The House has recessed until after the November election, sparking ire from Republicans as the lower chamber has left behind a long to-do list involving spending bills, contempt resolutions, task forces, and censure initiatives.
On the House floor on Tuesday, lawmakers burst into applause when it was announced that scheduled votes for Thursday and Friday would be canceled. However, the announcement angered some like Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who famously called out the Republican conference last year for a weak voting record and giving members nothing on which to go home to their districts and campaign.
“America always loses when these clowns — did you see what just happened right now? They all applauded because we’re leaving a day early. ‘Oh, we get to go home a day early.’ You know what I mean? The hardworking average American out there doesn’t get to leave a day early,” Roy said to reporters Tuesday. “They need a government that’s not incompetent, but everybody up there just applauded, Democrats and Republicans.”
From the July 4 recess to last Wednesday, House lawmakers have only voted on 19 days per the schedule — which amounts to lawmakers spending less than 20% of a three-month period on Capitol Hill.
The GOP-controlled House barely avoided a government shutdown after two weeks of GOP infighting over a continuing resolution, passing a clean stopgap spending deal on Wednesday that kicks the deadline for expiring appropriations bills to Dec. 20.
Roy had argued that he would not have put the clean CR on the House floor and instead would have taken more days to fight for the inclusion of voter integrity in the spending legislation. The Texas congressman’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, was included in the initial CR that failed on the floor on Sept. 18 but not in the one passed Wednesday.
“What do you think will happen at Christmas? You know what happens at Christmas. So when we set these fights up that expire in December, America loses,” Roy said. “We could have avoided that had Republicans united around a plan to get it past Christmas and fight for the SAVE Act. Had some of our colleagues who didn’t want to do that.”
“But here we are. We’re gonna walk out of town, and we gotta go convince the American people to trust this: Next time, we’ll do what we said we would do,” Roy added.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) expressed her annoyance at the House recessing two days early, wishing that more had been done to address the border and cut through the “red tape on American energy.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I don’t make the rules,” Luna said of an early recess.
Upon lawmakers’ return to the House after the November election, Republicans will once again have to work within the conference to help pass the seven remaining fiscal 2025 appropriations bills. Many hard-line Republicans are in favor of passing bills one at a time and do not support a Christmas omnibus bill — something Johnson vowed to his members that he would avoid last week but could still be likely given past spending deal performances.
Also on the horizon is the farm bill, something House Republicans are already pressuring Johnson to kickstart before the end of the year. A group of 140 House GOP lawmakers, led by Reps. Mark Alford (R-MO), Ashley Hinson (R-IA), Jen Kiggans (R-VA), and Mary Miller (R-IL), sent a letter to Johnson on Sept. 26.
The lawmakers argued that the farm bill should be among “the top priorities” of Republicans when they return from recess and warned that a one-year stopgap would fail to remedy long-term problems as the 2018 version is set to expire in December.
“Farmers and ranchers do not have the luxury of waiting until the next Congress for the enactment of an effective farm bill,” the members wrote.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the speaker’s office for comment on the letter.
When lawmakers return to Capitol Hill, there will be a new president-elect, a new makeup of Congress, and possibly new majority parties. Democrats are already lining up their priorities for when they return on Nov. 12, with the House scheduled to remain in session for most of November and three weeks in December before Christmas.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar (D-CA) told the Washington Examiner that there are “plenty of things we need to get done” but haven’t been able to accomplish due to Republicans’ “self-sabotage” on items such as the appropriations bills.
“This is — basically, ending today is just very consistent with where Republican leadership has been over the last 18 months,” Aguilar said Wednesday. “They’ve been ineffective and dealing with their own infighting rather than legislating and passing bills.”
“There’s so many things that Democrats want to accomplish,” Aguilar added, pointing to several priorities such as restoring Roe v. Wade and moving forward with the Equality Act. “We look forward to having the opportunity to do that if we’re privileged enough to be in the majority.”
Earlier in the week, both Aguilar and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had touted Democrats’ being on track to bail out Republicans to push the CR over the finish line. It was proven true on Wednesday when all Democrats voted for the CR and 82 Republicans opposed the measure.
Ahead of the vote, Jeffries spoke to the House under Republican leadership.
“Can anyone name a single thing that extreme MAGA Republicans in the House have been able to do on their own to make life better for the American people? A single thing, just one? … Zip, zero. You can’t, nothing. And so that is the track record that will be presented to the American people,” Jeffries told reporters at his weekly press conference.
Among other things that will be on the table for consideration when the House returns is a contempt resolution passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. The resolution, if passed by the full House, would hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress for not appearing before the committee to testify on the failures of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Democrats and Republicans have argued over the investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal, with some Democrats accusing the GOP of using the contempt resolution and the hearing in general as a political ploy ahead of a contentious 2024 presidential election. However, some like Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-NY) offered to stay on Capitol Hill to do more hearings on pulling out of the Middle East if that truly is the GOP’s goal.
“Tell the speaker to cancel recess. Let’s have more hearings on Afghanistan. … This Congress has had more hearings on gas stoves and refrigerators and ceiling fans and blenders than they’ve had on Afghanistan,” Moskowitz said during the Sept. 24 hearing. “And that’s not the chairman’s fault, but that’s this Congress.”
Both Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Johnson said the contempt resolution will likely be brought for a full House vote after the 2024 election.
Another measure placed on House GOP leadership’s agenda is a censure resolution targeting Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) from Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Steven Horsford (D-NV) for a controversial post the Louisiana congressman made regarding Haitian immigrants.
Claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are eating neighbors’ pets have been amplified by former President Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and other hard-liners as they ramp up rhetoric about the border crisis ahead of the election.
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Democrats have pushed back against this and have called for swift action to condemn Higgins’s remarks. Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) urged “all of our colleagues in Congress” to support the measure when the House returns in November.
“It needs to stop,” Horsford told reporters after he introduced the resolution. “We have to explore, sadly, every action possible, and this one that, you know, we have available to us because it does violate the rules of the House.”