To end the shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to call the House back in session. He did. For roughly eight hours Wednesday. Then he gave House members the rest of the week off.
“What do you make of Speaker Johnson?” Raw Story asked Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA). “You guys have just been gone for, like, more than a month, but you guys are just here for one day and then you're gone?”
“He's the most disappointing member of the U.S. Congress,” Beyer said, just off the Capitol steps Wednesday. “There was the opportunity to do a lot of other work that needs to be done in committee after committee, and that didn't get done.”
Instead of making up for lots of lost time, Congress still intends to take off the full weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That means there are only four more legislative weeks in the year. And when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, the 2026 midterm elections formally begin, which historically has meant an end to most legislating in Washington.
Still, Johnson’s all smiles for the cameras.
“Republicans are going to deliver for the people,” he told reporters this week.
“We're ready to get back to our legislative agenda. We have a very aggressive calendar for the remainder of this year. There'll be some long days and nights here, some long working weeks, but we will get this thing back on track.”
That’s what Democrats are afraid of.
‘Wow’
The reason House members got a 53-day vacation, even as the longest shutdown in history lasted 43 days, is because after the House passed its initial continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government on Sept. 19th, it left town — even though government funding didn’t run out til Oct. 1st.
Johnson intended to jam the Senate by forcing the upper chamber to either adopt or reject the House measure.
It took 53 days for senators to craft their own compromise. That needed the House to come back to town to sign off. It did so, and President Donald Trump signed the bill into law on Wednesday night.
Frustrated House Democrats accuse Johnson of living in la-la land, in part because the new measure reopening the federal government expires as soon as Jan. 30.
“We should be here every day to make up for the 53 days that we weren't here,” Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT) told Raw Story on the Capitol steps.
“But also, what we did was just gave ourselves another deadline. So we need to start working. We should have been working from Oct. 1st to meet that deadline.”
A formerly bankrupt businessman occupies the White House — a fact not lost on most Democrats.
“Well, if you were dealing with corporate management, you'd probably say it wasn't too efficient,” Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) told Raw Story, just off the floor of the House, about the funding process.
“You'd probably say you'd find a little bit more to manage.”
“It feels like they're just putting Trump in the driver's seat by being gone for upwards of a month?” Raw Story asked.
“It does, and I think that's what he liked,” Davis said. “And I think that's what they like.
“And so it's kind of like a camel, humping to please, and I think they're trying very hard to stay in the good graces of the president. Please him, please him, please him, please him.”
One thing that likely displeased Trump: on Wednesday, after delaying for weeks, Johnson was forced to swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ).
She immediately joined a majority of her House colleagues in signing a discharge petition, which forces Johnson to bring up for a vote a measure demanding the Trump administration release the full “Epstein files.”
For former Jan. 6, 2021 committee members like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), it’s clear: the Speaker kept the House out to forestall seating Grijalva.
“I think it's about the legislative days to ripen the discharge petition,” Lofgren told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol.
Like others on the left, Lofgren felt her suspicions were only confirmed by Wednesday’s release of new emails from the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that directly named Trump.
“Wow,” Lofgren said of the documents released by the House Oversight Committee. “Wow.”
‘A double whammy on our democracy’
Many Democrats fear Republicans’ absence from Washington for the past month made Trump’s case that the White House holds all the power.
“We adjourned when Trump wanted us to adjourn and we come back whenever Trump gives the okay, or the directive, to come back and what we consider is what his agenda is,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) told Raw Story.
Congress is “blatantly subjugating itself to executive authority,” Johnson said.
Like most on the left, Johnson says he’s disappointed because Speaker Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by trade, is ceding Congress’s constitutional powers.
“The House is no longer acting as an independent Article I institution. It's an organ of Article II,” Johnson said.
“That's revolutionary in and of itself, especially when the Supreme Court is giving away legislative power.
“So it's a double whammy on our democracy. After 249 years, this experiment is under direct assault from both the executive and the judicial branches.”
Republicans aren’t buying that, especially when it comes to the continuing resolution to keep the government funded at, mostly, last year's numbers.
Far from it. Republicans are cheering for themselves.
“This is monumental. We're doing the CR, which is fantastic,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Raw Story ahead of Wednesday’s vote to reopen the government.
The measure also included three of the 12 spending — or appropriations — bills required to fund the government for a full year. Those included funding for Congress itself, the agriculture sector, military construction and veterans affairs.
“So this is not a ‘just for today’ thing,” Van Orden said. “It's an amazing thing for America today, and it comes to you from the Republican Party.”
Rank-and-file Republicans argue the extended recesses the Republican majority just gave itself didn’t impact the other nine full-year spending bills Congress has to fund before Jan. 30.
“We've already read them. They're nothing new. They already passed through committee a long time ago,” Van Orden said. “In order to get back to regular order, you got to get back to regular order.”
‘He just lied’
Throughout the shutdown, House Democrats held in-person caucus meetings at the Capitol, along with occasional press conferences, even as Speaker Johnson addressed the cameras himself.
“In his daily press conferences, he just lied again and again and again,” said Beyer, from Virginia.
“He also used the most extreme language, you know, this ‘Marxist’ and ‘communist’ and all this crazy stuff. I mean, I'm not big into name-calling, especially things that are sort of disconnected from reality.
“Also, I thought there was a pettiness and meanness about the way he managed this place. Locking all the doors. Not lifting the [security] barriers. Of course, staff had to wait in line 30 and 45 minutes to get in in the morning because they would lock all the doors.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) speaks. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
But beyond abused employees or hurt feelings, Democrats feel their base was energized by the shutdown.
“I believe the American people are ready to stand up and insist that we rehabilitate and strengthen this democracy for the next 250 years,” said Johnson, from Georgia.
“The people are enlivened, even if the House has been MIA?” Raw Story pressed.
“That's right. They're even more engaged now,” Johnson said. “They are more aware of the stakes of what this democracy means for their pocketbooks, for their ability to afford to live in this country, and people are connecting the dots.
“They're recognizing that MAGA — Trump and Republicans — are all about tax cuts for billionaires and multi-millionaires and tariffs for everyone else.
“It's getting to be unbearable. The American people want relief. So they have become even more attuned to what's happening since this shutdown began, and they're going to be engaged next year in these elections.”
Hayes, the Connecticut Democrat, said her party’s fight wasn’t about the midterms.
“The midterms are a long way off, and a lot of people are going to get screwed between now and then,” Hayes told Raw Story.
“So our goal can't be we fix this in the midterm. We work every day to do something. Anything — or, you know, get caught trying.”
