The biggest achievement in the House last week was a party-line vote to file a brief in a court case. In other action, GOP leaders all but conceded they won’t be able to pass a budget, the party’s first order of business, this year.

Over in the Senate, lawmakers have been busy debating whether it’s good or bad to sit on the president’s Supreme Court nominee for the next nine months.


Call it the Seinfeld Congress — all about nothing. It's gotten so small-ball that one congressman, a chairman of a highly influential committee, introduced legislation last week to recognize the national significance of magic.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all. They are going to need magic to save their party,” joked Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who heads the House Democrats’ messaging arm. “The American people are used to a Republican do-nothing Congress, they are now getting used to a Republican ridiculous Congress.”

All this non-activity comes as the House is set to take a nearly three-week vacation. The Senate skipped town last week.

"This is my eighth year here, and by far this is the thinnest of thin gruel years," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "We're in session, I think, less than 111 days (for all of 2016) and the time we've been in session, we haven't done much."

House members have griped that their major legislative work a few weeks ago was naming post offices. Last week’s win for Republicans was passing a resolution giving the House authority to file an amicus brief in US v. Texas, the Supreme Court case challenging President Barack Obama's executive orders on immigration. Senior Republican aides say the brief is a big win for House Republicans who've been fighting the president's executive orders for years.

The big action before the House adjourns this week is to keep the Federal Aviation Administration running for another four months — a lowest-common-denominator outcome brought about by Congress' inability to do anything more.

When it comes to more substantive bills — like helping Puerto Rico avoid default, tackling the Zika virus or finding money to help Flint fix its corroded water system — there's been hardly any movement.

Democratic leaders formally urged Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to cancel the upcoming recesses until the House passes emergency funding bills to deal with the Zika crisis and opioid addiction. A typical tactic employed by the minority to make the party in charge look bad and pressure it to act, it unsurprisingly went nowhere.

“It is simply unconscionable that the House Republican leadership plans two weeks of recess without acting to address these public health crises and without passing a budget blueprint for next year,” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insists the Senate will continue pursuing bipartisan legislation the rest of the year, but 2016 politics are already getting in the way. A bipartisan energy bill has been stuck for more than a month amid Democratic demands for money to help Flint. Senate Democrats also rejected even debating a food labeling bill before the recess.

Senior GOP aides say it's not all bad. They point to a resolution that was just approved calling for the U.S. to declare that ISIL is committing genocide, legislation to boost sanctions against North Korea, and a bill requiring the EPA to notify the public of unsafe drinking water.

"We've had a number of bills on the floor in recent weeks that reflect important priorities of this conference," said a GOP leadership aide.

A Senate aide pointed to the North Korea sanctions and opioid legislation, as well as passage of trade and Internet tax bills, as significant accomplishments for Republicans.

Party leaders are also still looking to forge an agreement on Puerto Rico in the coming weeks, a Republican staffer said.

It's not unusual for legislative progress to slow during presidential election years as lawmakers turn their attention to politics. The focus on the campaign is even more intense this year with the Senate up for grabs in November.

But even by those standards, though, Congress seems to be setting a new bar for unproductiveness.

The most ambitious task on McConnell's to-do list this year is to pass individual appropriations bills, a task that would likely eat up the Senate’s entire calendar before the party conventions in July.

Democrats, needless to say, don’t think much of that agenda. At an event at the liberal Center for American Progress last week, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he didn’t mind lingering for extra questions from the press.

"We have a lot of time to do nothing in the Senate,” Reid said with a grin.

The House will likely have to scrap the effort to pass a budget after GOP leaders spent six weeks trying to craft one.

That would prevent Ryan from moving ahead with the appropriations process, and increase the odds that lawmakers will be forced to pass a patchwork spending bill in September — just to keep the government open.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.