Congressional Republicans are fuming over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s insistence that the House remain in recess over the government shutdown fight, complaining that the extended recess is jeopardizing the Senate’s ability to do other “substantive things.”
“The issue is that if we’re gonna do substantive things, like legislation, we can’t just do it in the Senate,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), speaking with NOTUS Thursday on her way to the Senate floor as reported by the outlet Friday. “We need both bodies. So we need the place to be open. We need the House to be functioning.”
The House has been in recess since last month after the Senate failed to pass a spending bill to fund the government, setting the stage for the ongoing government shutdown that’s now on its 24th day as of Friday, fast approaching the record of 35 days set in early 2019.
But for some Senate Republicans, Johnson’s insistence on not reconvening the House until the Senate adopts a spending measure is starting to hurt their own agendas.
“In addition to this making it a lot more difficult for us to actually end the shutdown, it also means that we’re not doing all of the things the House was supposed to be doing during this month,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), one of the five targets of California’s new congressional map, which lawmakers agreed to implement in response to Texas’ redistricting, speaking with MSNBC this week.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) also shared his complaints over the House’s recess with NOTUS, albeit much more reserved than Murkowski and Kiley.
“There’s so many bills that we’re all working on. 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,” Tillis told NOTUS.
“It requires you to be here… 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.”
While Johnson has said he wouldn’t reconvene the House due to it being a “waste of time” given the continued opposition from Senate Democrats to adopt a spending bill without health care subsidy extensions, some critics allege the real reason to be Johnson’s fear of an impending vote on releasing the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting sex-trafficking charges and is reported to have had a long personal relationship with President Donald Trump.