The U.S. Senate adjourned for the annual August Recess yesterday, not to return to the nation’s capital until Monday, September 9. They followed the House of Representatives, which was supposed to stay in session until yesterday but which truncated things and vamoosed last week, not to return until the same date.

Congress leaves much undone this year. The status of the twelve annual spending bills is, as has become the norm, bad, with the House only passing five (and voting one down) while the Senate has not taken any to the floor.

This, plus the entire rest of the calendar, would be daunting enough in an odd-numbered year. But this being an election year, here is the tentative House schedule for the rest of the year, with weeks that the House will be in session and voting highlighted in gold (from the Office of Majority Leader Scalise):

That shows just three weeks before the elections to get a lot done, the first item of which is getting some kind of short-term stopgap appropriations measure to take effect and fund large swaths of the government starting on October 1.

In a setup where Republicans at least control one chamber of Congress and Democrats the White House, the norm is for the GOP to try and use the stopgap “CR” to force the President to accept something else he doesn’t want, lest a wasteful government shutdown ensure. But this year, the normal willingness of the House GOP to engage in shutdown brinksmanship will be subject to the caveat “if President Trump wants them to.” If Trump tells them that he doensn’t want a shutdown in the news before the elections, expect the GOP to acquiesce.

Duration of the coming CR is not yet decided, but it will almost certainly go to sometime in late November to early December. And at that point, whomever wins the Presidential election will sit down with the leaders of their party in whichever chamber they happen to control now and decide how they want to play things.

New Presidents generally don’t want to waste any part of their first 100 days cleaning up messes left by the the previous President and Congress, and extending a CR into February or early March would force the next POTUS to redo the last budget cycle. So the new President is likely to push for Congress to write a fast-and-dirty omnibus appropriations bill before the end of 2024 and save them some grief.

(Although, Congress left all the appropriations bills unfinished in 2008, and Barack Obama was able to work with a unified Democratic Congress in the first two months of his Administration to write an omnibus that had significant spending increases over an omnibus that would/could have been written in the previous year under George W. Bush, and no one noticed because it was all happening below the radar as big things like the ARRA stimulus bill and other recession-fighting initiatives were taking place.)