WASHINGTON (AP) — Whither the U.S. House?
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday this weekend, the legislative branch has momentarily called it quits.
The House leadership on Tuesday abruptly canceled votes and sent lawmakers home early for the holiday recess, Speaker Mike Johnson ’s majority once again ground to a standstill by a Republican revolt over their own party’s agenda.
In this case, it's a standoff blocking the annual defense bill — with
pay raises for the troops and other matters at a time of war — as the renegade Republicans push to include President Donald Trump’s own priority, the SAVE America Act, a strict voter ID bill. Last week, the Senate similarly shuttered after Trump's demands.
The emptying Capitol provides another snapshot of the imbalance of power in Washington as a headstrong executive confronts a weakened Congress.
For the second time in as many weeks, the House has simply given up.
“It’s a relatively bad time in Congress,” Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota said recently. “A lot of my colleagues have forgotten how to govern.”
A year ago this weekend brought a wholly different scene in Washington, as Trump gathered Republican lawmakers outside the White House for an ebullient July Fourth ceremony to sign what they called the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” of tax breaks and spending cuts.
It was a celebratory moment for Trump and the slim Republican majority — and for Johnson, who many doubted could pass the bill over the objections of Democrats who viewed it as tax giveaway at the expense of billions of dollars in cuts to health care and food stamps for Americans in need.
Johnson was so reliant on Trump's power to help push the bill to approval that he gifted the president a speaker's gavel, which Democrats and others saw as a worrisome symbol of the transference of power from one branch of government to the other.
“We’re not dealing with Speaker Mike Johnson,” Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the caucus chairman, said in a recent interview. “Unfortunately, Speaker Donald Trump does not want us in this week.”
As Johnson works to keep Trump close, the president's demands seem to grow in ways the Republican speaker can't always deliver.
The president’s insistence on the SAVE America Act, which doesn't have enough support in the Senate to pass, has interrupted almost all other business in Congress. Trump has refused to sign a popular bipartisan housing bill that cleared both chambers until the voting bill is also approved. He calls the housing bill a “yawn.”
Johnson spent four hours last week at the White House and said he spent another two hours with the president this week on a path forward.
“I told him, ‘Mr. President, I don’t have any tattoos, but if I did, it’d say SAVE America on my shoulder,’ OK?” Johnson said over the weekend on Fox News.
“We passed it three times in the House already. We’re going to pass it again.”
But by Tuesday, a House vote to advance the legislation collapsed. Republicans led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida argued that Johnson's plan to attach the voting bill to the defense bill was essentially a doomed strategy that would be rejected in the Senate.
“That’s disappointing,” acknowledged Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who insisted the GOP would try again.
“We’re going to keep trying because we have to,” he said. “We’re not done doing big things.”
The founders of the new democracy clearly had aspirations for the Congress, putting it first in the Constitution as the Article One branch of government, ahead of the executive and judicial branches.
But as lawmakers face voters this fall, they will have to answer for these dwindling days on their calendar.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the problem is not the Congress, it's the GOP.
“Donald Trump is fighting with Senate Republicans, Senate Republicans are fighting with House Republicans, and House Republicans are fighting with each other,” said Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if Democrats win control in fall.
“It’s not the Congress that’s struggling. It’s House Republicans who are struggling,” he said.
Jeffries said Democrats are fighting “to make life more affordable for the American people.”
As they left the Capitol for an extended recess, lawmakers voiced frustration with the House’s dysfunction.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, who left the Republican Party to become an independent earlier this year, said the situation in the House is “frustrating.”
“It’s just like déjà vu where many times now we run into some sort of obstacle," he said, “then the solution is just to go home.”
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Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.
