As the year got underway, House Republicans planned for a busy September. After scheduling a lengthy summer break for themselves, GOP leaders intended to do several weeks’ worth of work in September, offering members one last chance to get some things done before the midterm elections.
Then the plan changed.
As the month got underway, the Republican leadership team announced that instead of three weeks of work between Labor Day and Election Day, the House would only be around for one four-day week.
Now, that four-day week has become a three-day week. The Washington Post reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said Wednesday that he was canceling Thursday votes, allowing lawmakers to depart a day earlier than planned for a scheduled seven-week recess ahead of the midterms. […]
After Wednesday votes, House members are not slated to return until the second week of November, after elections that will determine control of the House next year.
There’s ample speculation about why, exactly, GOP leaders decided to walk away a day early, but it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was poised to force a vote on Thursday on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — and by all accounts, the measure was likely to generate a fair number of bipartisan votes, which would have been deeply embarrassing to the beleaguered Pentagon chief, the White House and the party itself with seven weeks remaining in the election cycle.
By sending members home a day early, that vote won’t happen until after the midterms.
After making the announcement about the new schedule, Johnson boasted to reporters, “The House has done its work.”
Like so many of the House speaker’s claims, that was far from true. Punchbowl News recently noted, for example, that 244 days into this year, the House held votes on just 65 days. What’s more, NOTUS’ Dana Milbank noted in a recent column that the official congressional data shows that the current Congress “is indeed on pace to set a record — as the least productive Congress in modern history. With just 104 pieces of legislation enacted into law so far, it is poised to take the crown from … well, from the previous Congress, which Johnson also led, when just 274 pieces of legislation became law.”
GOP leaders could roll up their sleeves and try to deliver some results in the run-up to the midterms, but as they made clear again on Wednesday morning, they no longer intend to try.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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