House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shouldn't be claiming victory in the House when she lost more than half of her majority in the November election, Darrell Issa, who is returning to the chamber after his election in California, said Monday.
"Out here in California, surfers would say that the wave ate them; they didn't eat the wave," the Republican lawmaker said on Fox News' "Fox & Friends."
Issa served for two decades in Congress before deciding not to seek reelection in 2018. He said Monday he thinks Pelosi's predictions of a blue wave did not happen because of the far-left stance of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the speaker's "out of favor" policies.
Meanwhile, he said that President Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party to make it more sensitive to blue-collar workers and has "created an opportunity for us to make real inroads with what used to be considered the union household."
"In fact, the Republicans have stood with Trump to reach out and give the working man the advantage, if you will, [against] the global corporations," said Issa.
But even though Issa is returning to a House that could have 212 or 213 Republicans, there is still "a lot of room to grow," said Issa.
"There are still more than 15 districts that President Trump won that are occupied by Democrats," said Issa. "In the next two years between special elections and the continued diligence of the Republican team in the House, my expectation is that we will narrow that gap even more."
Issa noted that he has served as a representative before when the president or the Senate are from the party not held by the House, and in that situation, there must be a better job done of making sure bipartisan legislation is created.
"My Oversight Committee had 36 bills signed by President [Barack] Obama," he said. "He signed it when it was overwhelmingly bipartisan. And that's what the Democrats have to learn. They didn't learn it the last two years. The last two years clearly had a lot of partisan bills that were for show, and they went normally nowhere in the Senate because they basically passed out of a straight party line."