock ownership in place. It died in the Senate. Voters see members writing the rules that affect companies, then trading those companies’ stocks. Burchett says the failure to pass a real ban is one reason the party lost trust and seats.
He dismissed the argument that the Iran conflict was a primary cause of inflation, noting the United States does not import oil through the Strait of Hormuz and that companies still posted record profits.
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Democrats use the full power of the federal government against their political opposition. When Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate, they still can not pass core election integrity legislation to prevent another 2020 or a real ban on members trading individual stocks.
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