Congress was historically productive during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, passing landmark bipartisan bills on infrastructure, gun safety and semiconductor chip funding.
Democrats jammed through hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding during the 117th Congress to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spurred massive foreign aid packages. A same-sex marriage bill became law (which is kind of shocking looking back on it).
The 118th Congress, on the other hand, has been, well, pretty weak. And Biden — with his own party rebelling against him — decided to “pass the torch” to Vice President Kamala Harris just over 100 days from the election.
With a GOP-run House and a Democratic-controlled Senate, there’s been little real progress on the challenges facing the country. Bitterly divided House Republicans dumped former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year for cutting a debt limit and spending deal with Biden, and they would’ve dumped Speaker Mike Johnson this year if Democrats hadn’t stopped them.
The appropriations process is broken. Congress punted on the farm bill. Former President Donald Trump and Johnson blew up a bipartisan Senate immigration and border security deal they didn’t like earlier this year, guaranteeing no congressional action on the issue until 2025 at the earliest.
House Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — just the second impeachment of a Cabinet official in U.S. history — only to see the Senate swat it away. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was convicted on a slew of bribery and corruption charges and will resign next month after one final paycheck. Multiple House members were indicted and one of them — former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) — was expelled. A wave of members have announced they’re retiring, fed up with the toxic partisanship on the Hill.
There was a brief burst of activity this spring as Johnson finally faced down his right flank and pushed through two massive spending packages, as well as $60 billion in new Ukraine aid. That was what almost cost Johnson his job. A TikTok divestiture bill passed. FISA Section 702 and the FAA were reauthorized.
The Senate is on the brink of passing a landmark crackdown on Big Tech and social media platforms. Johnson has spoken positively on the measure, but we’ll see if anything happens.
As the summer heated up, and Election Day loomed larger, bipartisan cooperation pretty much dried up too. We told you it would happen, especially after the Ukraine vote.
Consider what’s been left on the cutting-room floor in the Senate: the House-passed Wyden-Smith tax bill, the railway safety bill, cannabis banking legislation and more. Most of these have been dead for some time, but the window to even hold “show” votes has pretty much closed.
The House will adjourn today until mid-September with only five of the 12 annual spending bills passed — and those on party-line votes. The Senate will be gone after next week. It hasn’t passed any spending bills, although the Senate Appropriations Committee is marking up several bills today.
Lawmakers will need to pass a CR when they come back in September in order to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month. House GOP conservatives want to attach the SAVE Act — a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — to that CR and dare Senate Democrats to shut down the government five weeks before Election Day, but we doubt they can really make it happen.
Johnson hasn’t decided yet whether he prefers the House pass a CR until December or January. Some hardline conservatives want to kick the funding deadline until next year when, they hope, Trump will be back in the Oval Office. Other Republicans, including House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), don’t want to gum up the opening months of a new Trump presidency with a government funding fight.
Here’s Johnson:
House and Senate leaders also need to pass the annual defense authorization bill during the lame-duck session.
Yet there was one last brief moment of bipartisanship late Wednesday night.
By a 416-0 vote, the House set up a task force to look into the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump (see below). That episode left two people dead, including the shooter, while Trump narrowly avoided being killed.
But after several GOP lawmakers made ugly comments this week about Harris as a “DEI hire,” House Republicans plan to leave town today having pushed through a resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”
Also: Johnson and a number of House Republicans went to Union Station Wednesday night to replace the American flags that protestors took down during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
— John Bresnahan, Andrew Desiderio and Jake Sherman
