The big goal is to just fund the government through the end of September. Guess what, Republicans are going to make that a problem.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) arrives at a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, July 24, 2024.

Hey, remember Congress? A bicameral representative body elected throughout the country that meets in a neoclassical domed building in Washington? Down the street from the White House? Apparently that wasn’t just a fad from the ’90s and they still meet every now and again. In fact, they are back in session this very week. Who knew?

I wouldn’t get your hopes up that they’ll do much of anything. In fact, September is a “you had one job” session: Congress needs only to pass funding by the end of the month to keep the government in operation. Everything else, save for some messaging votes, will probably wait until after the election.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Congress is having a tough time figuring out how to accomplish this basic task of keeping the lights on. The dispute seems to be that the Republican House, wanting to cuddle up to Donald Trump, is insisting that a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government be attached to something cooked up by the hard right called the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

More from David Dayen

It is already illegal to vote as a noncitizen in elections. We know that because in the infinitesimally small number of cases where that has happened, it has been prosecuted. It just hasn’t been prosecuted often, because it doesn’t happen often. The goal here is more intimidation than anything, by getting people who have the legal right to vote (Latino citizens in South Texas, for example) too nervous about potential harassment by law enforcement to do so. The larger effort is to instill doubt as to the validity of the election overall, a quadrennial habit from the Trumpified Republican Party.

The SAVE Act, which has already passed the House (depressingly with five Democratic votes) but is going nowhere in the Senate, would also mandate some form of voter ID. If applied as it has been in states with voter ID mandates, this creates a hurdle to voting that disproportionately impacts African American, Latino, and younger voters, who side more with Democrats in federal elections.

Democrats have already announced that they will not vote for a government funding bill that includes the SAVE Act. The House Republican leadership believes that gives them what they want: a talking point that Democrats are trying to “allow noncitizens to vote” and that the government will be shut down unless they relinquish that demand.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) intends to operationalize this plan by moving a six-month CR with the SAVE Act attached that would fund the government until March. (Democrats only want the CR to go to December.) Freedom Caucus members want to pass this and then leave town to “jam” the Senate into accepting it. One problem: Just as has happened in previous extortion attempts, Johnson and the Freedom Caucus may not actually have the votes.

The SAVE Act, which has already passed the House but is going nowhere in the Senate, would mandate some form of voter ID.

Some Republicans have been talking down this idea as destined to fail. “Some Republicans” is all you would need to break with Johnson for this to fail this week. In particular, swing-seat House members with tough re-elections coming up don’t want to be blamed for a government shutdown. This happens to be the one thing that Democrats are really good at winning the messaging war on. Meanwhile, some hard-right members don’t want to vote for government spending even with a voter ID measure attached, so Johnson could lose votes on his right flank and the center.

Losing a party-line vote on a CR plus SAVE would, in the delicate dance of Capitol Hill, give Johnson no leverage in government funding talks. It’s already doubtful he has any to begin with. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Senate Republican leader for the rest of the year, has been quietly speaking against the SAVE Act ploy. He knows that bringing voting into the conversation would probably lead Democrats to pull out their voting rights bills, and that the whole concept is doomed to failure anyway.

Which means that Johnson is really all alone on this gambit, maybe not even with enough strength to make it out of the House. The smart money is that he’ll eventually have to climb down in humiliation and pass a CR relying on Democratic votes, again.

The timing of the CR is another sticking point. If it goes into March, it becomes an early crisis for a new president; if it’s taken care of at the end of the year, the new president has a clean slate.

Outside of the CR, we’re going to largely see messaging votes in this short session. Democrats have an opportunity in the Senate to once again put Republicans on the spot on the hot-button issue of abortion. Donald Trump endorsed an insurance mandate for IVF late last month, something Senate Republicans, including his running mate J.D. Vance, rejected back in June. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) could put that bill back on the floor to exacerbate Republican tensions further and show the electorate where they stand.

The sad thing is that you can see the outlines of a potentially productive end of this session. A bipartisan deal was struck to ban stock trading by members of Congress. The Kids Online Safety Act won a large bipartisan vote in the Senate in July. There’s a bipartisan permitting bill that would accelerate clean-energy, transmission, and fossil fuel projects that seems to have some buy-in. Perennial bipartisan bills like making it easier for legal marijuana businesses to do banking are out there too. If Republicans cared about getting small wins where their interests overlap with Democrats, at least some of those would probably be able to get to the president, but this isn’t that kind of Congress.

To use another example, even though House Republicans are doing a “China week” of a number of bills, which would do things like bar vehicles with Chinese-made batteries from Inflation Reduction Act rebates and make it difficult for foreign companies to purchase U.S. farmland, it’s missing one key bipartisan measure: a bill to close the “de minimis” loophole, which has been responsible for mass closures of textile factories in America. Fast-fashion Chinese companies like Shein and Temu, and Chinese sellers on Amazon, use de minimis rules to ship over one billion packages into the country without tariffs or inspections at preferable postal rates, taking up incredible amounts of airfreight capacity. This is facilitated by an expansion of the definition of a de minimis package up to $800, which enables more goods to enter duty-free.

The bill would bar certain products from entering under de minimis rules, particularly goods subject to trade sanctions, goods seen as “import-sensitive” like textiles, and goods where Customs and Border Protection has seen a surge. All of these are targeted at Chinese abuse of de minimis. The bill would also add inspection resources and streamline seizures of unlawful goods coming in through de minimis. If there’s a House “China week,” not having this bill in the mix speaks to the emptiness of that effort.

That’s been kind of the path of this empty-calorie Congress, producing mostly sound and fury rather than tangible improvements to people’s lives. The election offers an opportunity to change that.