According to the Congressional Record, the United States Senate convened this morning at 9:00:01 a.m. and adjourned at 9:00:25 a.m.
Twenty-four seconds.
No committee meetings were held. No hearings were scheduled in either chamber. The House was not in session and met in pro forma at 10:30. The Senate now stands adjourned until 3:00 p.m. tomorrow, with one vote scheduled for 5:30 that evening.
Forty-three days before Americans vote.
Let us be fair about what a pro forma session is.
We are not going to pretend this is a scandal by itself, because it is not.
Pro forma sessions exist for constitutional reasons. Neither chamber may adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other, and holding brief sessions also prevents recess appointments. A gavel in and a gavel out is routine housekeeping, both parties have always done it, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The twenty-four seconds is not the offense. The twenty-four seconds is a measurement.
What it measures.
Here is the record of the past two weeks, drawn from the Senate's own Daily Press Gallery rather than from anyone's press release.
The Senate returned September 14 and voted on cloture for a district judge in the Southern District of Ohio. Tuesday and Wednesday went to the Protect College Sports Act. Thursday brought more college sports and cloture on a district judge for the Northern District of Texas.
Two judges and a college sports bill. Then a long weekend, and today, twenty-four seconds.
Judicial confirmations are real conservative wins that outlast any election cycle, and we are not going to sneer at them. The college sports bill may well be sound legislation.
But this is the entire remaining legislative runway. The House has already cancelled its final two weeks of session before the election. What is left of the Senate calendar can be counted on two hands.
And the bill is still sitting there.
We corrected our own record on this last week and we will repeat the correction, because it matters.
Thune did bring the SAVE America Act to the floor in March. The Senate voted 51 to 48 to proceed. There were roughly two weeks of debate. Senator Husted's voter identification amendment failed 53 to 47.
Then the Majority Leader declined to invoke cloture, declined to force a talking filibuster, and described the whole exercise as an opportunity to put Democrats on the record rather than an attempt to pass a law. Debate ended. The bill stalled. It has not come back in six months.
That is a sharper charge than saying he never scheduled it, and it is the accurate one.
Senator Mike Lee said publicly this month that Thune is mistaken about the arithmetic, that Republicans have the votes because they hold a simple majority, and that a talking filibuster with continuous session would pass the bill without touching the sixty-vote threshold. One of those two men has the authority to test the proposition. He has chosen not to.
The stakes are not abstract.
Republicans hold the House 220 to 215. They can afford to lose two seats. Two.
The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 last week that the Postal Service never had authority over mail ballot administration, which closed the executive-action route entirely. We predicted that outcome on jurisdictional grounds before it happened. The legislative path is not the preferred option anymore. It is the only one that exists.
And the chamber holding that path met today for less time than it takes to read this paragraph.
What we are watching.
The Senate returns tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. with one vote that evening. Whatever gets filed between now and adjournment is the answer to a question conservatives have been asking since August.
We said in September that if the SAVE America Act reached the floor before the election, we would report it and say leadership was right to do it. That offer stands and it has not expired.
Forty-three days. One vote tomorrow. Twenty-four seconds today.
The calendar still belongs to John Thune, and the record is public for anyone who wants to check our work.
