For the first time since 2005, the Republican party has a majority in both houses of Congress. With 54 seats in the Senate and 247 seats in the House, the onus is on the GOP to show that it can govern effectively over the next two years to win over the mandate of the people. Three months into its congressional reign, things aren’t exactly going as planned.

Things got off to a rocky start all the way back in January in the House of Representatives. The Republicans have controlled this body since 2011, and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) has led his party as the Speaker of the House since that time. This year, however, despite the Republicans holding the most seats in the House since 1928, Speaker Boehner encountered the strongest opposition to any Speaker since Joseph Martin in 1947; though he received 216 votes, enough to be reelected, 25 members of his own party voted against him.

Many hard-line conservatives in the House have been angered by Boehner’s apparent lack of aggression in trying to take down what, in their eyes, is executive overreach from President Obama in both the Affordable Care Act and his executive action on immigration. Party infighting thus led to the attack on Boehner, and his position has been nearly untenable since.

Despite that difficulty in the House, the majority of the GOP’s blunders have come in the Senate. While the Republicans have maintained their majority in the House for a few years now, taking a four seat lead in the Senate really put the ball into their court to make some serious legislative moves and show their ability to govern. To lead this charge, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was named the new Majority Leader, and the long-serving Kentuckian made promises of freer debate and conservative lawmaking.

First up on the Senate agenda was the Keystone XL pipeline.

“It’s a shovel-ready jobs project that would help thousands of Americans find work,” McConnell told POLITICO in an interview on Feb. 14. “It would increase our supply of North American energy. And it would do all that with minimal net climate impact.”

What McConnell failed to mention was that barely 5,000 new jobs would be created in construction, according to the Department of Labor, and that there could be serious environmental issues that could arise from building such a pipeline. On these grounds, President Obama vetoed the bill that the Republicans had passed on Feb. 25, kicking the 114th Congress off with confrontation and stalemate.

Apparently undeterred by this early bump in the road, congressional Republicans pushed on with their anti-Obama rhetoric and started anew to pass an important bill. The GOP then tackled President Obama’s executive action on immigration via the Department of Homeland Security funding bill. The Republicans inserted measures to the funding bill that stripped all the moves the president had made back in November out of money, and the legislation was quickly passed in the House. The Senate Democrats, however, did not roll over quite as easily.

Unable to gain the 60 votes needed for a cloture rule to stop a Democratic filibuster, Majority Leader McConnell was told that the bill would not go through unless it was clean. More infighting among the Republican leadership ensued as Boehner and McConnell took turns pointing fingers at each other, further highlighting the lack of coordination in the party and nearly shutting down the DHS. At the final moment, the GOP was repulsed yet again in their efforts as they were forced to pass a clean funding bill and had their language on stopping the immigration reform stopped in its development.

The latest example of the Republican failure to govern comes in the form of a trifecta of offenses against women. In a widely bipartisan bill that created a restitution fund for human trafficking victims, the GOP quietly slipped in the infamous Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funds from being used for abortions. When the Democrats found out about this, yet another storm broke loose on the Hill.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) commented to NPR on Mar. 16 about the Republican party.

“They still think they’re in the minority, and they’re putting their own poison pills in their own bill,” Schumer said.

The insertion of major conservative beliefs into otherwise supported legislation seems to be a favorite tactic of the right in an attempt to force the hand of the Democrats, but so far it has failed and it seems now as though McConnell will fall short yet again in this endeavor.

However, this latest problem doesn’t end with just playing politics with trafficking victims and endangering the safety and rights of women across the country. Sen. McConnell has announced that the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as the new attorney general will not go through until this problem is resolved. Lynch, who would be the first African-American woman AG, has waited 156 days since President Obama nominated her for the position, longer than all five previous attorney generals waited combined. Despite no actual concerns from the right on Lynch’s credentials, her confirmation has been delayed time and time again so that the GOP can continue playing politics instead of trying to lead the country.

These various cases of conservative brinkmanship and putting poison riders onto otherwise bipartisan legislation have only served to chip away at the Republicans’ credibility. Many Republican congressman won office with strong anti-Obama campaigns and obstructionist promises against their liberal enemies. If those men and women want to keep their majority on the Hill, however, they need to walk away from their polarizing strategy and must start to work on passing plausible laws.

When the Republicans stormed their way into a majority in both the House and Senate, they promised change. They claimed the mandate of the people, but knew that unless they proved that they had the ability to unite a fragmented party and to get things done, that majority would be in serious danger in 2016. The 114th Congress may only be three months in, but so far, things aren’t looking bright for the GOP.