Hey Congress! Take a good look at your fellow members and senators today. You’re not going to see them again until after Election Day.
The House is scheduled to take up a three-month continuing resolution that will keep federal agencies open through Dec. 20. That vote — which will be held under suspension, meaning a two-thirds majority is needed to pass — will take place this evening. It’s going to pass, of course. The biggest question here is whether a majority of the 220 House Republicans vote for the measure.
Then Tuesday night, Senate leaders locked in a time agreement that gives the chamber two hours to consider the CR once it formally receives the bill from the House.
This all means Congress will be gone after today until mid-November.
It’s a little earlier than normal — about a week — if you go back and look at when previous Congresses passed a CR that allowed lawmakers to head back home to run for reelection.
Yet the thing about this Congress is that it hasn’t done anything for months anyway. You want numbers? We got ‘em.
Let’s go back to the July 4th recess as a starting point, for instance. Since the last week of June — when Congress actually left for the holiday — the House has been in session and voted only on 19 days. A bunch of those were fly-in days too, so nothing really substantive was voted on then. That means lawmakers were in town for less than 20% of a three-month period.
The Senate’s record is marginally better. Senate Democrats will argue they spent the summer confirming President Joe Biden’s judicial nominations to lifetime appointments. This is a very important issue, no question about it. But the Senate wasn’t covering itself in glory either.
Most importantly, both chambers failed miserably in making progress on the FY2025 appropriations process, their biggest priority. This continues a decades-long congressional streak of failing miserably on the appropriations process. House Republicans will argue that they at least passed five bills on the floor compared to the whopping zero that the Senate passed.
However, the House bills were partisan exercises that had no hope of becoming law. House Republicans saw them as opening bids in negotiations, although neither the Senate nor the White House were in the mood to negotiate anything.
And for Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans, today’s vote isn’t the closing message they wanted heading into a frantic six-week blitz to save their embattled majority.
A week ago, Johnson and former President Donald Trump were pushing a six-month CR with the SAVE Act attached. That would require proof of citizenship to be shown before registering to vote in federal elections. Trump urged House Republicans to shut down the government over the issue.
But the GOP Conference had no stomach for that. Conservatives don’t like the bipartisan stopgap funding measure, which is why everyone will be watching to see how many House Republicans vote yes to a clean CR.
In addition to leaving town, the House also will vote today on a GOP-drafted resolution that condemns Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top administration officials over their handling of the disastrous 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.
Yet think about what Congress will return to in November (Nov. 18 looks like a likely choice for that). The annual defense authorization package needs to be passed by both chambers during the lame-duck session. Lawmakers tell us that the annual Pentagon policy bill will be loaded up with all sorts of ancillary priorities.
There’s also the farm bill, which needs an extension of some length by the end of the year. And there are a host of tax provisions and health care odds and ends that Congress will be under pressure to finish up.
As usual, all of this is being left undone as lawmakers head home to take care of their ultimate must-have — getting reelected.
— John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman
