Jeb Bush actually went easy on the Senate last month when he described the chamber’s schedule as a “French workweek.”

When no crisis is imminent, the Senate’s rhythms are as relaxed as a beachcomber's in July: In Monday night for a vote, hit a few party lunches and committee hearings, vote a few more times, then head home Thursday afternoon.


And with a presidential election looming, things are about to get even less rigorous: The Senate next year will take its longest summer break in two decades, a quirk of the presidential party conventions that will give lawmakers off half of July plus all of August. When they finally return, it won’t be for long. The chamber is slated to be in session a total of five weeks during the final three months of the year.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s awful. I don’t even know how to respond,” rookie Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said after perusing next year’s calendar.

Applying the seemingly straightforward observation that “most people work five days a week," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed when he took over as majority leader that a Republican Senate would mean "working more" and an end to the jet fumes schedule of his Democratic predecessor Harry Reid. More time in the Capitol, McConnell reasoned, would only help the deadlocked Senate find consensus.

McConnell’s Senate has indeed put in more days (150 as of Monday) than Reid’s chamber put in in all of 2014, and the chamber will soon surpass the 2013 workday total, too. But the Senate is scheduled to be in session just 31 weeks next year, while the House is scheduled to work only 28 weeks.

As for Bush’s comparison to the French, which he used in a failed attack on his presidential rival, the often-truantSen. Marco Rubio?

The French get only five weeks of paid vacation a year and use 35 hours per week as their baseline for overtime pay. Their parliament, though, is limited to working no more than 120 days per year, with some exceptions. By contrast, through the first 10 months of the year the Senate clocked 146 days in session over 917 hours, which works out to just under 3.5 days in session per week and 6.2 hours per day. The House worked 10 fewer days and 250 fewer hours over that period.

“I don’t know what a French workweek means,” said Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.). “Literally don’t know what they do over there [in the Senate].”

Of course, time is measured differently on each side of the Capitol: One bill in the Senate can take nearly a week to pass, while House leadership can jam through several bills in a day, without that pesky filibuster hurdle and other arcane regulations.

Given the constraints of the Senate, more days in session can translate to more production, and McConnell has moved more legislation this year than last. This week is a good example: The Senate is set to adjourn on Tuesday for the rest of the week. But McConnell is threatening to call the chamber back to work after Wednesday’s Veterans Day holiday if senators don’t finish work on a veterans spending bill.

This is precisely what McConnell meant when he said his Senate would work more, said spokesman Don Stewart.

“Reid used to threaten weekend votes all the time. He said that dozens of times. He did it once," Stewart said. "Threats have to be believed.”

Still, newer senators are amazed at how little is getting accomplished.

“I don’t object to having time off in the Senate if we’re getting our work done. But we’re not getting our work done,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a former governor and state Senate majority leader. Deadlines to finish bills, he added, "would help.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who’s facing a potentially tough reelection race next year, took a different view.

“Good!” McCain said of the long pre-election recess. “Sounds good to me, as long as we get our work done.”

Though the Senate majority leader sets the schedule, the natural inertia of the chamber points toward fewer days in session no matter how valiantly a new leader tries to change it. The vast majority of senators live in their home states, not Washington, and for Western lawmakers the trip home is a serious slog. (Rounds said his commute is 22 hours round trip, each week.)

Then there are campaign demands, which are about to become a lot heavier — between the multiple senators running for president and nearly 30 up for reelection to their current jobs.

“It’s fairly traditional in an election year,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who helps run the floor as GOP whip, said of the light 2016 schedule. “I’m going to be working seven days a week, maybe just not all here."

If the Senate was operating as originally envisioned, it would work relentlessly for bursts of time and then send lawmakers home to mingle with constituents, said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who is trying to disrupt the Senate’s bad habits.

“This model doesn’t work very well, back and forth every week. Some people move here, I’m not here to beat them up, but I’m not doing that,” Sasse said. “There are really only two full work days per week … I don't think it's enough, but I don't think we should be in session year-round.”

Kristen Orthman, a spokeswoman for Reid, said next year's calendar is evidence that "Republicans' rhetoric was bankrupt all along."

"Faced with their own inability to govern, Republicans are giving up and scheduling a two-month recess, the longest in the recent history of the Senate," Orthman said.

But the retiring Democratic leader, having spent a long time in McConnell's shoes, declined to go there himself.

“It’s not easy to set a schedule,” Reid shrugged in an interview. “I’m not going to complain about it.”

Pierre Briançon, a Paris-based POLITICO correspondent, contributed to this report.