The House of Representatives’ calendar has been completely empty for more than a month.
Lawmakers, including House Republicans, have long lamented the optics of Speaker Mike Johnson keeping the House out of session, and Democrats have seized on the opportunity to blast the GOP as “on vacation” when members could be advancing appropriations bills to reopen the government.
But it’s not just shutdown negotiations that are at a standstill. Lawmakers are concerned that progress on their other legislative priorities is stalled without representatives physically in Washington. The casualties include hearings, committee markups, swearing-in ceremonies and votes.
“There’s so many bills that we’re all working on,” Sen. Thom Tillis told NOTUS. “I’m working on any number of things that require our colleagues, whether it’s intellectual property in my capacity as chair of the intellectual property subcommittee on Judiciary, or just about any of this work. It requires you to be here.”
“Work sessions, staff-to-staff discussions,” he continued. “Some staff are furloughed. Other staff are working. That sort of cadence is lost when you’re not here, particularly when you’re not here when you were scheduled to be here.”
Among the most high-profile cancellations in the House: Seven Financial Services hearings, including one on artificial intelligence, Judiciary’s Justice Department Oversight hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi and a hearing on “worldwide threats” with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Those are the few committee activities that had already been reported or posted on committee websites before the shutdown started. But in a typical week in Washington, dozens of House committees would be meeting to review and advance legislation or conduct oversight.
The last week that the House was in session last month, 32 of those meetings took place, addressing topics from “agroterrorism” to oversight of the District of Columbia. The House also passed 18 bills and resolutions.
Members of the House have been able to introduce legislation during the shutdown, and they’ve done so 187 times. That includes everything from Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s Designating the Russian Federation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism Act to Rep. Dusty Johnson’s Shutdown Fairness Act,” which would appropriate funds for “excepted” federal workers to pay them during a shutdown.
Though most introduced legislation never even advances out of committee, the bills lawmakers introduce at this time are one way to gauge the type of work members of Congress would like to be doing — or, at least, project that they are doing — during the shutdown.
On her way to vote on the Senate floor, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told NOTUS on Thursday that she planned to speak with her lone counterpart in the House, Rep. Nick Begich, to discuss business the House could address.
“The issue is that if we’re gonna do substantive things, like legislation, we can’t just do it in the Senate,” Murkowski said. “We need both bodies. So we need the place to be open. We need the House to be functioning.”
A growing faction of the House Republican Conference has also been vocal that they want Johnson to bring them back to Washington — particularly appropriators and vulnerable Republicans.
Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley — whose California district is poised to become much more competitive if the state enacts new congressional maps — told MSNBC this week that it’s the “wrong decision” to keep the House out of session.
“In addition to this making it a lot more difficult for us to actually end the shutdown,” Kiley said, “it also means that we’re not doing all of the things the House was supposed to be doing during this month.”
Johnson has insisted that he will not bring the House back into session until five more Senate Democrats join Republicans to pass a short-term funding bill that would reopen the government through Nov. 21. But the House passed its version of the funding bill on Sept. 19, and Johnson acknowledged at a press conference this week that House Republicans were “anxious to get back to work.”
Some senators are supportive of Johnson’s strategy, readily defending the speaker’s political calculus.
“Speaker Johnson is doing the right thing, putting pressure on the Democrats to open the federal government back up,” Sen. Roger Marshall told NOTUS. “I think even if they don’t come back to Washington the rest of the fall, we won’t catch up to them yet. So I’ve not lost one second of sleep.”
Others were less inclined to praise — or even discuss — the lower chamber’s decision.
“There’s a wonderful Scripture, ‘Let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for the day,’” Sen. Bill Cassidy told NOTUS. “We’ve got enough troubles for us in the Senate. I’ll focus on my day’s troubles. I won’t worry about those guys.”
There’s also some level of incentive for the House to stay away.
A discharge petition that would force a vote on a bill that would compel the Department of Justice to release all documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein is close to having the number of signatures required to force the House to take action. The petition only needs one more signature, which Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva has committed to providing.
With the House out of session and the government shut down, Johnson has argued he cannot swear her in — meaning when the House does return, Democrats will be champing at the bit to amplify Epstein news.
Democrats have plenty of other ideas for what the House could be up to if members were to return to Capitol Hill.
“A lot of things,” Rep. Maxwell Frost told NOTUS. “Legislation on the housing crisis, on health care — all of the issues people really care about. And that’s part of the reason that half of the country is living paycheck to paycheck.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has used the House’s absence to accuse Republicans of avoiding scrutiny of the reporters roaming Capitol Hill eager to question them about shutdown politics.
“It seems to me that Speaker Johnson has no intention of bringing Republicans back to Washington to do their jobs, because they’re the ones that shut down the government,” he told reporters Thursday. “They can’t justify why they shut the government down.”