The federal highway department will keep filling potholes and veterans’ healthcare gets a $16bn overhaul – but don’t let Congress fool you. Partisan gridlock was in full tilt last week before the legislature fled the capitol for a five-week vacation.

With Washington now in its August doldrums, legislators left unfinished a solid plan to address the US migrant crisis, declined to meet its deadline to reauthorize the export-import bank, and allowed the National Security Administration to retain all of its pre-Snowden surveillance powers.

But with approval ratings hovering around scalp-parasite level, maybe no one expected these issues to be finished anyway.



Immigration unresolved

It was a legislative sparring match in the House on Thursday and Friday, as largely untenable immigration reform bills were approved. A recent flood of Central American women and children illegally crossing the US-Mexico border has spotlighted the perennial issue.



The House stayed in the capitol an extra day to pass a $697m border security bill, but only after a deep rift in the Republican party was exposed. Texas Senator Ted Cruz reportedly rallied conservative Tea Partiers to reject a bill scheduled for a vote Thursday.



Obama vowed to veto the bills and the Democrat-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass the bills. Even consideration is impossible before September. The House legislation would end a 2008 human trafficking law that requires hearings for migrant children, and would defund a 2012 executive action that defers deportation of migrants brought to the US as children, as well as fund border security.



Wildfires

Wrapped into a failed $3.6bn immigration reform bill are $615m to fight wildfires in the west – the Senate failed to bring a vote on the bill Thursday. Senate Republicans blocked a vote on procedural grounds, saying the legislation violated the Senate’s budget rules.

The money would have stopped the Interior Department and the US Forest Service from “fire borrowing”, or transferring money from another program to pay for firefighting efforts.



NSA reform bill

Barring reforms enacted by executive order, the NSA retains almost all of its pre-Snowden powers to bulk-collect phone records. A Senate bill introduced by Patrick Leahy could rein in the NSA’s collection efforts, and require the intelligence agency to obtain a warrant to access “details” about phone records, but a single warrant from the secret Fisa court could still allow the agency access to thousands of phone records. The Senate bill would create a stronger privacy advocate than the House NSA reform bill, the USA Freedom Act.



However, neither seems likely to pass during the fervor before midterm elections this fall. If reforms aren’t passed before the next Congress is sworn in, NSA reforms will have to start from scratch.



Export-Import Bank

The “Ex-Im” Bank, as its often called, loans billions to American companies to help their sell wares abroad, the biggest beneficiaries being companies like Boeing and Caterpillar. The bank doesn’t receive any taxpayer funding, and actually delivered a $1.1bn profit to the Fed last year. But there are just 10 legislative days between Congress’ return on 8 September and a 30 September deadline to reauthorize the bank’s existence.



A divided House Republican party has accused the bank of corruption and of picking winners and losers among companies. House majority leader Kevin McCarthy said he’d prefer to let authorization lapse. If the bank isn’t reauthorized, it could be the a win for “reform conservatives”. The same group points out that 80% of the bank’s 2012 loans went to Boeing.



Minimum wage

A week and five years ago, Congress raised the federal minimum wage to $7.25 per hour, providing a bump for America’s lowest paid workers. Now, a day’s work for minimum wage workers has about 10% less buying power, some many consumer goods, such as gasoline and ground beef, have gone up in price by as much as 40%.



In April, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill that would have gradually raised the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. Republicans widely oppose the bill, just one voted for it in the Senate, and whether the bill could have made it through the House appears dubious.

