How Congress Pauses Time to Avoid Tough Votes. Seriously.

This one sentence lets Congress pretend days don’t exist and protects Trump's tariffs

Sometimes Congress does some funky, underhanded business to get what it wants with the general public being none the wiser.

I know, I know—you are shocked! Congress?! It can’t be!

Let me give you an example with Trump’s tariffs.

Did you know that the House of Representatives adopted several procedural bills that *turned off* its own ability to challenge or remove President Trump’s tariffs?

In other words, as it stands now, the House is unable to terminate the Trump tariffs, even if the House wanted to, because it agreed to an internal rule that they couldn’t. They hamstrung themselves on a controversial issue. On purpose.

Let’s ignore the ‘why’ for now and dive into the ‘how’, because it’s going to make you mad (if you can stand the boring). Stay with me.

First, the context

All the way back in February of 2025, Trump declared a national emergency, a move his administration said was critical to deal with “a public health crisis” resulting from drugs coming into the US. Declaring that national emergency also allowed him to impose tariffs on countries he felt contributed to the health crisis—in this particular case, Mexico, China, and Canada.

Boom, tariffs imposed with few strokes of the presidential pen.

Francis Chung/POLITICO | Credit: AP

At the time, Congress could have responded in infinity ways, from imposing tariffs with its own votes to taking away the president’s power to unilaterally declare national emergencies or imposing tariffs at all. (Side note: we have a long history of tariffs in this country, but for the vast majority, Congress was the one doing the tariff-ing, not the president.)

Now, the law says that national emergencies are temporary. They are to only remain active for six months. Within six months, Congress must decide “whether that emergency shall be terminated.”

Congress does this with a bill that goes to a committee. That committee then has a deadline of 15 days to vote on whether or not they think the emergency should be terminated. If the committee thinks it should be, then the full House and Senate must vote on it within three calendar days.

That 15 and 3 days are critical here. They are Chekhov’s guns for my Congress nerds. Here’s why.

Next, turning time off

In March, the House adopted this resolution by a vote of 216-214 (all but one GOP Rep. voted yes and all Dems voted no). The resolution does a bunch of different things on several different pieces of legislation, but the very last section, the one sentence in Section 4, is where we start our tariff tomfoolery.

Sec. 4 states:

Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.

Let me translate: the calendar literally stops for the entire first year of the 119th Congress if there’s a bill that attempts to terminate Trump’s national emergency that gave him the power to impose tariffs. And if the calendar can’t start, the 15 days can’t go by. And if the days can’t tick off, there’s no deadline to vote on the issue. No deadlines, no votes to end the emergency and end the tariffs.

Let me translate even more directly: by adopting this one sentence tucked in a longer resolution dealing with other issues, the House says no days are happening. The clock is unplugged despite the sun going up and down a whole bunch of times. And since no days are going by, the deadline can never come to force a vote.

They turned the clock off!

It’s the Truman Show but with far worse actors and a lot fewer people who understand what the hell is going on.

It gets worse: they didn’t just do it once. They have done it four times! (Here, here, here, and here) for different national emergencies and different tariffs. So if some lawmakers didn’t know what was happening the first time, they’ve had three more plate appearances.

Just like Granny used to say, “fool me four times.” Or something like that.

Congress has a bad rap for not doing anything, often for good reason. And that’s frustrating enough.

But sometimes they’re literally making it so they can’t. And that’s much, much worse.