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House members have known for a while that their summer break was drawing closer — for generations, Congress effectively shuts down in August — but the hapless Republican majority hoped to get some meaningful work done before heading to local airports.
At least, that was the idea. While the GOP leaders’ original schedule had members working next week, they decided not to bother. As NBC News reported, House Republican leaders canceled next week’s session “and sent lawmakers home for a six-week summer recess with little to brag about to constituents and voters heading into the final months before the election.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his leadership team had hoped to pass all 12 bills that fund the government before the long August recess, setting up negotiations with the Democratic-led Senate on how to keep the government open ahead of a shutdown deadline on Sept. 30. But that goal now looks out of reach with the House not returning until Sept. 9, leaving just three weeks to avert a shutdown.
As recently as last fall, Johnson’s position was that House members shouldn’t leave town until the chamber had completed its work on all 12 of the federal appropriations bills. That was certainly a nice idea in theory.
But in practice, the House’s Republican majority had passed only five funding bills — none of which can pass the Democratic-led Senate — and plans to take up four more this week fell apart.
As Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida told NBC News, in reference to GOP leaders: “They can’t pass their own bills.”
Looking ahead to the near future, a Roll Call report added, “The outlook is similarly grim come September, the focus will shift to passing a stopgap funding measure to avoid a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.”
Ordinarily, ahead of Congress’ summer break, House leaders try to rack up at least some wins so that their members have something to boast about in their local districts. That’s clearly not the case in 2024.
“Extreme MAGA Republicans have been in the majority for over 18 months,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Thursday. “Can anyone name a single thing extreme MAGA Republicans in the House have done in order to make life better for the American people? A single thing that they have done? You can’t. ... You can’t name one single thing that extreme MAGA Republicans have done on their own to make life better for the American people.
“They are incapable of governing.”
The New York Democrat’s rhetoric comes roughly eight months after Republican Rep. Chip Roy delivered impassioned remarks on the House floor about his party’s legislative efforts.
“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one! — that I can go campaign on and say we did,” the Texan said. “Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
No one rushed to respond to Roy’s — or Jeffries’ — challenge.
The point is not to point and laugh at congressional foibles. The point, rather, is to question what in the world House Republicans intend to say as they hope to maintain their majority in the chamber. A recent Punchbowl News report noted that they’re “struggling to figure out what — if anything — to tout this November.”
When Punchbowl News asked “roughly two dozen House GOP lawmakers about how they plan to convince voters to let them hold on to the majority,” they had strikingly little to say.
In fairness, Republicans could plausibly argue that with a Democratic-led Senate and a Democratic White House, the prospect for legislative breakthroughs were severely limited. That’s true. But it’s also true that GOP House members could’ve engaged in good-faith negotiations, embraced legislative compromises, and scored some meaningful victories they could take to voters in the fall.
They didn’t want to. The result is a wasted governing opportunity and a blank slate where a record is supposed to be.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.