Congress keeps holding all-nighters, creating dysfunction after dark
[April 25, 2026]
By MARY CLARE JALONICK
WASHINGTON (AP) — Just as the Senate prepared to launch into a
late-night vote series, Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana went
to the floor to vent.
Frustrated and seemingly exhausted Wednesday, Kennedy said he wanted
more time to debate his amendments to a budget resolution to fund
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. “Not that they’re in bad health, but it’s
hard to stay up all night.”
More than 6 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 the Congress, with leaders in both major
political parties often turning to the torturous grind of an overnight
session to exhaust members, overcome objections and push legislation to
passage. But it's a scenario that is playing out again and again, nearly
business as usual, as the House and the Senate fracture and careen from
one crisis to the next.
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 Sen. 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 the last few weeks, Congress has repeatedly debated pressing national
issues at night — leading to confusion and turmoil in both chambers.
Much of the drama has centered, as it increasingly does, 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. It was a
breakthrough, and Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., passed the
spending bill by voice vote — meaning there were no objections on either
side — 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. Senators were then forced to figure
out a new plan for reopening the department, and it 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 well past midnight last week
while trying and ultimately failing to pass different versions of a
foreign surveillance bill. Scrambling to pass an extension of the law
ahead of a Monday deadline, leaders eventually cobbled together a 10-day
extension past 2 a.m.
Members of both parties were exasperated by the last-minute mayhem.
“Who the hell is running this place?” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. He
said Republicans threw the bill together “on the back of a napkin in the
back room in the middle of the night.”
“Just about everyone agrees that this is serious stuff, the kind of
debate that Congress ought to have in the open,” McGovern said.
Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican and member of the House Freedom
Caucus who opposed the leadership bills, said the outcome was
predictable.
“We warned them that this was gonna happen,” Ogles said. “Unfortunately,
here we are at 2 in the morning.”
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The moon emerges from the clouds over the U.S. Capitol dome in
Washington, Dec. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Time-consuming partisan bills push Senate into late nights
The late-night vote series in the Senate this week was part of an
arcane, complicated process called budget reconciliation that GOP
leaders are using to try to fund the two immigration enforcement
agencies that Democrats continue to block. It's become the default mode
of governing for majorities in Congress as bipartisanship on major
issues fades away.
Reconciliation allows the Senate majority to bypass the filibuster and
pass budget-related bills along party lines. First, though, they have to
get through two lengthy series of votes — and that's where the dreaded
“vote-a-rama” comes in.
The process is open-ended, which means lawmakers in both parties can
offer as many amendments as they want to put the other side on record —
or, as Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska describes it, “to make
each other miserable.”
Leaders generally hold the votes in the middle of the night, as they did
Wednesday into Thursday, in hopes of exhausting both sides and forcing
senators to stay on the floor and vote quickly. But instead of waiting
around between amendment votes, Murkowski walked back and forth between
the chamber and her “hideaway,” a small office each senator has in the
Capitol building.
“I’m at 14,291 steps,” she said just after 11 p.m., looking at her
smartwatch, which was also telling her that her bedtime was approaching.
She said if she couldn’t sleep, she might as well get more exercise.
Senators went through the same reconciliation process last year, in
extremes, as they labored for weeks to pass President Donald Trump’s
package of spending and tax cuts, which he dubbed One Big Beautiful
Bill.
The bill had barely enough Republican support to pass, and the Senate
and the House held nearly back-to-back all-night sessions to pass it by
Trump’s July 4 deadline. In the Senate, GOP leaders kept the long vote
series open for hours on end as they worked to win support from
Murkowski and others.
“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 certainly nothing new in Congress. The
Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law,
passed the Senate in the early hours of Christmas Eve in 2009 after
weeks of negotiations, just in time for senators to get home for the
holidays. Countless other big bills have been passed in the dead of
night, as well.
But lawmakers say the after-dark routine has gotten worse and 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 Sen. Ron Wyden of
Oregon, who has served in Congress since 1981, when he was elected to
the House. “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 Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey, a relative newcomer to the
Senate elected in 2024, said there’s an eventual question of whether
anyone is watching.
In the middle of the night, he said: “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 when there is a war going on with Iran and lawmakers
take long stretches away from Washington.
“I don’t mind being here,” Kim said.
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