WASHINGTON – Congress has itself a good, old-fashioned, chicken-egg problem in getting out of the government shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson needs enough members of the House of Representatives to make it back to Washington by Wednesday night to vote to reopen the government.
The rub: The shutdown is causing travel issues so widespread that those very lawmakers may not all get back to D.C. in time to do their jobs.
For nearly two months, many House members have been residing in their districts while the speaker kept them away from Washington and their day jobs voting on bills. The pressure tactic was meant to force Democratic senators into reopening the government without major concessions from Republicans.
By Sunday, when lawmakers in the Senate finally reached a bipartisan deal to end the historic crisis, nearly half of all domestic flights were either canceled or delayed.
It didn’t take long for Johnson to shift his marching orders.
“You need to begin, right now, returning to the Hill,” he said in a message to lawmakers Monday morning. “We have to do this as quickly as possible.”
Congressmen opt for carpooling, motorcycling
One Republican congressman was so concerned about flight delays that he opted to drive his motorcycle roughly 950 miles back to the nation’s capital instead of braving an airport.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden left his home state of Wisconsin on Monday night to make the approximately 15-hour voyage through freezing temperatures.
“You may ask, Derrick, why are you on a Harley Davidson when it’s 32 degrees outside?” he said in a video posted on social media from somewhere along the Mississippi River. “Because they shut down the government – the Democrats –flights are too unreliable.”
“It’s going to be a little chilly,” he said.
GOP Reps. Rick Crawford of Arkansas and Trent Kelly of Mississippi decided to carpool back to the capital.
“8 more hours to go!” Crawford posted on social media just after 2 p.m. Tuesday. At that moment, there were more than 2,000 delays among flights within, into and out of the U.S., according to the data tracker FlightAware. Over 1,2000 had also been canceled.
The airports bearing the brunt of the disruptions Tuesday were New York City, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Delayed flights have already been dragging out congressional business during the shutdown.
Even after lawmakers agreed to end the shutdown on Sunday night, the chamber didn’t adjourn until after 11 p.m. The lone holdout vote, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was still getting off a plane in Virginia while others were voting. He blamed Democrats for his tardiness.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters in recent weeks she had two flights diverted at the last second – something that previously had never happened to her during her decades-long career in Congress.
