Washington– Just as the Senate prepared for it Kicking off the late night voting seriesRepublican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana went to the floor to vent.
Kennedy, apparently frustrated and exhausted, said on Wednesday that he wanted more time to discuss his amendments to the budget resolution to fund immigration enforcement agencies. But he had another complaint.
“Frankly, I’m concerned about the health of some of our members,” Kennedy said as the clock approached 9 p.m. “It doesn’t mean they’re in bad health, but it’s hard to stay up all night.”
More than 6 hours later, just after 3:30 a.m., senators finished another marathon vote on the amendments and walked out of the chamber, dazed and tired and resigned to doing it again soon.
It’s a complaint as old as Congress, where leaders in both major political parties often resort to the tortured overnight session to wear down members, overcome objections, and push legislation through. But it is a scenario that is repeated over and over again, almost as usual, as the House and Senate disintegrate and move from one crisis to another.
Lawmakers say a symptom of a dysfunctional Congress is that leaders are increasingly forced to govern in the dead of night.
“The dysfunction is getting worse,” said Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who has been a member of Congress for 14 years. He said lawmakers have become “less mature,” with an increasing number of them acting solely in their own self-interest and stalling bills or delaying procedures.
“It’s not a healthy lifestyle for the country or for lawmakers,” Cramer said. “There is less attention to team effort.”
In the past few weeks, Congress has repeatedly debated pressing national issues into the night, leading to confusion and turmoil in both chambers.
Much of the drama has centered, as is increasingly the case, on government funding.
In late March, Senate Republicans reached an agreement with Democrats to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, including the TSA, while Democrats continued to block funds to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, including the TSA. Immigration, Customs, and Border Patrol After two protesters were shot in Minneapolis. It was a major accomplishment, as Majority Leader John Thune, R-D., passed the spending bill by voice vote — meaning no objections from either side — just after 2 a.m.
Senators then went home for a two-week recess, leaving the House of Representatives to the final floor. But House lawmakers were asleep when the final agreement was announced to the Senate I got up and rejected it angrilySaying they will not pass legislation that does not include funding for immigration enforcement agencies. Senators were then forced to come up with a new plan to reopen the department, which remains unresolved.
An equally controversial issue is the renewal of surveillance powers for federal spy agencies, which has also turned into an after-hours issue.
House GOP leaders kept their members in session past midnight last week as they tried, and ultimately failed, to pass various versions of the foreign surveillance bill. Leaders are scrambling to pass an extension of the law before Monday’s deadline, finally They were put together for 10 days Past 2 am
Members of both parties were angry about the last-minute chaos.
“Who the hell runs this place?” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Republicans threw the bill together “on the back of a napkin in the back room in the middle of the night.”
“Almost everyone agrees that these are serious matters, and it’s the kind of debate Congress should be having publicly,” McGovern said.
Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed the driving bills, said the outcome was expected.
“We warned them this was going to happen,” Ogles said. “Unfortunately, we’re here at two in the morning.”
The series of late-night votes in the Senate this week were part of an arcane and complex process called budget reconciliation that GOP leaders are using to try to fund two immigration enforcement agencies that Democrats continue to block. It has become the default mode of governance for congressional majorities as bipartisanship on key issues fades.
Reconciliation allows the Senate majority to bypass the filibuster and pass budget bills on a partisan basis. First, they have to go through two long series of votes – and that’s where the dreaded “Rama vote” comes into play.
The process is open-ended, meaning lawmakers in both parties can introduce as many amendments as they want to score the other side — or, as Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska puts it, “to make each other miserable.”
Leaders generally hold votes at midnight, as they did from Wednesday to Thursday, hoping to tire out both sides and force senators to stay in the chamber and vote quickly. But instead of waiting between votes on the amendment, Murkowski walked back and forth between the chamber and her “bunker,” a small office each senator has in the Capitol.
“I’ve taken 14,291 steps,” she said just after 11 p.m., looking at her smartwatch, which was also telling her it was almost bedtime. If she couldn’t sleep, she said, she might exercise more.
Senators went through the same reconciliation process last year, working for weeks to approve President Donald Trump’s spending and tax cuts package, which he described as… One big, beautiful bill.
The bill barely had enough Republican support to pass, and the Senate and House held back-to-back sessions almost overnight to pass it by Trump’s July 4 deadline. In the Senate, GOP leaders kept the long voting chain open for hours on end as they worked on it Gaining support from Murkowski And others.
“It’s crazy,” Murkowski said of the late nights. “My mother always said, ‘Nothing good happens after midnight.’”
Overnight voting is certainly nothing new in Congress. The Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, in the early hours of Christmas Eve 2009 after weeks of negotiations, just in time for senators to go home for the holidays. Countless other big bills were passed in the dead of night as well.
But lawmakers say the after-dark routine has become worse and more repetitive.
“Part of what’s changed here is there’s a lot of heavy lifting you have to do to pass the bill,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has served in Congress since 1981, when he was elected to the House. “I think at some point you have to have a compulsion mechanism, and one of the easiest is staying up until the wee hours of the night so that everyone is trying not to fall asleep on national television.”
Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey, a relative newcomer to the Senate elected in 2024, said there is a final question about whether anyone is watching.
In the middle of the night, he said: “Are the American people paying attention? How can we get the message across?”
However, he said it’s important for lawmakers to get their work done at any hour, especially when there is one Ongoing war with Iran Lawmakers travel long distances from Washington.
“I wouldn’t mind being here,” Kim said.