43 days and counting: Why the House is working way less than the Senate

Tuesday was supposed to be a voting day in the House, with members flying back to Washington to begin their workweek by passing a slate of bipartisan bills.

Instead the floor was largely deserted after Republican leaders pushed back the chamber’s first votes — further adding to a gaping divide between the House and Senate in how often lawmakers on each side of the Capitol are carrying out their most basic legislative duties.

According to a Blue Light News analysis of the Congressional Record, the House has gaveled in 241 days during the 119th Congress, compared to the Senate’s 284 session days. The analysis includes brief pro forma sessions, which both chambers conduct during extended recesses at roughly the same pace.

That 43-day gap is looming extra large as Hill Republicans face a massive time crunch ahead of the midterms, with hopes of passing several major pieces of legislation ranging from a GOP-only immigration enforcement funding package to bipartisan transportation and housing bills and key extension of government surveillance powers.

But even though the House has only 38 scheduled legislative days left before Election Day, GOP leaders have continued to cancel votes at times, prompting many lawmakers to stay home as Speaker Mike Johnson struggles to wrangle his tiny majority.

The ever-tightening calendar has further imperiled the GOP’s hopes of passing yet another longshot party-line bill focused on war funding and affordability issues before voters head to the polls — one that Johnson has said Republicans could advance by the end of July despite a lack of consensus on what exactly should go in it.

Johnson often argues the “sausage-making” of the legislative process isn’t always pretty, and he has managed to get out of many — though not all — of his tough spots.

“Despite a razor-thin House majority, and the resulting frequency of various attendance problems, and despite a string of record-setting government shutdowns forced by the Democrats, Speaker Johnson, his leadership team, and House Republicans have delivered countless positive legislative results for the American people,” said Taylor Haulsee, a spokesperson for the speaker, citing “lower taxes, secure borders, reduced crime, a return to American energy dominance, massive reductions in burdensome regulations, fraud, waste and abuse, and more.”

Furthermore, senior House Republicans and aides argue it’s often better to cancel votes or keep members home than risk bringing them back prematurely to a failed vote that would generate frustrations and risk a backlash against Johnson and his fellow leaders.

The biggest reason for the discrepancy between the House and Senate calendars was last fall’s record-setting government shutdown. Johnson kept his chamber out of session for nearly two months after House Republicans passed a funding package that languished in the Senate due to a Democratic filibuster.

Eventually, Democrats flinched and the government reopened, but the costs were significant: Committee work ground to a halt and the floor agenda piled up just as the GOP majority grew even more unmanageable.

Since then, Johnson and fellow leaders have pared back session days as they have faced dicey legislative fights and uncertain attendance.

Just ahead of the recent Memorial Day recess, Republicans’ hopes of quickly passing the immigration enforcement bill evaporated after President Donald Trump’s administration announced the creation of a controversial “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could be used to hand large settlements to presidential allies.

Members headed home expecting to return for Tuesday’s votes, but Johnson & Co. instead opted to punt the week’s first roll call votes to Wednesday. That effectively gave the White House more time to wriggle out of the payout-fund mess and also possibly strike an Iran deal that would forestall an embarrassing loss on a bipartisan resolution to end the war in the Middle East.

Tuesday was also primary Election Day in several key states, meaning member attendance would be sketchier than usual — another consideration weighing on the GOP whip team.

“Even if one or two members are missing, it can derail a whole week of floor plans,” said one senior GOP aide who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the challenges facing the House majority.

There’s also the long-term absence of Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.), who has been missing from Capitol Hill since March 5 with what his office says is a health matter.

Some committee business continued Tuesday — including an Appropriations subcommittee hearing where acting Attorney General Todd Blanche renounced the fund — but most rank-and-file members were not present on Capitol Hill.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries took advantage of the vacuum at a news conference, insisting that a string of legislative setbacks and floor defeats for Republicans has contributed to the House’s poor attendance.

“What exactly do Republicans have to show for being in complete control of Congress over the last 18 or so months? The answer would be nothing, nada, zero,” Jeffries told reporters.

“They made life worse for the American people, and so that’s one of the reasons why I’m convinced that Republicans continue to cancel votes and do everything they can every week to get out of town before sundown,” he added.

The two chambers were in roughly the same number of days to this point in the last Congress, — with the House meeting 257 days between January 2023 and June 2024 versus the Senate’s 260 days. There was a significant gap in the same window for the 117th Congress, when differing approaches to the Covid pandemic contributed to the House’s lighter, 237-day schedule versus the Senate’s 271 days in session.

The Senate has a natural advantage in managing its calendar. It has the unique role of approving presidential nominees, which means it can usually easily fill its agenda with confirmation votes even when legislative business stalls. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also has a slightly more comfortable majority, with 53 Republican senators, as well as Vice President JD Vance available to break ties.

In the House, on the other hand, Republicans have been working with a one-to-three-seat majority since the Congress began in January 2025 — a tiny margin in the much larger chamber.

On some recent voting days, Johnson did not appear to have a functioning majority. In the hours before lawmakers left for the Memorial Day recess, GOP leaders suffered an embarrassing defeat when a small group of Republicans joined with Democrats to vote down a bill that would have advanced plans for the Smithsonian National Women’s History Museum while barring exhibits on transgender women and giving Trump more control over its location.

Johnson then faced another GOP rebellion, this time on a vote forced by Democrats to effectively end hostilities with Iran. The measure was set to be approved thanks to Republican defections, and it would have delivered Trump a major rebuke. The speaker huddled with Majority Leader Steve Scalise and top GOP aides on the House floor and ultimately decided to postpone the vote until after the recess.As Johnson struggled to get through the vote series that last session day in May, the sentiment among Republicans on the House floor was clear.

“We just gotta get out of here,” one senior House Republican said.