Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana supplied the line of the week, and it is not printable in a family newspaper without a second reading: “Right now, Congress can’t pass gas.” He was complaining about the pace of artificial-intelligence legislation. It works for the gas tax too.
Maya Davis reports in Friday’s Journal that House lawmakers are heading home until after November’s midterms, having already called off two weeks of scheduled work this month and then cut Thursday’s votes as well. Speaker Mike Johnson’s argument is that letting members go now — rather than later this month — is the best path for Republican candidates in the final campaign stretch.
The numbers behind the argument
Both parties are unhappy. Rep. Ralph Norman put the number of canceled voting days at 63 since this Congress started in January 2025: “The Founders did not envision taking this much time off and still getting paid.” Rep. Kat Cammack said she would not recess until the work was done, and named AI as unfinished business. Rep. Pramila Jayapal said the House shouldn’t be leaving early but that she would rather be in her district because the chamber doesn’t “do anything of value here.”
By count, 104 laws have been enacted in the current Congress, putting it on pace for fewer than any of its predecessors since the Civil War. Johnson counters with more than 900 bills passed by his chamber and blames the Senate for not finishing them. A Senate GOP aide called that laughable. From January through August the Senate spent 667 hours in session against the House’s 383.
An April Gallup poll put congressional disapproval at 86%, a historical high. J.D. Rackey of the Bipartisan Policy Center offers the contrarian note: “How you measure productivity is truly all over the place… Some of the metrics, the current Congress is kind of within the average of all the Congresses.”
What is actually stuck
Three things named in the story have direct household consequences. There is no consensus on suspending the gas tax, though some members were clamoring for a vote, with pump prices at the center of this year’s inflation. Both parties see artificial-intelligence legislation as a way off. And a bipartisan measure on sexual misconduct, introduced in May, is held up by the early recess.
One thing did pass: the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill, 262–159, which lets the president impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top five countries importing Russian oil and gas over a 12-month period — a list that today includes China and India. That one has a direct line to energy markets.
Our read
This desk has no view on which party should win in November and a firm view on what to do with a legislature that has stopped legislating: plan on the rules that exist.
That sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored. A great deal of household financial planning quietly assumes a change that has been discussed but not enacted — a tax provision extended, a credit restored, a cap lifted, a subsidy renewed. Every one of those is now, at minimum, a 2027 question. The practical consequence is that decisions with a deadline attached — Roth conversions, charitable bunching, gifting, realizing gains, choosing a health plan in open enrollment — should be made against the law as written, not against the law as hoped for.
And the single most consequential item on that list has a date: the Social Security trust-fund cliff in 2032, covered elsewhere in this edition, on which a Congress that canceled 63 voting days has not started work. Six years sounds like a long time. It is one presidential term and a bit.