With Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s announcement canceling a portion of the Senate’s usual August recess, hope springs eternal that the Republican Senate will one day start working.
For months, conservatives have been pleading with the Kentucky Republican leader to work five days a week, and thus keep Democrats off the campaign trail, and cancel their monthlong August break, in order to confirm President Trump’s key nominees and actually keep some of their campaign promises: repealing Obamacare, defunding Planned Parenthood, and prioritizing border security, among them.
Now that the Senate has committed to staying in town for three more weeks in August, they have a chance to actually put some points on the board.
What would that look like? First and foremost, it means they need to stay in town for the three weeks they’ve promised. Recall the bait and switch from just a year ago, when McConnell received praise for canceling the first two weeks of August recess, but then called the whole thing off after just four days of session.
Second, it means passing all their funding bills before the end of August. Specifically, it means funding the troops first and Congress last. On this point, the Senate is already off to a bad start.
According to the Senate’s appropriations schedule, funding for the troops will be considered dead last. This is a transparently cynical attempt to use troop funding as leverage in a potential shutdown fight in September. That is, any member seeking changes will be told they are playing politics with troop funding, how dare they! (Yes, this is D.C. The hypocrisy is as blatant as it is shameless.)
All of this can be avoided, however, if the Senate simply stays in town until it passes all of its funding bills, thus avoiding a September shutdown fight altogether. This is important for two reasons. First, Congress would actually be doing its job (yes, the bar for Congress working is so low that it gets a special highlight when they do). Second, however, it would allow for the transparency, debate, and deliberation missing from just about every other funding fight this year.
Remember what happened to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., when he tried to get a single amendment vote on a funding bill in February? Or how about the 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion spending bill that Congress passed in March without giving members time to even read it?
It is incumbent upon the Senate to avoid similar scenarios this time around. Staying in town until all funding bills are complete will allow time for the debate and amendments that have been previously denied, not to mention the transparency that Congress owes the voters when it comes to spending.
Next on the list for the Senate is confirming the president’s nominees — all 156 of them currently awaiting consideration. This is a historic level of backlog. At this point in their terms, all four of Trump’s immediate predecessors had their people in place and working to implement their agenda. And even though the Senate has been slowly moving through judicial confirmations, there are still more judicial vacancies now than when Trump took office.
Republicans blame Democrats for their obstruction. And yes, unsurprisingly, Democrats are doing what minority parties are allowed to do in the Senate: obstruct. But you know what majority parties are allowed to do? Mete out consequences for obstruction. The Senate’s rules provide the majority with ample opportunity to cause the minority party pain if they continue to drag things out. (I’ve written about this in depth here.)
Right now, Senate Democrats are obstructing for free. It’s high time that McConnell use the Senate’s rules to start punching back.
For the notoriously slothful Senate, committing to stay in town is only step one. Step two is following through — and until they do, this commitment is merely words on a page. The Senate must actually use their working weeks in August to deliver — staying in town, working five days a week, using the full measure of the Senate’s rules to confirm Trump’s nominees, and passing all their funding bills to avoid shutdown drama in September.
Anything less puts this promise into the all-too-familiar category of “made, but not kept.”
Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) is policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute.
