There is a season in Congress that is not on the calendar. It has no name in the C-SPAN schedule and no date in the almanac, but every member knows it the way a dog knows the doorbell. It is the stretch in which the House, which had been “in full swing this week, kind of,” decides that it is, in fact, not in full swing this week, kind of, and that it would prefer, on the whole, to go home. Speaker Mike Johnson, who has made a personal art form of the early departure, announced this week that the final two weeks of September are being canceled, allowing lawmakers to leave a day earlier than they had already planned to leave a day earlier than they had planned to plan to leave.
The Roll Call roundup of the session’s hits and misses is, by its own description, the work of a legislature that was “in full swing this week, kind of.” The phrase “kind of” is doing the work that a legislative session usually does. The highlights, per that same roundup, include a clash in a Senate Judiciary hearing, a senator getting testy about party switching, and a House that closed shop early, left town, and will not be back until after the midterms.
That last item is the one with the name in it. The House has punted the vote on the impeachment of the Secretary of Defense until after the November elections, which is to say it has decided, unanimously and on the record, that the timing of a vote on whether to impeach the Secretary of Defense is, at present, a question best answered by the voters. The voters, who have not been asked, are scheduled to weigh in in seven weeks, at which point the matter will be either resolved or, more likely, resolved in the way that these things are resolved when the question is deferred: by being, once again, not the question.
The arithmetic of the early departure is the part I want to sit with. House members are, per the Spokesman-Review’s count, in Washington for only a handful of days between July and November. A handful. The word the House uses for “a small, unspecified, and probably deliberate number” is “a handful,” and it is a good word, and it is the word, and it will be the word when someone asks, in November, what the House accomplished in the two and a half months it was technically in session. The answer will be “a handful,” and the answer will be true, and the answer will be the entire answer.
More than a hundred House Democrats wrote a letter, per the same coverage, asking the Speaker to keep the chamber in session to pass safeguards for artificial intelligence. The letter is, on its face, a reasonable request. It is also, on its face, addressed to the one person in the building whose entire professional record is the early departure. The letter was sent. The departure proceeded. The safeguards, which would have been the work of a session that is, as of this writing, not happening, remain, in the language of the chamber, “for a future session.”
At press time, the House had left, the midterms were seven weeks out, the impeachment vote was, per the schedule, “after the midterms,” and the artificial intelligence safeguards were, per the letter that had been sent and the departure that had proceeded, “a future priority.” The chamber, empty and warm from the evening light, was doing what the chamber has always done in the season that is not on the calendar. It was going home. It was going home early. And it was going home, for the first time in a long while, with the specific and satisfying knowledge that it had left the question of the Secretary of Defense exactly where it had put it: not yet.