Try this at your job tomorrow.
Show up to your shift at the restaurant on a packed Friday night, tell the manager your section “has done its work,” and drive home for seven weeks. Leave the tables seated and the tickets hanging in the kitchen window. Tell them to text you if the cooks get their act together.
Try it as a long-haul trucker. Park the rig in Barstow with the load still on it, text dispatch that the truck is “second most productive in company history,” and take October off.
Try it as a public school teacher. Cancel the last two weeks of September, cancel Thursday, and tell the principal you need the time to talk to parents about what a great teacher you are.
Try it as a contractor with a customer’s kitchen torn down to the studs. Tell the homeowner you’ll be back in November. Tell them you’ll come back on 48 hours’ notice if the plumber shows up first.
You know exactly what happens next. Security walks you out. Your badge stops working before you hit the parking lot. The termination letter beats you home. Nobody asks for your side.
Now look at what Mike Johnson did Wednesday. He canceled Thursday’s votes, cut the week short, and sent the House home until after the November midterms. Seven weeks. He had already erased the last two weeks of September so members could campaign. By Republican Ralph Norman’s count, the House has now scrapped at least 63 scheduled working and voting days this Congress, nine of them this month. Norman called it unacceptable. He was being polite.1
You pay each rank-and-file member $174,000 a year, and the Speaker, Mike Johnson, makes $223,500. You pay for the marble, the staff, the security detail, the flights home. Here is what was on the desk when they left.
A country paying $4.37 a gallon, up more than a dollar in twelve months, and over six dollars if you live in California. Grocery bills that never came back down. A war in Iran the public has soured on. A government that cannot pass a budget without a stopgap and cannot hold a vote without checking the polls first.
And inside the building, the work they were paid to finish. Thomas Massie’s privileged resolution to impeach Pete Hegseth, which required a floor vote by Thursday under the House’s own rules. A letter from more than 100 House Democrats asking Johnson to stay in session and pass AI safeguards. A bipartisan sexual misconduct task force finished with feedback and ready to write the bill this month. And, by Johnson’s own count, about 700 House-passed bills gathering dust in the Senate.
That is the in-box. That is what “the House has done its work” looks like. Any employee in America who left that pile on the desk and drove home for seven weeks would come back to a cleaned-out locker and a security escort.
And these clowns all work for you. They work for me. We pay their salaries with our tax dollars.
I have tried cases for four decades. When opposing counsel asks for a continuance the week before trial, the judge does not ask why. The judge already knows. The case is weak and the lawyer wants time. Same rule on Capitol Hill. You send the team home when you cannot afford the vote.
The food server cannot leave the restaurant. The trucker cannot abandon the load. The teacher cannot skip the month. The contractor cannot ghost the homeowner. Every one of them answers to someone, and every one of them gets fired for a fraction of this.
Republicans hold the majority. They set the calendar. They control the floor. Every canceled day carries one signature, and it belongs to the Speaker. Full stop.
So when a candidate knocks on your door this fall talking about hard work and getting things done, ask them when they left Congress in September. Ask them when was the date of their last recorded vote. Then ask who told them to go home.
Then remember that on November 3, you are the one holding the termination letter.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
I will never leave work sitting on my desk while there is still a story to write and an issue, story or name that needs calling out. If you want the facts and a straight explanation of what is really going on, you are in the right place at the Uncensored Objection Substack newsletter and community, so subscribe and support the work.
While it’s true the House always leaves before an election, look at the scale. In 2025 this House held 362 roll-call votes, the fewest first session in decades and half of 2017’s total. By the Rules Committee tally, Johnson canceled 35 voting days in his first year, more than the prior Congress canceled in two, and Republican Ralph Norman now counts 63. Since the summer recess ended, the House has worked seven days across two weeks and is gone until November 9. While an October recess might be considered a tradition during normal years, a mid-September, with an upside down economy, a war in Iran, an impeachment vote pending and the fewest votes anyone can remember, is a choice. And that’s the story. Nobody gets to call that routine.
Despicable.
To avoid an impeachment vote on Hegseth, Johnson sent the House home for 7 weeks?? Not as bad as DOGE spending $10 billion to ay federal employees not to work, but still amazing waste (the same waste that the GOP spends most of its time supposedly chasing).