The House returns from its August recess this week to take up legislation that would fund the government through the beginning of December. It's expected that the stopgap measure will be approved, but will there be last-minute hurdles?…
Page A6From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
House returns after five weeks away; top priority is preventing the shutdown it must now rush to avert.
As it ran on the front
The House returned this week after five weeks in district, and its first order of business, appropriately, is preventing a government shutdown — which some have characterized as some kind of irony, the five weeks and the shutdown, back to back. It is not. Recess is when members do their most important work: listening to constituents. That the constituents' government may lack funding by the time members get back to listening to each other is a scheduling matter, not a contradiction.
I want to be direct about the timeline, because I think it's being misread. Five weeks away is not five weeks of nothing. There was, per this desk's own information, at least one live discussion about whether the House can, in fact, prevent the shutdown it is returning to prevent, which — I'll grant — is a strange sentence to have to say about a legislature discussing whether it can do the thing it's back in session specifically to do. That's not dysfunction. That's due diligence. Sorry — that's not quite right either. Let me restate.…
…(cont) The shutdown risk did not appear while the House was out. It was there before they left; recess didn't create it, it just left it running unsupervised for five weeks, which — again, I'm not conceding unsupervised is the right word — is simply how the calendar fell this year. Every Congress has a calendar. Calendars have recesses. Recesses end. This one ended with a live discussion about whether the thing they're back for is preventable, and this desk is confident it is, provisionally, pending the outcome of the thing this desk cannot currently predict.
The top priority is avoiding a shutdown. That was also, this reporter would note, roughly the top priority the last time the House returned from recess, though I don't have that date in front of me. The point stands regardless of the count.
“They take five weeks off, come back, and act shocked there's a shutdown deadline. It was always going to be there. They just weren't in the building.”
“Recess is constituent work, and the House returns fully prepared to handle the shutdown risk it — inherited, let's say inherited, rather than created. Inherited from itself, five weeks ago. That's still accurate.”
The receipts
The House is back ith a top priority of avoiding a government shutdown before the midterm elections.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.