How’s this for a work ethic?
The House just returned Monday night from a five-week recess, and even after that long break, 42 lawmakers couldn’t be bothered to show up to vote.
On Thursday, the House will go out on another recess, this one for 10 days, after which it may or may not return for a couple of weeks before quitting town until after Election Day.
Of the 244 days that have elapsed so far in 2026, the House has held votes on only 65 of them, Punchbowl News tallied Tuesday.
President Donald Trump, perhaps hoping to avoid blame for the midterm election results, called out the lethargy last week by reposting criticism from a conservative influencer stating: “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are f—ing up right now.” The post also listed various legislative failures and scolded lawmakers for “lots of very long vacations and no work.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson must have felt a great deal of pressure to justify his leisurely approach to legislating, for he came out to face reporters on Tuesday protesting a bit too much. “House Republicans worked really hard” during the break, he insisted, and he “went to over 54 cities, over 75 campaign events and countless meetings.”
So grueling! Johnson then claimed to have “objective data” proving that, under his leadership, the House had set a new standard of tirelessness. “This has literally been the most productive and successful and aggressive Congress since 1949, and I think it’s in the top five of all time,” he proclaimed.
Literally the most productive? I checked the official stats, and the “objective data” show that the 119th 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 last Congress, which Johnson also led, when just 274 pieces of legislation became law.
That, in turn, was the least productive Congress since such tallies began in 1950 — and probably for decades before that, studies show. Making the failure all the more remarkable is that the House, Senate and White House have all been under Republican control over the last two years.
I asked Johnson’s spokesperson, Taylor Haulsee, about the speaker’s zany claim. Haulsee told me that Johnson was referring to the number of bills passed by the House alone (also not a particularly impressive number), and that the speaker based his measure of productivity on the “substance and quality of the bills.”
So much for objective data.
Lawmakers were hard at work on that substance and quality on Tuesday. They passed legislation keeping the government running while they go on recess — itself a result of the failure to reach spending agreements with the Senate. They then set out to debate minor matters, including a resolution “providing for the condemnation and denouncement of socialism in all its forms.”
Even that modest plan almost fell apart when five Republicans, nursing grievances over other matters, voted against the rules for debate. Two Democrats, Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state, stepped in to save Republican leaders.
In fairness to Johnson and his team, it’s probably too late to do anything to change the trajectory in advance of the midterms.
Trump is at 33% in the polls, the Iran war has reignited, the military is running out of munitions and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is wantonly firing generals. There’s now a trade war with Canada and beef producers are angry about Trump’s plan for cheap imports — and Trump is building a ballroom and refurbishing the bowling alley at the White House.
Johnson and his team tried calling the Democrats “communists” some 20 times during the press conference. They made things up about the economy: “Inflation is down from where it was two years ago. Gas prices are down from where they were two years ago.” (Nope and nope.) They even tossed in a bit of Islamophobia. For some Iranians, “it’s apparently part of their religion that they can just lie to someone they disagree with,” Johnson said.
But when the questions came, Johnson just threw his hands in the air.
Lisa Desjardins of PBS NewsHour asked about Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario, his threat to demolish the Kennedy Center and other antics.
“Some of these things are, you know, out of our control,” Johnson pleaded.
Has Hegseth gone overboard?
“I literally don’t have the bandwidth to go there and micromanage the Pentagon.”
CNN’s Manu Raju asked if Americans should judge Johnson on his false assurances that the Iran war would end quickly.
“Manu, that is one of the stupidest questions you’ve ever asked,” the speaker snapped. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution of a war across the globe.”
Yes — because he and his colleagues chose to surrender all their power to Trump.
***
But there is one area in which the 119th Congress has been highly productive. It may have produced more sleazebags than any previous Congress. It may or may not be the most “aggressive,” as Johnson claimed, but it has a strong claim on being the most transgressive.
Tuesday brought a vote to censure Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-North Carolina) over what the House Ethics Committee called his “intimate and effusive attentions” toward two women on his staff. The attentions included dinners, trips, thousands of dollars in gifts, remarks about their appearance and cringe-inducing letters.
The Ethics Committee is probing nine other lawmakers, including Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), over allegations that he physically abused his ex-wife and daughter. (Johnson this week called Miller a “great member of Congress.”)
Rep. Cory Mills (R-Florida) is being investigated for allegations of sexual misconduct and assault, as well as violations of campaign-finance laws. (Johnson last year called him a “faithful colleague.”)
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California) is under investigation for “inappropriate sexual contact” with a House staffer.
On and on goes the list. The Ethics Committee found that Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pennsylvania) violated the House code of conduct over his wife’s stock trades. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was pardoned by Trump in 2025 but still has an open Ethics investigation over bribery and other charges. The panel is also probing Reps. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee), Troy Nehls (R-Texas), Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), and Mike Collins (R-Georgia).
And the chair of the House Ethics Committee himself, Rep. Michael Guest (R-Mississippi), has violated the STOCK Act, an insider-trading and transparency law, my NOTUS colleague Dave Levinthal reported.
Then there are the ones who recently left Congress. Republican Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned rather than face expulsion over an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.
Democrat Eric Swalwell of California left office in disgrace and is the subject of probes into sexual assault allegations.
Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida resigned and faces charges alleging that she stole $5 million in federal disaster-relief funds.
More than 30 members of the House have violated the law over the last year.
Some have compared the spate of scandals to 2006, the year of Mark Foley (sexual misconduct), William Jefferson (bribery), Duke Cunningham (bribery) and Bob Ney (the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal).
But the sleaze seems more pervasive now, as if an anything-goes attitude has gripped the place. Some of this may be the Trump effect: If he can get away with it, why can’t we? But I suspect it’s something deeper: This is what happens when you don’t have competitive elections.
Waves of gerrymandering, blessed by the Supreme Court, have taken all but a handful of congressional seats out of play. A Politico analysis this spring found that, after the latest round of redistricting, only 22 of 435 House seats are competitive — meaning that the presidential candidates were within 10 percentage points of each other in 2024.
Using a comparable measurement, there were 143 competitive seats before the 2011 round of redistricting, according to Daily Kos. As recently as 2020, there were 93 competitive seats.
With only 5% of seats contested, that means 95% of lawmakers are chosen in primaries, where small slivers of the electorate reward the loudest and most extreme. They aren’t well vetted and most voters have no say in picking them.
If you don’t think that affects the quality and the character of members of Congress, check out the Edwards censure debate on the House floor Tuesday afternoon.
Guest and other members of the Ethics Committee laid out what he had allegedly done: giving two female staffers jewelry, purses, shoes, flowers and vacations, telling them they looked “pretty” and “breathtaking,” inviting them to meals, casinos and performances, sending them intimate letters, poems and late-night texts, skipping a vote series to decorate a Christmas tree with one.
Edwards began his defense with an apology to the women, and to his wife. But he then claimed that they “exchanged gifts reciprocally” and that the women were “initiating dinners and activities, expressing affection, complimenting me, making future plans and maintaining relationships after their employment ended.”
Edwards seemed not to grasp that, as one of the victims put it, she could not refuse his advances because she “did not think having a member of Congress against me would benefit my career.”
His colleagues got that. They voted for censure, 413-2.
But a defiant Edwards apparently felt no shame. After the vote, he announced that “I do not accept the conclusion” and “I will not confess to conduct I did not commit.”
“I think there is something deeply troubling about where this leaves us as a society,” he wrote.
Here is what’s deeply troubling: We have a president running amok and a House of Representatives showing that the only thing it’s good at doing is wrongdoing.
Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
Understand the complexities — and absurdities — of Washington as only Dana can describe them. To get his columns in your inbox, sign up here.
More from NOTUS Perspectives:
Jesse Watters vs. Abdul El-Sayed Was Compelling TV — And Great for American Democracy
The Republican Midterm Message on Inflation? Stop Whining!
Forget Mar-a-Lago Face. The Real Symbol of Right-Wing Politics Is the Cinched Waist.