Stuck in a shutdown, the work piles up on Capitol Hill

It doesn’t matter which party you think is to blame for the government shutdown. Congress isn’t getting its work done.

At the U.S. Capitol, the halls on the House side have been quiet — very quiet — as Speaker Mike Johnson has scrapped legislative work for five straight weeks in an effort to pressure Senate Democrats to vote to reopen the government.

The House hasn’t held a vote in over a month. No House committee has held a hearing here since Sept. 18.

And yet, there is much work to be done. And everyone knows it.

“The House should be in session,” grumbled U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome. She has suddenly become the public conscience of the House GOP, saying things out loud that many other Republicans are thinking.

There are a dozen yearly government funding bills, which are supposed to be finished by Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year. But that hasn’t happened since 1996.

The other nine could have been brought to the House floor for votes in recent weeks — but Johnson has kept everyone at home for more than a month.

Republicans could have also used some of the past five weeks to forge their own plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, or at least to deal with expiring health insurance subsidies under Obamacare.

“Millions of Americans cannot wait for Congress to deal with this later,” said U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany. “Congressional Republican leaders need to come to the negotiating table, right now.”

“We can’t give in,” said Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Suwanee, as he stood outside the Capitol.

In the meantime, the headlines out of Washington just don’t seem real this week.

Parts of the White House complex are being torn down. The U.S. House has worked 20 days in 16 weeks. The government shutdown has no end in sight. The House speaker won’t swear in a newly elected Democrat from Arizona. And President Donald Trump generated videos of himself dropping human waste on demonstrators who oppose him.