What if you could extend today to avoid making an uncomfortable decision tomorrow?
For most human beings, it is not possible. But in the alternative reality that is the congress, which operates according to its own arcanic rules and precedents and is exempt from the statutes which bind us the rest of us, a day can be as long or short as the laws of the demand for political gravity.
This is how it has succeeded that the House Republicans in recent weeks have declared the rest of the year a long day when it comes to considering a challenge at President Trump’s prices. They would prefer to avoid votes on the advisability of deleting the samples, but the law says that the Chamber must consider them within a final period.
The obvious solution? Downtime.
It was not the first time that Congress leaders have mixed the laws of the universe for the political opportunity. By folding the legislative time, the leaders of the Chamber and the Senate have long found ways to buy the place for negotiation, to preserve their prerogatives and to protect their members from the votes that they prefer not to have to express.
Four years ago, Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker, kept the house in recess during the night rather than adjournment To stretch a single “legislative day” over two calendar days. This decision allowed her to claim that she had held a promise that she had made to moderate the Democrats that she would have a vote on a bill on the infrastructure of $ 1 Billion by the end of the month.
The recent efforts of speaker Mike Johnson to freeze the weather has been more visible – and more sustainable. Last month, he discreetly pushed a provision that Content a calendar gadget Make sure that no legislator could force a vote this year to end Mr. Trump’s prices on Canada, China and Mexico. He used the same thing on Wednesday To vote until at least October on the world rates that Trump announced last week, then in part to take a break.
The first measure said that “every day for the rest of the 119th congress will not constitute a civil day” for the end of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1 to impose prices in Canada, China and Mexico. The resolution approved on Wednesday used the same language to prevent any member from forcing a vote on the rest of Mr. Trump’s rates until September 30.
“When is not one day one day?” The representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who was the only member of the GOP to oppose the two movements, wrote on social networks. “Answer: when the congress bypassing the law requiring a vote on national presidential emergencies within 15 days.”
The Democrats were also indignant.
“The Republicans have changed the functioning of the time itself to prevent a vote on the prices authorized under the law,” said representative Jim McGovern, a democrat of Massachusetts.
Johnson also used a distortion of legislative time this month to buy space to suppress a rebellion in his ranks on the rules of the chamber. When a bipartite majority used a complicated maneuver to force a vote on a proposal to allow legislators to vote at a distance after the birth of a child, the speaker had two legislative days – days when the congress leads legislative affairs – to allow his measure to vote.
Instead, he suddenly canceled the house’s affairs for the week, stopping the stopwatch to give himself time to negotiate with the republican architect of the measure, representative Anna Paulina Luna de Florida. When he recognized the room this week, He had concluded an agreement with Ms. Luna to kill her proposal.
The Democrats of the Senate planned a similar schedule more than ten years ago to afford to negotiate with colleagues who wanted to force a vote on reducing the use of headlights. The supporters planned to move the first day of the new congress in 2011, therefore the Democratic leaders Prepared to put the Senate in recess Before they can act, then keep it so – instead of adjourning as planned – for the next three weeks while they were trying to reach an agreement with the demanding changes.
At the time, the Historical Bureau of the Senate said that Senator Robert C. Byrd de Virginie -Western, who died the previous year after having served half a century in the Senate, had set out the calendar failure record in 1980. That year, Mr. Byrd, then on June 12 – to direct the Senate in the same legislative day for 162 days – from June 3 to 12 – Philibatte.