Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise chat while on their way to talk with reporters after the vote to re-open the government on Nov. 12. Johnson sent members home after they voted on a continuing resolution to fund the government in mid-September.
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
After narrowly approving a stopgap funding bill to end the government shutdown last night, the House of Representatives adjourned for the remainder of the week – marking one full day in session after being out for 54 days.
The Wednesday vote was the first time House members voted since House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., sent members home after the chamber passed its initial version of a continuing resolution in mid-September.
“The House did its job,” Johnson said on the third day of the shutdown when asked why he wasn’t having members stay in town. “The House will come back into session and do its work as soon as [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer allows us to reopen the government.”
He kept his word but tensions were high when members returned this week.
“Long time, no see. I hardly recognize you guys,” said House Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., at a meeting. “Where the hell have you been?”
After repeated comments from Democrats about Republicans being on vacation during the shutdown, Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., stepped in.
“I am sick and tired of hearing you all say we had an eight-week vacation. I worked every day,” she said. “I don’t want to hear another soul say that.”
Although House leadership in both parties held press conferences every day during the shutdown, there was no legislative business of the House for over seven weeks.
“The halls have been pretty, pretty lonely,” said California Republican Kevin Kiley on Wednesday. Unlike Republicans, rank and file House Democrats were instructed by their leaders to come to D.C. regularly for caucus meetings.
But Kiley kept showing up to his Capitol office throughout the shutdown.
“This has not been the finest hour for the United States Congress, having the House of Representatives cancel its sessions while so many people across the country were suffering,” he told NPR. “I don’t think that either party comes out of this thing in the best light.”
Kiley said he used the time to work with a colleague on the other side of the aisle to address an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year – the crux of the shutdown itself.
“That was, I guess, one advantage of being here – that I have had some constructive conversations like that,” he said. “But of course, if the entire House was here, then we could have been having the sort of consensus building process that you need to pass legislation like this.”
Other GOP members, like Missouri Rep. Mark Alford, said the time back home was useful.
“In a way, this time away working in the district has been very, very helpful,” he told NPR. “I got more done in my district than I think in the three years that I’ve been [in Congress]. We went to farms, we went to businesses, we visited 14 of our 18 rural hospitals in our district, and it gave us a real clear picture of where America stands right now and what we can do to help.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are still fuming that the chamber was sent home in the first place.
“I think that the speaker really has exhibited some poor judgment. I think it was disrespectful to the body,” said Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., speak to the press after Grijalva was sworn in at the Capitol on Nov. 12. 2025.
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She called it “poor form” for the speaker not to swear in fellow Democrat Adelita Grijalva, who won an Arizona special election in mid-September and was waiting to be sworn in during the shutdown.
Grijalva told NPR’s All Things Considered she thinks her support of the effort to release the Jeffrey Epstein files played a role in her wait to get seated.
“I really like this lady. She’s going to be an excellent member of Congress,” Speaker Johnson said after he swore Grijalva in. “We followed the custom of the House on the timetable and we’ve had a little, as we say in the deep South, some intense fellowship about that. But she’s here now and I promised that we would have the oath administered before we began legislative business so she hasn’t missed a vote.”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said swearing in Grijalva during the shutdown is just one of the business items of the chamber that should have been done last month.
“For the last 54 days, the House has been completely closed and locked out, and there is all manner of legislative business that could have been going on,” she told NPR. “People are angry about the lack of accountability.”
Stansbury added: “We should have been here for the entire time.”
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., agreed with that.
“We were gone far too long,” he told NPR. “I didn’t want to go home in August [for recess]. So to be gone for those five or six weeks and then turn around and do it again in October was just – that’s just more than Americans should have to put up with.”
Womack, a longtime appropriator, said he has his eye on the end of January — when Congress has to finish the rest of its spending bills.
“We’re going to be putting Congress on the clock again in another 78, 79 days,” he said. “We’re going to be right back where we were. I just hope we don’t put America back through the same nut roll.”
