Utah Sen. Mike Lee is demanding congressional leaders bring lawmakers back early from its ongoing two-week recess, calling it “inhumane” to have lawmakers out of town as the partial government shutdown becomes the longest in U.S. history.
In a flurry of social media posts over the weekend, Lee repeatedly called on the Senate to return to Washington, D.C., to continue funding negotiations for the Department of Homeland Security, which has been closed since Feb. 14 — the longest shutdown for a single government agency.
Lawmakers left for the holiday recess on Friday with no plans so far to return early despite failing to come to an agreement on how to reopen the department.
“This is the Senate’s *second* recess since the DHS shutdown began. The Senate shouldn’t have taken the last one (right after the impasse began) either, but it certainly shouldn’t take this one—a two-week recess 40 days into the crisis,” Lee said in a post on X on Monday. “This is insane. And inhumane. The Senate should convene immediately and debate funding proposals until DHS is fully funded.”
Brief Senate session on Monday ends without solution
The Senate was briefly in session on Monday morning for a pro forma session, during which Republicans had the opportunity to request unanimous approval to pass the temporary funding bill that passed the House on Friday. Through unanimous consent, Republicans could pass a bill without needing a roll call vote so long as no one on the floor objects.
However, no Republican requested passage — and a Democratic senator was on the floor ready to object even if they had.
“The Senate just completed a pro forma session. No attempt was made to pass DHS funding by unanimous consent,” Lee said in another post on Monday. “The Senate must convene now.”
Instead, Lee has suggested President Donald Trump should use his authority under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to convene the Senate “on extraordinary Occasions.” The record-long shutdown, which has left hundreds of thousands of employees without paychecks, should qualify for that exception, Lee argued.
“If a department with 260,000 employees (DHS) going unfunded isn’t an ‘extraordinary occasion’ — especially while the Senate is out on a two-week recess during that shutdown with no plans to resolve the impasse beyond ‘we’ll deal with that in two weeks’ — I don’t know what is,” Lee wrote in a third post.
Trump wants Congress to come back from recess
Trump has not yet indicated that he would do so, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that the president is “encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely.”
The pressure campaign comes after the Senate passed a DHS funding deal in the middle of the night on Friday that would have funded most of DHS except ICE and parts of Customs and Border Patrol. That proposal was soundly rejected by House Republicans who, just hours later, passed their own bill to fund the entire department for 60 days while immigration enforcement negotiations continue.
Both the House and Senate then left for recess without coming to an agreement.
Meanwhile, Republicans are already planning to fund immigration enforcement agencies later this year through a partisan reconciliation bill that wouldn’t require Democratic approval. That package could allocate funding for up to three more years, according to Sen. John Hoeven, R-S.D., who presided over the pro forma session on Monday.
That way, he argued, “the Democrats can’t have yet another Schumer shutdown and do this to us again.”
It’s not yet clear if congressional leaders will push to return to Washington before the end of the recess. Top Republicans have worked behind the scenes to contact their Democratic counterparts, who so far have said the majority party needs to sort out their intraparty conflict.