After the Senate passed a package of bills to end the longest federal shutdown in history on Monday, all eyes turned to the House.
Speaker Mike Johnson told members to hurry up and get back to Washington, and later this week they’ll vote on reopening the government — the first vote the chamber has taken since Sept. 19.
“We look forward to the government reopening this week so Congress can get back to our regular legislative session. We have a lot of business to do, as you all know. And we will be working in earnest,” Johnson told reporters on Monday. “There’ll be long days and long nights here for the foreseeable future to make up for all this lost time that was imposed upon us.”
It’s not just the shutdown the House will have to address. By keeping members out of town, there have been no committee hearings, no votes on crucial legislation that would have nothing to do with the shutdown, no formal in-person GOP conference meetings and no swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva.
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Plus, appropriators will need to spend time hammering out the details of the rest of the funding bills for 2026.
The growing to-do list as a result of the chamber being in recess for more than 50 days is adding to the pressure to get the government open as soon as possible.
“This is the first shutdown I’ve been through in which the House simultaneously goes on recess,” Rep. Thomas Massie, a frequent GOP critic of Johnson, told NOTUS. “By keeping Congress in recess for over a month, the speaker is wasting our precious time in the majority that we could otherwise use for hearings to uncover malfeasance that happened during the Biden administration and for obvious things that Americans want, like releasing the Epstein files and passing laws like Country of Origin Labeling for beef.”
House Republican leadership isn’t denying there’s a lot of work to be done when the House comes back. Johnson told reporters Monday that he would swear in Grijalva ahead of a vote on the deal. And in a brief interview last Thursday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said he’s warning rank-and-file members that there’s going to be a lot of “late night votes.”
“I’ve been talking with our chairmen, with the speaker, on a regular basis about the bills that were scheduled to come to the floor in October that obviously didn’t, as well as the things that we still have ahead of us,” Scalise told NOTUS. “So when the Democrats end the shutdown and we return, we’re going to have a lot of work stacked up.”
He had a warning for how things are expected to go when they inevitably come back to work: “I’ve told members: Be ready to work late hours. Late night votes, late night committee meetings to make up. It’s time for Democrats to end the shutdown. We’re ready to get back to work. Democrats are continuing to hold the American people hostage, and it’s having real devastating consequences.”
Democrats have from the beginning lambasted Republican leadership for keeping the House in recess. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has held nearly daily press conferences from the Capitol to highlight the recess and has called back his caucus members to the Hill for in-person meetings at various times in an effort to show force against the decision to keep the House out.
“Six consecutive weeks they’ve canceled votes,” Jeffries told reporters last week. “It causes you to ask the question, is there such a thing as a four-ring circus? Because it’s a circus right now in the House.”
Democratic Rep. Mark Takano said he’s concerned about the backlog that’s been caused by the House’s impromptu recess. Since the shutdown started, lawmakers have introduced 339 pieces of legislation that have not yet been addressed in committees.
“There is going to be a huge workload bomb on this institution,” Takano said.
Takano added the House’s absence has posed a “real problem” for committees that have been out of session for more than a month. He serves as the ranking member on the Veterans Affairs Committee, which hasn’t held an oversight hearing since the end of September and is set to miss a yearly benchmark as veterans go without certain programs that were tied to the CR.
“There are student veterans right now that are not receiving their tuition payments, their housing allowances,” he said. “And normally there’s a Veterans Day legislative package for the Veterans Affairs Committee and that’s not happening.”
Other Democrats have concerns about the legislation that has been held up while lawmakers remain in their districts.
Rep. Darren Soto said he’s heard from constituents who are worried about grocery prices, consumer protection and health care, all while bills on those issues sit untouched.
Soto said any progress in the House would be a good thing.
“There are a bunch of health care bills that are languishing in the Energy and Commerce Committee. I still haven’t given up on a farm bill,” Soto said. “And then there’s housing. I keep hearing about housing and yet nothing’s happening right now.”
Some representatives said the House could also be working to advance bipartisan measures while the government was shut down. Rep. Sarah McBride said there are dozens of suspension bills that the House could have brought to the floor that will now need to get votes in the end-of-year crunch.
McBride added she feels particularly strongly about a bipartisan bill she introduced aimed at addressing credit repair organizations. The bill has been referred to the Financial Services Committee but can’t move forward while the House is out of session.
“It might not be the bills that make headlines or grab controversy, but they’re important pieces of legislation that make tangible improvements to lifesaving programs, to benefits, to policies that impact people in our districts every single day,” McBride said.
Johnson was steadfast in his resolve to keep the House out of town until the Senate figured out a solution to end the shutdown. He stuck to his word but it’s unclear what kind of consequences that’s going to have for the congressional workload when this is all over.
When asked last week whether it was time for Johnson to bring back the House, Rep. Mike Simpson responded jokingly: “That’s above my pay grade. That’s the leadership decision on how we do it. But yeah, there’s still a lot of work to do.”
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