The House of Representatives recessed on Wednesday this week. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made this move to head off a bipartisan push to force votes on a resolution to force the executive branch to promptly release files relating the trafficking of girls by Jeffrey Epstein.
Democrats and their supporters made much hay over the People’s House closing for six weeks when so much work needs done.
Indubitably, the Republicans’ shortening of the work week was driven by politics. But, it also is true that the Wednesday departure was only two days ahead of the chamber’s planned summer break, which was to run form Friday, July 25 to Tuesday, September 2.
An August recess is a tradition on Capitol Hill. It comes on top of periodic breaks that overlap holidays like Christmas, the Fourth of July, and Easter.
The specifics of the congressional calendar is structured by the Constitution, existing law, and the choices made by both chambers. And, as this week’s events illustrate, plainly politics can play a role.
The Constitution originally set the first Monday in December as the start of a new session of Congress, but allowed for the date to be altered by law. The 20th Amendment, which shortened the length of lame-duck presidencies by shifting the inauguration date from March 4th to January 20th, established January 3rd as the start date of a new Congress. Article I, Section 5 establishes the rule that the House and Senate must agree to adjourn if the break is to last more than three days. Most recesses of Congress are accomplished pursuant to this rule by a concurrent resolution, which govern actions within Congress but do have the force of law and so do not require the approval of the president. The August recess was formalized in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, a sweeping piece of legislation that modernized many congressional practices, such as the use of electronic voting in the House of Representatives.
An interesting wrinkle in congressional scheduling is that the Senate is technically in session for much of these breaks. It schedules “pro forma” sessions, which usually only last a few moments and include no more than a handful of members. These meetings are a way to check the power of the president, who can make temporary appointments if the Senate is in recess and can “pocket veto” legislation (killing a law by refusing to sign it when Congress is in recess). President Barack Obama challenged this practice in 2010 by declaring the Senate was actually in recess during pro forma sessions and appointed board members to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. In 2014 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Noel Canning v. NLRB that the president had no authority to decide when the Senate is actually in recess.
Compared to most Americans, members of Congress seem to have a lot of time off. All told, both chambers have been averaging around 150 days in session per year over the last decade. That compares to 180 days for school students and more than 200 days for full-time employees. Why so much free time?
Much of the answer has to do with historical tradition. Washington, D.C. is uncomfortable in the summer — with temperatures in the high 80s and humidity nearing 70 percent. Modern air conditioning was patented in the early 20th century and was not installed on Capitol Hill until 1929, after a number of elderly senators dropped dead during sweltering sessions. So for much of congressional history, members simply fled the heat through lengthy recesses.
Another historical barrier was transportation. Today, we take modern highways and airplanes for granted, but they too are a recent development. It took a long time to travel great distances in the 19th and much of the 20th century, and the congressional calendar had to account for this. To do otherwise would unfairly privilege citizens whose districts were closer to the capital than those farther away. There was also a personal component — members of Congress typically did not bring their families to Washington, D.C., and often stayed with other members at boarding houses. A lengthy break was the only way to see one’s family unless one wanted to bear the burden of moving them to the District.
Yet with all the changes in technology and transportation that have made traveling to and from Washington, D.C., breaks like this are still a good thing. The American system of government is premised on the idea that all governing authority belongs originally to the people. Under the Constitution, the people have delegated certain powers to the three branches of the federal government. Elections are a further delegation, empowering members to wield those constitutional powers for a specific period of time.
It is therefore essential that the representatives of the people keep in close contact with them. That requires lengthy breaks, even as technology has made it easier for members to get back and forth from Capitol Hill. Indeed, the House refers to the August Recess in its calendar as a “district work period,” while the Senate refers to it as a “state work period.” Members of Congress are not required under law or the Constitution to use these recesses as work periods, but most of them do. It is just good political sense — even those in safe seats can be defeated in a primary, and seeming out of touch with constituents is an easy way to get booted from Congress.
A good example of how members treat the August recess is Congressman Mike Kelly, a Republican from western Pennsylvania who represents the 16th District. During the August break, he “lives on (Interstate) 79,” the highway that runs the length of his district, according to Communications Director Matt Knoedler. Kelly has five counties (Erie, Crawford, Lawrence, Mercer, and Butler) in a district that stretches over 100 miles north to south. He tries to visit one county a day during the August recess, with three to five stops within the day. His staff fields calls throughout the spring and summer in efforts to plan Kelly’s time in August.
Kelly is hardly unique. Indeed, members who represent more rural districts must travel much farther, and thus inevitably spend a portion of their August in hotels on the road. Still, this is what members who take the work of Congress seriously do, be they Democrats or Republicans. Meetings with firefighters, tours of local businesses, or eating hotdogs at county fairs are not trivial show pieces, although they can attract favorable coverage from local media. Rather, they are where members engage in essential parts of the representative process. These meetings are where they hear from their constituents about what matters to them, and also have an opportunity to explain to their constituents exactly what they have been doing in Washington. It is not particularly glamorous work, but it is an important part of how representative democracy happens in practice.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of five books, most recently Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution (AEI Press, 2023).
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