*** Ed Kilgore - 9/1/26 - Congress Dodges Pre-Midterms Government Shutdown + 9/4/26 -Congressional Republicans Are Bailing on Trump and All His Unfinished Business........
Buzz Sawyer
before the latest congressional recess, to keep the government going until December 11.
On Tuesday, the House followed with a 307-48 vote rubber-stamping the Senate measure.
The White House has signaled that the president will sign the bill, averting a possible
government shutdown when current funding runs out on September 30.
The bill passed under suspension of the rules to avoid potential hang-ups in the
House Rules Committee, and in the end only 19 Republicans and 29 Democrats
could bestir themselves to oppose it. Republicans holdouts were mostly House Freedom
Caucus militants upset about an obscure dispute over hemp regulation, along with
the bill’s language delaying an OMB plan to allow suspension of grants to blue
because it didn’t restrict or claw back money being used by ICE."
H.R. 6500, the “Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027
elections (yes, the House is due to return for four days in mid-September, but only
to ventilate the air over “messaging” bills that aren’t intended to become law).
Politico’s take on Congress’s unfinished business mentioned much-needed data-center
legislation distancing the GOP from that suddenly very unpopular by-product of the AI
revolution; the Russia-sanctions legislation once expected to quickly be enacted as a
memorial to Lindsey Graham; and steps to continue Epstein-files oversight and examine
there is so, so much more going undone:
No farm bill. No AI regulations. No affordability agenda. No transportation bill.
No water resources bill. No college sports bill. No end to this war …
It seems that despite their vast differences, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have decided that they wouldn’t benefit from a government shutdown right before the midterms. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Donald Trump has suddenly refrained from temper tantrums over what Congress has failed to do to advance his extremist agenda, particularly when it comes to his hopes of blowing up state election rolls and/or restricting voting by mail. The Senate easily (by a 90-6 vote) passed a stopgap-spending bill in early August, before the latest congressional recess, to keep the government going until December 11. On Tuesday, the House followed with a 307-48 vote rubber-stamping the Senate measure. The White House has signaled that the president will sign the bill, averting a possible government shutdown when current funding runs out on September 30.
The bill passed under suspension of the rules to avoid potential hang-ups in the House Rules Committee, and in the end only 19 Republicans and 29 Democrats could bestir themselves to oppose it. Republicans holdouts were mostly House Freedom Caucus militants upset about an obscure dispute over hemp regulation, along with the bill’s language delaying an OMB plan to allow suspension of grants to blue states fighting the administration. Some Democratic progressives voted against the bill because it didn’t restrict or claw back money being used by ICE.
For now, the stopgap bill represents the only absolutely mandatory legislative item on the preelection congressional agenda, though Republicans are torn between the desire to go home and campaign and the need to show some work ethic while buttressing the party’s midterm messaging, such as it is. A procedural vote in the House right after the stopgap-spending bill passed might have forced the GOP to give up and adjourn right away, but unexpectedly, two conservative Democrats bailed them out, giving Speaker Mike Johnson the chance to push a few more pieces of legislation (e.g., an anti-socialism resolution designed to back up the GOP’s Red Scare claims of a “Bolshevik” takeover of the Democratic Party). But for the most part, it appears this session of Congress is likely to end not with a bang but a whimper, perhaps amplified by a demagogic gesture or two.
Congressional Republicans Are Bailing on Trump and All His Unfinished Business
By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015The first session of the 119th Congress was characterized by frenetic activity, even if some of it was simply a matter of getting out of the way of Donald Trump’s various executive-branch power grabs. The largest and broadest single piece of legislation ever, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was signed into law on July 4, 2025. It was so packed with policy dynamite (tax cuts, a huge plus-up for defense and immigration-enforcement spending, and social-services cuts that wreaked havoc around the country) that members of both parties are still campaigning on its good and bad features well over a year later. In 2025, Congress revoked much of the regulatory legacy of the Biden administration and found new ways to confirm Trump’s executive and judicial nominees quickly and without debate.
If reckless speed was the watchword for the Republican Congress in 2025, in 2026 it was mañana. Yes, it passed another budget-reconciliation bill, but it was very narrowly tailored to pre-fund immigration enforcement. Yes, Congress kept the federal government open, aside from a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that dragged on for months with no real resolution. But again and again, sometimes with the House leading the foot-dragging and sometimes the Senate, Congress kept putting off major initiatives, including many that the tyrant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had insisted he just had to have. And now Congress is in recess, for all intents and purposes, until after the midterm elections (yes, the House is due to return for four days in mid-September, but only to ventilate the air over “messaging” bills that aren’t intended to become law).
Politico’s take on Congress’s unfinished business mentioned much-needed data-center legislation distancing the GOP from that suddenly very unpopular by-product of the AI revolution; the Russia-sanctions legislation once expected to quickly be enacted as a memorial to Lindsey Graham; and steps to continue Epstein-files oversight and examine DoJ’s slow-walking of the controversy. But as Democratic senator Brian Schatz noted, there is so, so much more going undone:
No farm bill. No AI regulations. No affordability agenda. No transportation bill. No water resources bill. No college sports bill. No end to this war … See you right before the holidays! Great job!
Perhaps most remarkable of all, there’s no third budget-reconciliation bill, which was supposed to be the vehicle for a veritable ton of agenda items various Republicans wanted and needed. It was necessary, we were told, to pay for the unanticipated costs of the Iran war, to provide succor to farmers aggrieved by the president’s trade initiative, and most important, to give said president a sort of down payment on the radical proof-of-citizenship voting scheme he wanted to impose via the SAVE America Act. Some fiscal hawks, moreover, hoped Reconciliation 3.0 might begin the much-anticipated work of gutting the social safety net far more than contemplated in the Big Beautiful Bill and even beginning to reduce the national debt. None of that is happening. Somehow, today, with Congress already long gone and intent on barely coming back, Donald Trump sent out this order on Truth Social:
How? When? In truth, Trump’s hopes of blowing up the midterms by taking over state-voters rolls to purge imaginary noncitizens now depends on a long-shot bid for Supreme Court approval of his wild scheme to make the U.S. Postal Service a choke point for mail ballots. But he can’t seem to let go of the reins he holds of his runaway Congress.
Yes, it’s true that the 119th Congress can reconvene after the midterms; indeed, it has to come back in order to deal with the expiration of stopgap spending authority for the federal government on December 11. But with a new Congress looming on January 3, more than likely with Democrats controlling one or both chambers, there won’t be much time to take on the backlog of legislation that never made it to the floor during the previous 11 months. That’s particularly true of anything requiring a party-line budget-reconciliation bill, full of procedural requirements that can hardly be crammed into a short pre-Christmas lame-duck session.
More likely than not, this GOP Congress has already done its best, and its worst, and for all the many, many things it has done, by commission and omission, to please Donald Trump, it is leaving him in the lurch to a considerable extent. He’s not going to like the next Congress if his party’s trifecta is broken in November, but maybe he should have spent more time in 2026 focusing on legislation instead of waging a no-win war and building monuments to himself.