Lee Hamilton: Congress Has a Lot to Accomplish in a Short Time. Don't Expect Much.

Congress went back into session after its summer recess on Sept. 9 with a full plate of competing demands. With the fall elections less than two months away, members want to walk away with some accomplishments — but not spend much time achieving them. Or as Roll Call put it, they want “to get out of Washington as quickly as possible while doing just enough to avoid a government shutdown.”

This is nothing new — and it’s entirely understandable. There is a point in every cycle when a politician’s focus changes from crafting policy — or stopping policy from being passed — to getting reelected. The reason, of course, is simple: You don’t get to focus on policy without getting elected, and that requires playing politics. With an election looming, the pressure to be out on the hustings is intense. And so is the need to keep the election in mind while back in Washington.

This year especially, lawmakers have to legislate in the face of deep uncertainty. They’re looking at a presidential election in which Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are essentially neck-and-neck in the polls. Democrats narrowly control the Senate this fall, but this year’s electoral map gives the edge to Republicans, so the possibility of a GOP takeover there is in the back of everyone’s mind. Similarly, the GOP currently has a House majority, but the prospect of a Democratic takeover is very real; control come January will likely come down to a relative handful of districts.

As one GOP senator said recently, “There’s a lot of handwringing going on and a lot of anxiousness about where this election is headed.” He could have been speaking for either party.

With the looming election in the back of legislators’ minds, it’s no surprise that the politicking around the remainder of this session has grown intense. It’s been made even more so because the first order of business for Congress is to fund the government before the end of September; unless it does so, we face a government shutdown beginning Oct. 1.

The most likely way forward is a so-called “continuing resolution” that would fund federal agencies into next year, but some Republican House conservatives — and Trump — have pushed to attach a measure requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote, a move Democrats argue is unnecessary because it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote, and that has virtually no chance in the Senate. House Speaker Mike Johnson is promoting the idea along with his bid to fund the government into the next administration, but even within his own caucus there’s opposition. Expect a lot of pushing and pulling around this as the deadline nears — government shutdowns tend to boomerang against Republicans, and GOP members in tight races have very little appetite for one as they head into an election.

There are other pitfalls ahead, as well. Defense officials argue that the proposed continuing resolution, which would fund the military at 2024 levels, will harm US readiness. The federal farm bill lapses at the end of September, and pressure will be intense on farm-state members to extend it, possibly as part of a continuing resolution. There are bills focused on China, the possibility of a vote in the Senate on legislation supporting access to fertility treatments like IVF, rumblings among GOP hard-liners in the House favoring an attempt to impeach President Joe Biden, and more.

In a sense, the policy specifics are less notable than the moment. Especially this time around — as we’re in the very unusual situation of members in both the House and the Senate recognizing that control of their chamber could well flip in January, not to mention that who will win the White House is very much up in the air. With just weeks to go until the election, expect political tactics to reign supreme. It may not be pretty, but that’s probably as it should be at this moment. We make our system work through politics; it’s the price legislators pay for the chance to serve as legislators.

Lee Hamilton is a senior adviser for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government and a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.