📝 The Readback: A high stakes Senate pro forma

IN THIS EDITION

A notable Senate pro forma session

The fog of tech policy

Ode to the August happy hour

Vote for your favorite scoop

THE TOP

A notable Senate pro forma session

Welcome to The Readback, our weekend digest featuring the best of Punchbowl News this week – a quick roundup of all our scoops, analysis and Capitol Hill insight you won’t find anywhere else. We’ve also included a few of our favorite outside reads from the week.

The Capitol was pretty empty on Tuesday. Both chambers were in recess. Many staffers, members and reporters were on vacation. The constant stream of tourists felt like a trickle.

It was quiet. All except for Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), the man standing in the way of President Donald Trump’s plans for recess appointments.

OK, I’m exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect. This wasn’t Rounds’ decision alone, but rather a pre-agreed upon leadership call.

The affable South Dakota Republican just happened to be the chosen senator to oversee the Senate’s first pro forma session since the chamber adjourned for August recess.

If you recall, the Senate sparred last week on how to break the substantial logjam of nominees that built up over the past few months. Trump wasn’t pleased and urged Senate Republicans to get his picks across the finish line. Democrats employed dilatory tactics on the nominees as part of a larger strategy to halt Trump’s agenda.

Democrats and Republicans tried to come to a deal where the minority party would pass tons of nominees in exchange for Trump unleashing some blocked funding. That failed.

The Senate wasn’t going to cancel its recess, so brute-forcing the backlog wasn’t a real option.

One idea? Have both the Senate and the House formally adjourn and allow Trump to make recess appointments. It was an outside-the-box route that Trump floated way back in November 2024, but the efficiency of Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s operation meant that the vast majority of Trump’s nominees got through with no problem — thus negating the need for recess appointments.

However, fast forward to last week, and nominees were very much an issue for the GOP. Leadership seriously considered going for recess appointments, but technicalities stood in the way.

Pro forma sessions — where the chamber gavels in briefly and immediately gavels out — are intended to prevent presidents from unilaterally making appointments that would otherwise need Senate confirmation.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Senate being out of sessions for a span of three days or less doesn’t count as a break under the Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause. As a result, the pro forma schedule means the Senate is in session every Tuesday and Friday for the next month.

Senate GOP leadership was ready to adjourn, but the House posed an issue. Since the House was already on recess and had set a pro forma schedule, Speaker Mike Johnson would have had to call his lawmakers back from their break to vote to formally adjourn.

House Republicans knew that a vote could lead to Democrats forcing Jeffrey Epstein-related votes, so they nixed the plan.

The pro formas would stay, and Trump wouldn’t get to issue recess appointments.

Right as Rounds walked off the Senate floor, the assembled Senate press corps wanted to know if he was comfortable blocking recess appointments.

Rounds, an institutionalist and close leadership ally, stood by the practice.

“The Senate still has a responsibility and a role to play in appointments,” Rounds said. But he followed up with a full-throated endorsement of changing Senate rules.

“It will require cooperation on the part of Republicans and Democrats to get behind what is really a crisis right now with the number of appointments that we’ve got to be doing,” Rounds said. “And there’s way too many of them.”

Stay tuned for September, when Senate Republicans will focus on changing the way many nominees are handled. It’ll be a major storyline that we’ll be covering every step of the way. Until then, enjoy your August!

What I’m reading: This exceptional Washington Post article by Emily Davies on how a Hill staffer who survived a random, life-threatening attack on the streets of D.C. grappled with how to react in the years after.

– Max Cohen

You can find The Readback in your inbox every Saturday at 8 a.m. And don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] with feedback. Enjoy The Readback.

The fog of tech policy

Recess was supposed to be quiet for tech policy.

Instead, I spent this week covering Apple’s Tim Cook at the White House, President Donald Trump calling for the removal of Intel’s CEO and threats of tariffs on semiconductors that, depending on your guess, could end up between 100% and nothing at all.

Oops.

If you want to offer sympathy that one of my pre-vacation weeks ended up so hectic, I’ll take it. After all, I was really hoping to catch up with sources.

Honestly, though, it was fun to get my stories back into the top of our newsletter and draw together a lot of reporting that I had in my notebook.

The week also helped me finally describe two aspects of Trump’s second term I’ve been struggling to put into words.

One is the way that companies dealing with the administration are, as I put it in our Thursday Midday edition, “trying to figure out if they’re shaking from fear or excitement about new opportunities.”

Tariffs on semiconductors? That’s bad for industry. Exemptions on those tariffs that would let most chips makers off the hook? That’s less bad for tech, but since surprise upside is good for stocks, it’s also kind of great.

As corporate lobbyists will tell you, Trump’s policies leave open questions that drag on profits, while the administration’s pro-business attitudes are liberating. The tariffs are killer, the tax changes are like rocket fuel. Plus, you never know when Trump will yell at your CEO.

The political environment isn’t good or bad for companies. It’s both, all the time and always intense.

The other thing I finally put into words was the way storylines get threaded together. Tariff issues flow into stories on CEO lobbying, then hop over to export controls and flit back to funds for research and development.

Sure, there’s a certain amount of topic convergence that happens on any beat. But Trump has no patience for the traditional boundaries of expertise. Everything is leverage to him, and so everything touches everything else.

No wonder I can’t always remember the exact themes I planned to touch on in a given week. It’s really just one big Tech Story.

Still, I do hope my memory and focus will improve once I’ve actually had two weeks off.

What I’m watching: I started the new season of “King of the Hill.” I tend to be anti-reboot. I also thought there was a real temptation to turn Hank Hill’s “Every Man” confusion at the wide world into something nastier and more tribal. No one needs more of that. Surprisingly, two episodes in, I just find it a great chuckle.

— Ben Brody

Ode to the August happy hour

The Punchbowl News events team knows how to throw a happy hour. But I’ve got a soft spot for the ones that happen in August – especially after the year we’ve had.

We hosted congressional staff and advocacy professionals on Wednesday at our Capitol Hill townhouse. There was beer, wine and plenty of snackies.

If you’re on the D.C. circuit, you’re probably no stranger to the Beltway happy hour. There are a lot of adjectives you could use to describe this ritual. “Wonky,” “long,” “belligerent” and “frequently distracted by one of two work phones” all come to mind.

But “relaxed” isn’t usually one of them! That’s the beauty of the August happy hour. With the bosses home and recess in full-ish swing, we get to be reminded that staffers are, in fact, people. They wear jeans! They talk about their vacations!

Work still comes up but in the cadence of a hometown sports rivalry rather than stuff we’ll have to follow up on in the morning. Is the House the worst place to work or the Senate? We land somewhere in the middle.

To work in the modern Senate is to run ultramarathons – long sessions, few breaks and physical breakdowns are to be expected. To work in the House is to sign up for semi-regular dentist appointments. The pain is more immediate and acute, but it tends to recede more quickly.

What I’m reading: I don’t often have the energy for non-fiction reading when Congress is in town. But with the news slowing down, I’m continuing my descent into World War II history buffery.

On the docket: “The Wages of Destruction,” by Adam Tooze. The book, published in 2006, is an economic history of Nazi Germany and all the industrial wrangling required to create a genocidal war machine. It also examines the role of America’s own industrialization in the mind of Adolf Hitler.

– Brendan Pedersen

Vote for your favorite scoop

With the August recess in full swing, it’s a good time to pull back and reflect on the most pivotal moments shaping Congress and Washington so far this year.

And so, we’re doing something a little different with the Readback. We’ll share a fun question each week and would love to hear your thoughts.

Punchbowl News has been at the forefront of several breaking stories this year that have had real implications on Capitol Hill and beyond. This week, we’re asking: What’s our scoop of the year?

Submit your vote here. We’re itching to know what you think.

Vote by Wednesday and share with your friends and colleagues. We’ll show you the results in next Saturday’s Readback where we’ll also preview our next big question.

– The Punchbowl News Team