House lawmakers are back today after a five-week summer break — but they’re not sticking around the Capitol for long. The House is scheduled to be out again next week for Labor Day, and many Republicans are reportedly already eager to cut short a session that’s currently scheduled to run until October 1 so they can head home and campaign for the November midterms.
House GOP leaders have a limited agenda for the weeks before voters cast their ballots. After holding votes tonight for the first time since July 23, they are expected to bring up their main must-do item tomorrow: A stopgap bill that would avoid a potential government shutdown by extending federal funding from the October start of the new fiscal year through December 11. The bill passed the Senate in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 90-6 vote earlier this month. Speaker Mike Johnson plans to bring it up under suspension of the rules, given the expectation that it can get the two-thirds majority needed to pass under that fast-track process.
“The first thing is we’ve got to make sure this government gets funded and we don’t have another Democratic shutdown,” Johnson told reporters.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters that his leadership team and members would discuss the spending bill tonight and tomorrow before the vote.
Midterm messaging: As Republicans look to score some political points against Democrats ahead of Election Day, the House will also be voting on a resolution to condemn and denounce socialism “in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America” and on a proposal to amend the Constitution to require that the Supreme Court be composed of nine justices.
The House won’t be taking up any of the nine annual government funding bills it has yet to pass — and the Republican push to pass a third party-line reconciliation package remains stalled after the Senate left town without approving a budget resolution. The House had approved a $95 billion framework, but that measure, built around money for the military, farm aid and election changes, is reportedly unlikely to be considered in the Senate before the election, as fiscal conservatives and defense hawks remain divided over the package.
The bottom line: The House may not do much before the elections, the Senate is still out for two more weeks and any efforts by Republican leaders to hammer their preferred campaign messaging could well be disrupted by the Disrupter-in-Chief, who continues to dominate the political landscape with his Iran war, tariff and trade fights, construction controversies and random musings.