Copyright The Boston Globe
As the shutdown drags into its sixth week, unfinished work keeps piling up outside the heavy wooden doors of the closed House chamber. “You can’t do legislative business if you’re not here... . There are no negotiations going on. There are no talks. There are no hearings. Nothing,” said Representative Jim McGovern, a Worcester Democrat. “I don’t know how long he can keep his vacation going.” Johnson and his leadership team actually have been in Washington most weekdays, holding frequent news conferences. The backdrop occasionally changes as they gather in different areas of the Capitol, but the message remains the same: the Democrats are to blame for the shutdown and, until they agree to reopen it by passing the bill pending in the Senate, the House will remain closed for business. “We are anxious to get everybody back to regular legislative session,” Johnson told reporters Monday. “But there cannot be a regular legislative session so long as the government is closed and Americans are feeling so much pain. We won’t do that.” His position is drawing some opposition from within his own party as the House has largely been sidelined in the shutdown fight. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has publicly called for the House to return. And California Representative Kevin Kiley said Johnson’s decision makes no sense. “We’ve now lost, just totally burned, a month worth of legislative business,” Kiley said. “A lot of priorities I have that we have not been able to advance. Hearings for oversight, markups for legislation, none of its happened.” Kiley spoke to the Globe Thursday in an eerily quiet hallway just off the House chamber. In the first couple weeks of the shutdown, Kiley was one of the few rank-and-file House Republicans in Washington. But he said more of his Republican colleagues have been coming back as the shutdown drags on. “I think at some point it just becomes so absurd that there has to be a change,” he said, noting he had to cancel a hearing last week for the subcommittee he chairs on early childhood, elementary, and secondary education. “It’s been the case for a while that a lot of our members want to come back.” A short while later Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, walked through the same hallway on the way to meet Johnson. He said he didn’t feel lonely on Capitol Hill. “There’s plenty of Republicans around,” he said as he walked quickly. “The real question is, ‘When will they decide they want to reopen the government on the Senate side?’ We’re waiting to respond to whatever they say.” Many House Democrats, including the leaders, have been coming to Washington in recent weeks to highlight the contrast with Republicans, holding news conferences and unofficial hearings. They’re returning Tuesday after most of them spent last week in their districts. The only official House activities during the shutdown have been short, pro forma sessions Republican leaders have held every few days for procedural reasons. The most recent one took place Friday afternoon and lasted less than four minutes. Representative Adrian Smith, a Republican from Nebraska, gaveled the House into session. House Chaplain Margaret Grun Kibben delivered a 90-second prayer that referenced lawmakers being “in the throes of this divisive shutdown.” Smith led the handful of staff and tourists in the mostly empty chamber in the Pledge of Allegiance before a clerk read a list of three bills passed recently by the Senate that need House action and announced Johnson had designated this week as a district work period. Then Smith quickly gaveled the session closed without acknowledging Maryland Democratic Representative April McClain Delaney, the only other lawmaker in the chamber. Still, she called out for Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva to be given the oath of office but was ignored, the same way other Democrats have been during shutdown pro forma sessions. Grijalva won an Arizona special election on Sept. 23 to replace her late father, who died in March. But Johnson has refused to swear her in while the House has been out of session. Grijalva will narrow the House Republican majority to five seats. And perhaps more importantly, she has promised to provide the final signature necessary on a bipartisan petition to force Johnson to hold a vote calling for the Trump administration to release all the government files related to Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. “You can’t deny the people of Arizona their ability to have representation,” McClain Delaney said afterward. “We can speculate the reasons why he doesn’t want to swear her in, but it’s time.” It was time for Johnson to bring the House back into session, she said. A freshman on the House Agriculture Committee, McClain Delaney noted that the chamber is falling behind on reauthorizing many farm programs that expired Sept. 30. “How can you do your job if you don’t even show up to work? It’s pathetic,” McClain Delaney said. “At least we’re showing up.” The House has passed only three of 12 appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The House also must pass an annual legislative package extending some expiring tax provisions, said Springfield Representative Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. “When this is resolved, which it will be, then we’re going to have this backlog of matters that are going to have to get done. Then you could see something like an omnibus bill, a catch-all bill,” Neal said. “And then the public angst rises again when these big pieces of legislation get passed that have really not been vetted.” Neal said he’s been trying to stick to his schedule, doing what work he can. And he recently was able to take on a more mundane task with the extra time. Flying to Washington a couple of weeks ago, Neal said he encountered four constituents who had been expecting a tour of the Capitol building on their visit. But with workers furloughed because of the government shutdown, all tours are cancelled — except if they’re given by lawmakers themselves. “I said, ‘Be at my office 11 o’clock tomorrow,’ ” Neal said. “I’ll do the tour.”
