The Senate is scheduled to walk out the door in early August and not come back until the middle of September.
Five weeks. Gone.
And what did they finish before booking the vacation?
Nothing.
The House has sent the SAVE America Act over again and again. The Senate has passed it zero times. Not once.
President Trump said Monday that John Thune should not let the Senate leave town until that bill is done.
Mike Lee says he will not give his consent to recess and wants a roll call vote. Rick Scott says he will vote to stay in session. Ashley Moody, Ron Johnson, John Kennedy, and Jim Banks have said the same thing.
Leadership's answer is that the votes are not there, so why bother trying.
Think about what that excuse actually means.
You do not get to campaign for six years on secure elections, proof of citizenship to register, and photo ID to vote, and then shrug at the first sign of resistance and roll out for a five-week holiday.
If a working American told his boss the job was too hard and then took thirty-five days off, he would come back to a cleaned-out desk.
Publius wrote in Federalist No. 63 that the Senate was built to give government a real sense of responsibility to the people who put it there.
Brutus warned in his sixteenth letter that the opposite would happen, that senators would sit so far above the voters that they would answer to no one at all.
Look at the recess calendar and tell me Brutus was wrong.
They do not fear us. They do not need us until the next fundraising email goes out. And every promise made about election integrity was apparently just noise to fill the air until the checks cleared.
If they leave town without passing it, does your vote for a Republican Senate candidate still mean anything to you?