Right as the Senate prepared to launch into a late-night vote series, Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana took to the floor to vent. Frustrated and seemingly exhausted, Kennedy said he wanted more time to debate his amendments to a budget resolution funding immigration enforcement agencies. But he had another complaint.
“Frankly I am worried about the health of some of our members,” Kennedy said as 9 p.m. approached Wednesday. “Not that they’re in bad health, but it’s hard to stay up all night.”
Over six hours later, just past 3:30 a.m., senators wrapped up another marathon voting session on amendments and filed out of the chamber, dazed, tired, and resigned to soon doing it all again.
It's a complaint as old as Congress, with leaders often turning to torturous overnight sessions to exhaust members, overcome objections, and push legislation to passage. But this scenario is playing out repeatedly, nearly business as usual, as the House and Senate fracture and careen from one crisis to the next.
Lawmakers blame worsening dysfunction
Lawmakers say it’s a symptom of a broken Congress that leaders are increasingly forced to govern in the dead of night.
“The dysfunction is getting worse,” said Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who has been in Congress for 14 years. Lawmakers have become “less mature,” he said, as a growing number act only in their own self-interest and hold up bills or delay proceedings.
“It’s not a healthy lifestyle,” Cramer said, for the country or the lawmakers. “There’s less concern for the team effort.”
Late-night fights have become the norm
In recent weeks, Congress has repeatedly debated pressing national issues at night, leading to confusion and turmoil in both chambers. Much of the drama has centered on government funding.
In late March, Senate Republicans struck a deal with Democrats to reopen most of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration, while Democrats continued to block money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol after the shootings of two protesters in Minneapolis. Majority Leader John Thune passed the spending bill by voice vote just past 2 a.m.
Senators then flew home for a two-week recess, leaving final passage to the House. But House lawmakers who were asleep when the final Senate agreement was announced woke up and angrily rejected it, saying they wouldn’t pass legislation that didn’t include funding for the immigration enforcement agencies. The issue remains unresolved.
An equally contentious matter, the renewal of surveillance powers for federal spy agencies, also devolved into an after-hours affair. House GOP leaders kept members in session past midnight last week while trying and ultimately failing to pass different versions of a foreign surveillance bill. Leaders eventually cobbled together a 10-day extension past 2 a.m.
Members of both parties were exasperated. “Who the hell is running this place?” said Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts. He said Republicans threw the bill together “on the back of a napkin in the back room in the middle of the night.”
Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus, said the outcome was predictable. “We warned them that this was gonna happen,” Ogles said. “Unfortunately, here we are at 2 in the morning.”
Time-consuming partisan bills push Senate into late nights
The late-night vote series in the Senate this week was part of an arcane process called budget reconciliation, which GOP leaders are using to fund the two immigration enforcement agencies that Democrats continue to block. It has become the default mode of governing as bipartisanship fades.
Reconciliation allows the Senate majority to bypass the filibuster and pass budget-related bills along party lines. First, they must get through two lengthy series of votes, leading to the dreaded “vote-a-rama.” The process is open-ended, allowing lawmakers in both parties to offer as many amendments as they want to put the other side on record.
Leaders generally hold the votes in the middle of the night to exhaust both sides and force quick votes. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska walked back and forth between the chamber and her office, accumulating over 14,000 steps. “I’m at 14,291 steps,” she said just after 11 p.m., noting that if she couldn’t sleep, she might as well exercise.
Senators went through the same process last year to pass President Donald Trump’s package of spending and tax cuts. The Senate and House held nearly back-to-back all-night sessions to meet Trump’s July 4 deadline.
“It’s insane,” Murkowski said of the late nights. “My mom always said, ‘Nothing good happens after midnight.’”
Overnights are not new but become more common
Overnight votes are nothing new. The Affordable Care Act passed the Senate in the early hours of Christmas Eve 2009. But lawmakers say the after-dark routine has worsened and become more frequent.
“Part of what’s changed here is there’s a lot of heavy lifting that you have to do to get a bill passed,” said Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has served since 1981. “I think at some point you’ve got to have a forcing mechanism, and one of the easiest is to stay up until the wee hours so that everybody is basically trying not to fall asleep on national TV.”
Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, elected in 2024, questioned whether anyone is watching in the middle of the night. “Are the American people paying attention? How do we get the message out?” Still, he said it’s important that lawmakers get their work done at any hour, especially with a war in Iran and long stretches away from Washington. “I don’t mind being here,” Kim said.
