Glacial pace: Despite promises of accountability, Congress is off to yawning start

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) bolted off the Senate floor before 2 p.m. Thursday, slapping two colleagues on the shoulder and giving them an order to relax: “Y’all take the rest of the weekend off.”

It was a sarcastic joke about the Senate’s historically slow pace to start off the new Congress. Two hours earlier on Thursday, the House wrapped up its final votes for the week and departed on an 18-day break from the legislative session. Unlike past new majorities, these House Republicans have opted to move slowly in trying to advance their agenda.

Over the first 100 days of their majority — what Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) considered a critical moment when he took over as speaker in 1995 — the House Republican calendar includes just 30 days in the Capitol voting on legislation. Over the next roughly 10 weeks, the House is slated for just six full days in session, with nearly a dozen other half-day meetings so members travel into and out of Washington.

All told, this Congress will be mostly about sound and fury well into the spring and early summer.

It began in early January with a four-and-a-half-day marathon to elect House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), followed by fights over who got seated or ejected from committee assignments. The past 10 days brought the early stages of GOP investigations, as well as President Biden’s clash with Republicans about entitlement programs during Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

House Republicans have made a conscious go-slow decision so that they can make sure they can actually pass their priorities. Their narrow majority gives them just two, three or four votes to spare — depending on who is healthy and attending.

“I think we want to do it right, because let’s remember what the Senate is doing, which is going to be a whole lot of nothing with whatever we pass. So I think doing it right is an okay strategy,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.).

The hard-right faction, which forced McCarthy into concessions before giving him the votes to claim the gavel, also prefers doing less as a matter of conservative principle.

“It is not, to me, advantageous for Congress to be doing a lot, but to be doing less and doing it well,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.).

Roy acknowledged that some of the early legislation passing the House — a rebuke to Biden for drawing on national oil reserves, rejections of pandemic-era mandates — might look like “small ball.” But those early moves are helping set the stage for bigger fights to come.

“We’ve passed meaningful bills our folks care about while we are getting prepared for what is obviously the important spending debate,” he said, “and we are laying down markers on that. That takes a lot of time and thinking.”

That drawn-out selection for the House speaker set Republicans back in the attempt to hit the ground running. With uncertainty over McCarthy’s ascension, Republicans could not make their selections for committee chairs and seats on those legislative committees in December, instead filling those posts in the weeks after the final vote on the early morning of Jan. 7.

Some committees didn’t have their organizing meetings until just the past few days — never mind holding hearings about actual legislative policy.

Across the Capitol, Senate Democrats have decided they will take their time considering major issues to see how functional the new House majority will be, whether McCarthy can unify ranks or if internal GOP fighting makes the House ungovernable.

“I think there’s understandable you-go-first dynamics happening. So I think there’s a bunch of potential bipartisan conversations that could happen here,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Thursday. “But until there’s some — some — smoke signals from the House as to whether they’re going to be a 100 percent dumpster fire, or only an 80 percent dumpster fire, there’s a reluctance to get things moving.”

They sure aren’t moving, even by the Senate’s own historical measure of operating at a glacial pace.

When Tuberville cracked his joke about taking the weekend off, the chamber had held only its eighth roll-call vote of the new year.

On Jan. 3, the first day of the 118th Congress, the Senate convened to swear in its newest members and those incumbents who won another term. Then, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) closed the Senate later that afternoon and sent everyone home for 20 days.

So far, the Senate’s accomplishments include confirming two members of the board to the U.S. Institute of Peace, one federal judge and a Pentagon official. Senators also unanimously supported resolutions condemning stalking and sex trafficking.

“This is probably one of the slowest starts in memory for the Senate,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a 16-year veteran of the chamber, said Thursday.

He’s right.

Of the 12 times the Senate has started off a new Congress since 2001, only the 2005 edition launched with fewer votes and less fanfare.

By this point in 2021, the Senate had already cast 57 votes, confirming many members of Biden’s Cabinet and approving a budget resolution that set the stage for sending a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill to Biden by early March.

In 2011, the last time Democrats lost the House and retained the Senate majority in a midterm election, they took a slow start out of the gate, holding just 14 votes over the first five weeks in session. That Senate confirmed a few judges, debated its procedural rules and considered legislation related to labor and health laws in its first weeks in action.

That might be a harbinger of things to come these next two years, according to Barrasso, because Democrats no longer have an incentive to move aggressively after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lost the speaker’s gavel.

“When the American people chose the Republicans to be in charge of the House, that stopped the railroad of Pelosi-Schumer-Biden,” he said.

Biden, Senate Democrats and House Republicans will eventually have a major clash on lifting the Treasury’s borrowing authority, but that is currently a mid-June deadline and, depending on revenue levels after tax season, could push deeper into the summer.

Until then, the attention will likely fall on personalities and investigations, many of which will have minimal impact on policy issues. This lack of real action probably explains the public’s continued disgust with Congress.

According to Gallup’s monthly tracking poll, 21 percent of Americans approved of Congress’s job performance last month, while 75 percent disapproved. That’s statistically consistent with how voters viewed Congress in the months leading up to Republicans winning the House majority in November.

Usually, voters give a temporary boost in approval when a new majority takes charge. Gallup found a 10-point jump for congressional approval in the first two months of the House GOP’s majority in 2011 and a 16-point bump in the early weeks of the new Democratic majority in 2007.

House Republicans saw three key issues where they had a political edge last year: border security, fighting crime and inflation. Their campaign agenda, the Commitment to America, included planks for each of those issues, but no major legislation on those topics has come up in the first two months.

Republicans tried to round up support for Roy’s tough-on-migrants bill to secure the border, but several GOP moderates backed away. So McCarthy sent the proposal back to the Judiciary Committee, and most other legislation must go first to committees as part of the concessions to hard-right conservatives.

“There’s a demand for regular order on major agenda items, so it’s just going to take time,” Crenshaw said.

Murphy wants to tap into the momentum of last year’s bipartisan Senate “gangs” that helped pass legislation codifying same-sex marriage, approving modest gun violence bills and reshaping election laws after the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.

Some of those senators traveled to the Mexican border together last month and are willing to work on a major immigration package, if they think the House could handle it.

“We need a little bit more help from the House as to even what areas they’re interested in working on or not working on,” Murphy said.

“If they’re not going to be able to tie their shoes, then there’s going to be less interest in doing big, bipartisan deals here,” he added.