Being a Member of Congress is a Full-time Job
Every time we turn around, it seems like the United States Senate or House of Representatives is leaving town for a break period that sometimes extends for weeks at a time. On the 2022 calendar above, the red days show when the Senate is in session and the blue days show when the House is in session. In 2021, the Senate was in session for 158 days and the House was in session for 172 days. There are about 260 workdays in the average work-year in the United States; when you factor in that US workers receive on average about 10 days of paid leave each year, this means most people are working around 250 days. What’s up with the House and Senate only being in session about 2/3 that number of days?
There are a few factors at work.
If elected officials don’t show their faces regularly in their districts, their constituents (and potential political opponents) claim that they are part of a “Washington elite,” who live in the “swamp” (which apparently always needs to be drained). Constituents want their elected officials to hold town halls and work regularly out of their district offices. Elected officials are expected to attend local government events and ride in the lead car in a variety of parades. This is as much the job of the member of the House or Senate as legislating is.
The House deals with this by regularly observing a four-day Washington work week.
The Senate is more likely to take a week off at a time, frequently holding legislative sessions only three weeks out of a month.
Committees continue to meet (and members are often in their offices and staff come to work every day) when Congress is not in session. Committees are where the real work of Congress gets done. Woodrow Wilson wrote his first major book on the Congress, observing “. . . it is not far from the truth to say that congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work.” (Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, 1885). This was all more visible this past summer, as the ‘Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol’ interviewed witnesses and held public hearings on days when the House was not officially in session. The members of this committee (and their staffs) worked across the calendar and around the clock to organize and disseminate the information they received in the course of their investigation. This committee was one among the many committees that get their work done when Congress is not officially in session.
Members of Congress have oversight responsibilities for the activities of the federal government. This means they have to go to places where government activities are being carried out – factories, businesses, ports, urban planning offices, schools, transportation hubs, social service agencies, and so forth – to see what’s going on and respond to problems. Congress makes budgeting decisions every year, and part of what goes into these decisions is the observations they make about how well current policies are working.
This oversight activity sometimes involves overseas travel by a Congressional Delegation (a CODEL in Congress-speak). Members of Congress show up on the ground all over the place (Ukraine, China, Honduras, Nigeria), to get a sense of what’s going on, how American resources are being employed, what needs are not being met, what needs are still unaddressed, and so forth. If they don’t do this, they will be attacked for living in their ivory tower and never having “boots on the ground.”
In election years, members of Congress have to go back to their states or districts to run for re-election. They can’t run for office from Washington. They have to participate in the “rubber chicken” circuit of civic association dinners and barbecues. For this reason, the House is often in session fewer days during an election year – which is every even-numbered year. This year, the House was not in session for the months of August and October. This is what the House Calendar has looked like in recent election years:
2002 – 126 days
2004 – 110 days
2006 – 104 days
2008 – 119 days
2010 – 128 days
2012 – 153 days (big number!)
2014 – 137 days
2016 – 131 days
2018 – 175 days (another big number !)
2020 – 164 days (big again!)
2022 – 112 (one of the smallest numbers)
Much of what members of Congress do when they are not in session looks like a vacation to us. They go to fancy dinners, ride in parades, and get to travel around the world. This is part of their workload, and they ignore it at their peril. There’s always a political opponent waiting in the wings to charge that the member of Congress is “out of touch” if he or she stays in Washington too much of the time.
We are currently in what’s called the “lame duck” session of Congress – the term remaining before the new Congress is sworn in on January 3 following the November election. This is usually a time of transition in the Congress while a lot of things happen: defeated (or retired) members of Congress pack up and prepare to move on; new members attend orientation (just like being a high school or college freshman); staff keep their eyes on employment opportunities while refreshing their resumes; furniture, file boxes, and office decor get moved from office to office in a cascading series of office changes, and so forth.
A little insight into the office switching process. The seniority system determines how office spaces are assigned in the House or Senate office buildings (there are three office buildings for each house of Congress). This means that the newly elected member doesn’t get to move into the space vacated by his or her predecessor; that might be a large or conveniently located office, not appropriate for a newcomer. Let’s use Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont for this example.
He served in the Senate for 47 years and was the senior Democrat in the Senate in his last term of office. His office in the Russell House Office Building is large and is in a desirable location.
The person elected to succeed him, Democrat Peter Welch, is not likely to get this office. Instead, another Senator (let’s say Mark Warner although I don’t have any idea if he would want to make this switch) who doesn’t like his office space might put himself in the lottery to get Leahy’s office suite.
If he is successful, that put Warner’s office space up for grabs. And so forth.
It’s like a giant game of Pachinko; the marbles all eventually get into their spaces at the bottom of the board, but it might be a bumpy ride.
I worked for Senator Chuck Robb the first summer he was in office in 1993. He had just moved into his permanent office space a few weeks before I got there in June, although he had been in office since January. He had to wait for the marbles to settle before he was allocated permanent office space.
The office switching thing is more complicated when control of one of the parts of Congress switches from one party to the other. In the House, the Democrats are currently preparing to give up control of Committee chairmanships and the accompanying large majority staffs; Republicans will hire their own committee staffs (in most cases) who will move into the larger offices previously occupied by the Democratic majority staff, while the pared-down Democratic staff members will move into the smaller minority committee staff office space. That’s not true for every committee, but it’s true for most of them. All of this has to be done while Congress is not actually trying to conduct business. The corridors are full of desks, furniture, file cabinets, bookshelves, framed photographs and certificates, state flags, and anything else that might decorate a congressional office. Congress hires temporary movers to cart things around.
And there’s more. The Speaker of the House has a ceremonial office just off the floor of Congress in the Capitol Building in addition to the office he or she has in a House Office Building. Nancy Pelosi is in the process of moving out of that office so that Kevin McCarthy (or whoever the GOP chooses to be Speaker) can move in. That’s the office where one of the January 6 yahoos propped his feet up on the desk while rifling through papers. Yeah, you can have it, Kevin or whoever.
As of today (December 2, 2022) the House is scheduled to be in session for eight more days of this year’s lame-duck session. The Senate will be in session for 12 more days. Both houses have a significant agenda to get through during these days.
The Senate has already passed the Respect for Marriage age (codifying the right to same-sex marriage in the wake of Justice Thomas’s statements in his concurring opinion in Dobbs). The bill is expected to be passed in the House next Tuesday
Both houses have to pass some kind of budget bill to keep the government running after December 16.
President Biden has asked for nearly $40 billion in aid for Ukraine and $9 billion in COVID funding.
They need to pass the National Defense Authorization (NDAA), the annual military funding bill. According to the Washington Post, lawmakers are way behind this year.
A bipartisan group of Senators wants to revise the Electoral Count Act, the ambiguities of which The Former Guy tried to exploit to overturn the 2020 election results.
They need to raise the debt limit – although the deadline for this isn’t until next year. Democrats are calling for dealing with it now, while they still control both houses of Congress. The GOP has warned that they plan to use it as leverage for spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare or other policy demands next year.
And more.
This is an ambitious agenda, and they’re not likely to get it all done. But I don’t think it’s because of their calendar; it’s because only one party is interested in actually governing while the other is interested in obstructing. But that’s an essay for another day.