“Trump’s window for scoring early legislative victories is shrinking,” the article is titled. Broadly, the piece explains that the stumbling block for legislation in the Senate is the Republicans’ narrow majority, meaning that a loss of even two votes makes things fraught — and that’s on issues that can’t be filibustered.

But since you and I are problem-solving sorts of people, you probably also noted this line from the article (since it is the first line): “Trump faces an increasingly narrow path to win major legislative victories before the looming August recess, with only two months left to revive his health-care or tax initiatives before Congress departs for a long break.”

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In response, I offer a simple idea to solve that flummoxing problem. What if . . . Congress didn’t take so many long breaks?

Here’s the thing about Congress. It is the legislative branch, meaning that it is meant to craft legislation. There’s a lot of work that goes into crafting that legislation, including hearings and negotiations and outreach to the community. Members of Congress do other things, too, such as holding town halls and helping constituents resolve problems. But the main thing Congress is in Washington to do is to pass legislation that creates new laws or undoes old ones. That requires being in session. And Congress takes breaks from being in session pretty regularly.

Since the 96th Congress, spanning 1979 and 1980, this is what the congressional work schedule has looked like, by day. It’s long.

We’ve marked the regular holidays that Congress takes. In August of both off and election years, neither chamber does much of anything. For the last three months of an election year, Capitol Hill is basically empty, as members of Congress take time away from their jobs to convince voters why they should keep their jobs.

What we’d like to call your attention to here is the proportion between those blue and yellow days — days in which one or both chambers is in session — to gray days, weekdays when neither is in session at the Capitol.

All those gray days? Those are days that Congress could be in session, voting on legislation such as the health-care bill that was stressing out Republicans so much, according to Paletta and DeBonis’ report. Mind you, even those yellow blocks don’t necessarily indicate that the House or Senate is hard at work. Those periods during long breaks when the Senate is in session once every three days? The Senate wasn’t really doing work; it was just holding a perfunctory session to prevent the president from making recess appointments.

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There are 53 more days this year that are weekdays during which neither chamber will be in session, including five straight weeks in August. So that’s my crazy idea: What if, instead of not being in session, Congress were to be in session?

To be fair, Congress is in session more now than in years past, relative to how many weekdays it isn’t in session.

But if the problem is truly “we don’t have enough days left before we take five weeks off,” it seems almost weird that no one has yet proposed that Congress try maybe being in session more. It’s not only those gray days that they can be in session, of course; all the white blocks on that first chart are weekend days. Congress has been in session on the weekend in the past. It can also do so in the future.

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I propose this now for two reasons. The first is that Paletta and DeBonis wrote that article. The second is that Wednesday marks the 20th day of 2017 that Congress has not been in session on a weekday. A less generous person would look at that as a solid month of workdays that was squandered instead of moving forward on legislation. But you and I are generous, and simply offer that, from here on out, maybe being in Washington will make it easier to advance legislation in Washington.