This week, Punchbowl News ran with bold supposition. Republicans may be in control of one legislative chamber, albeit narrowly, but the “big winner” of the 118th Congress is Joe Biden. “On government funding, on FISA, and now on Ukraine and Israel, Biden got what he wanted,” the article maintains.

If Democrats don’t precisely subscribe to the outlook of Punchbowl’s reporters, the fatalists within the Republican conference likely do. The GOP tugged on the thread indicative of illegality in the Biden family and came up with evidence insufficient to impeach the president. The effort to oust Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas fizzled. The Republican Party in Congress is a fractious mess, unable to present a coherent opposition to Democrats on a host of issues. No one managed to shut down the government. And atop it all, the House passed bills providing material support to its partners abroad while rebuilding the domestic defense industrial base. In a narrow sense, the GOP did fail to meet its self-set expectations.

But the fatalistic argument runs around within the exploration of Punchbowl’s own hypothesis. “Biden gave a bit,” it conceded, in negotiations against the House GOP then led by former speaker Kevin McCarthy over a debt limit increase in 2023. And in the end, the very act of raising the debt limit cost McCarthy his speakership. If that was Biden’s win, however, it wasn’t one he set out to achieve. Rather, McCarthy argued the president into accepting work requirements for eligible, able-bodied recipients of federal relief requirements, the reclamation of unspent Covid aid, and the paring back of some provisions in what Democrats called the “Inflation Reduction Act,” including the expansion of the IRS. If that’s a “win” for Biden, you have to squint to see it.

The very fact of the 118th Congress’s partisan makeup following the GOP’s victories at the House level constitutes a disaster for Joe Biden’s agenda, as any progressive will freely admit. Despite the hyperactivity of its Democrat-led predecessor, the last Congress couldn’t pass progressive priorities like permitting reform designed to advance Biden’s “green agenda,” lifting the state and local tax deduction caps in the 2017 tax-code reform bill, expanding the Child Tax Credit, or the $4 trillion suite of left-wing desiderata packaged as the “Build Back Better” initiative. No wins to be found here.

Punchbowl lacquers a rosy gloss onto the failure of the Senate supplemental that would have appropriated support for America’s partners abroad while also providing additional funding for border security and amending immigration statutes to strengthen enforcement provisions. Whatever anyone thinks of the immigration side of that bill, its failure is not a win for Biden, who supported its passage. As a political narrative, the White House wasn’t even coy in its intention to argue after its passage that the GOP would own at least some of the border crisis over which he has presided.

Democrats have tried to make the most of that failure, contending that the GOP wants to preserve the crisis for political reasons. But there’s no indication in the polling around the migrant crisis that voters are buying that spin. If the bill’s failure provided “some political space for Biden and Democrats” on the border, we wouldn’t see the president semi-regularly broadcast his intention to use his existing powers to restore order to the U.S. side of the Rio Grande. We see no evidence of “space” here. Rather, Biden is boxed in by his own policy preferences.

The list goes on. The Senate GOP blocked a Democratic effort to swap out the late Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee with Senator Ben Cardin to ensure the swift confirmation of Biden’s justices. No win there.

The House passed and compelled Democrats in the Senate to affirm a bill overturning a D.C. crime bill that would have codified the District’s lax enforcement of criminal law. The shifting politics on that issue compelled the president to reverse his opposition to congressional intervention into D.C. politics, leading his fellow Democrats to complain that Biden had “f***ed this up royally.” Nothing to crow about there either.

Joe Biden was even compelled to wield his veto pen for the first time in his presidency to block the implementation of a bill that would have prevented pension managers from substituting their fiduciary responsibility to investors with progressive investing sensibilities — so-called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. Where are Joe Biden’s laurels?

The most receptive audience to Punchbowl’s dubious framing here will be the Republicans Joe Biden supposedly rolled. After all, it advances the fashionable narrative that Republicans only ever lose. Those on the right who promulgate this framing of events are richly rewarded, either by their despairing audiences or the eager Republican donors who imbibe pessimism like water. But Punchbowl’s retelling of how Congress exposed its belly to Biden is a selective interpretation of the facts. Indeed, the news hook that led the item revolves around a series of foreign-aid bills, all of which save Ukraine passed with the support of a majority of the Republican conference. Even the Ukraine bill that passed the House split the GOP almost down the middle, with 102 yeas and 112 nays.

If this is all that constitutes a series of legislative victories for Joe Biden, it certainly explains why Democrats seem so profoundly unsatisfied with them.