The lame-duck Congress will be a disaster for Team Trump

It seems like every two years, members of Congress who retired or have been let go by their constituents get one last chance to legislate. A good government policy would be to not schedule lame duck sessions of Congress at all.

We have new members of the House and Senate elected to serve starting on Jan. 3, 2025, and the elected members should be the ones to fund the government and pass new legislation. Furthermore, any new legislation that sabotages the incoming Trump administration should be abandoned.

Lame duck refers to a Congress being in session between a November congressional election and the following Jan. 3 when new members are sworn in. All the members of the House are sitting members, yet not all of them are elected to legislate in a new Congress.

The Senate is a bit different, because it is considered a continuing body, yet at least one third of the seats in the Senate are in the same position occupied by a sitting member who is not necessarily the one who will be sworn in a new Congress. Congress is having this session primarily because they failed to pass the regular appropriations measures to fund the government for fiscal 2025 that started on Oct. 1, 2024, with a current continuing resolution expiring on Dec. 20, 2024.

Republicans should resist any attempts to do anything more than a short-term one-sentence continuing resolution that ends on Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump’s inauguration day. Anything more will allow the Biden administration and Senate Democrats to handcuff an incoming Trump administration, in addition to a new Republican-controlled Senate, from implementing the will of the American people as expressed on Election Day.

The danger for the American people, and a new Trump administration, is that a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House craft an appropriations measure that continues the liberal priorities soundly rejected recently by the voters.

Congress has made a habit of not getting enough work done on appropriations before an Election Day. The Congressional Research Service put out a report this fall documenting that “a total of 49 regular and 25 continuing resolutions were enacted during the 10 other lame duck sessions held in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2020, and 2022.” The “other” lame duck sessions when they did avoid appropriations measures occurred in 1994, 1998, 2008 and 2012. That is a staggering record of dysfunction and incompetence by both parties.

With Congress making lame duck sessions routine, they tend to push other important legislative matters to a lame duck session. Items expected to be addressed aside from the spending bill are disaster relief, the National Defense Authorization Act and a farm bill. Lame duck sessions are unusually active. Roll Call notes that “the last lame duck in 2022 saw 148 items signed into law, which totaled just over 4,000 pages of legislative text” with the bulk of the legislative language coming from appropriations and the National Defense Authorization Act. It seems wrong for a Congress that includes so many fired members to pass that many bills that affect the American people.

Another bad outcome of a lame duck session of Congress is that current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has tried to use the lame duck to load up the federal bench with as many new lifetime appointments as he can get. The longer Congress dithers in passing appropriations measures and other legislation, the longer Schumer has to confirm President Biden’s nominees.

Republicans should not be scared to walk away from the table and not pass anything in a lame duck if it runs contrary to the incoming Trump administration’s agenda. This includes appropriations by Dec. 20 which would cause a partial government shutdown. Maybe a government shutdown is just what the people want right now. It is time for Congress to get back to implementing what they want and one thing they don’t want is a continuation of the Biden agenda.

Brian Darling is former counsel to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).