WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in both chambers fled the Capitol Tuesday for a two-week Thanksgiving recess, telling reporters they desperately needed time to recover from the strain of having voted on something.
The recess begins 72 hours after Congress narrowly concluded a 43-day shutdown it had personally constructed, brick by brick, over the preceding two months. Members will return in early December, at which point they will have roughly nine working days left in the calendar year to address the appropriations cliff they have already scheduled for January.
“I’m running on fumes,” said Sen. Brent Halloran (R-OK), boarding a chartered flight to a donor retreat on Sea Island. “We just spent the better part of November in extremely difficult negotiations with ourselves. People don’t understand how draining it is to refuse to do your job and then suddenly do a small portion of it.”
According to a tally maintained by the Roosevelt-Brennan Civic Audit, the 119th Congress has logged 11 substantive floor votes in 2025, six of which were procedural votes about whether to take other votes. The body has spent an estimated 219 days either in recess, in pro forma session, or in what junior staffers privately describe as “the long wait between cable hits.”
Federal workers, many of whom received their first back-pay deposits Monday after going six weeks without income, were reportedly thrilled to learn their elected representatives had earned a vacation. “Cool, glad they’re getting some rest,” said Marjorie Linney, a TSA officer at Reagan National who spent the shutdown driving Lyft until 2 a.m. “I was worried they might be tired.”
Speaker Mike Johnson’s office released a statement Tuesday afternoon thanking the American people for their patience during “the recent challenges,” a phrase aides later confirmed referred specifically to a budget crisis caused exclusively by people Speaker Johnson works with daily and sees in the hallway.
Several members will spend the recess hosting district “listening tours,” a format in which constituents are invited to a community center to listen to their congressman talk about himself. Sen. Halloran’s tour will include three fundraisers, a pheasant hunt, and one ten-minute appearance at a food bank, where he is expected to hand a single can of candied yams to a press photographer before being whisked back to the SUV.
Rep. Cassidy Withers (R-FL), asked at the rotunda exit whether she had any message for furloughed workers still negotiating with their landlords, paused, said “Happy Thanksgiving to them and their families,” and walked into a wall.
Asked whether the January funding deadline concerned him, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters he was confident leadership would address it “at some point, probably,” before excusing himself to catch a plane. The aircraft, sources confirmed, was paid for by a man who manufactures ethanol.
Congress is scheduled to reconvene December 1, at which point members are expected to immediately introduce a resolution congratulating themselves on their handling of the shutdown.