A Republican lawmaker tore into House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Tuesday for his leadership amid the soon-ending government shutdown, which another lawmaker said had created a “workload bomb.”
The last House session was held on Sept. 19, a little under two weeks before the government would shut down due to disagreements on health care policy. And, while Johnson could have called the chamber into session amid the shutdown, he chose not to, a decision that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) slammed.
“This is the first shutdown I’ve been through in which the House simultaneously goes on recess,” Massie said, speaking with NOTUS in its report Tuesday.
“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.”
Johnson had given vague reasons throughout the shutdown as to why he refused to call the House back in session:
“We passed the bill,” Johnson said in early October, saying the House had no reason to reconvene after the passage of a temporary spending bill designed to reopen the government.
“The reason the House isn't here in regular session is because they turned the lights off,” Johnson explained on a different day in early October.
For some critics, Johnson’s hesitation to reconvene the House was due to a petition that, were it to receive enough signatures, would force a vote on a bill that could compel the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein. That petition is just one vote short of succeeding, leading to further speculation that Johnson’s refusal to call the House into session was tied to his desire to protect President Donald Trump, who’s been informed that his name appears in the DOJ’s files on Epstein.
Johnson has denied that his refusal to call the House back into session had anything to do with Epstein, but his explanations have done nothing to cool the heads of House lawmakers, who now say that the 53-day House hiatus has created a major work backlog.
“There is going to be a huge workload bomb on this institution,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA), NOTUS reported. “There are student veterans right now that are not receiving their tuition payments, their housing allowances. And normally there’s a Veterans Day legislative package for the Veterans Affairs Committee and that’s not happening.”