When the Lame Duck Ran Three Months

Imagine a built-in, three-month lame-duck session every two years.

That was the original congressional calendar. Terms began March 4, a date the Confederation Congress picked in 1788 and nobody moved until 1933. Congress met the first Monday in December, after the harvest was in. A member elected in November took office in March and did not sit until the December after that, thirteen months out. Meanwhile the old Congress sat from December to March 4 with its defeated members voting the whole time. That short session was the lame duck.

In 1922, President Harding's Republicans lost seven Senate seats and seventy House seats. Harding called the defeated Congress back anyway to pass a ship subsidy bill his party's opponents had just campaigned against. The House passed it with the votes of defeated members. Ten of those yes votes later got presidential appointments. A Senate filibuster killed the bill, but the jobs had made the point.

Senator George Norris of Nebraska, a Republican like Harding, wrote the fix: a constitutional amendment. Norris argued the short session was too brief "to do good work." The Senate passed his amendment by a wide margin in February 1923. His own party's House leadership buried it for a decade. Speaker Nicholas Longworth, whose name is on a House office building today, held it almost a year before sending it to committee. After Democrats took the House, it passed the amendment in 1932, 336 to 56, and the states ratified it in under a year, eighteen of them in the first three weeks of 1933.

The Twentieth Amendment ended congressional terms at noon on January 3 and presidential terms at noon on January 20, and set the meeting of Congress for January 3 "unless they shall by law appoint a different day."

The parallels to the 2026 election are hard to miss. In 1922 the President's party held the House and Senate, the economy had just come through the Depression of 1920 to 1921, and the party in power took the blame. The President's party holds both chambers again. The 1922 lame duck ran more than three months; this one runs about two.

The current continuing resolution runs out December 11, and the post-election session is still where the must-pass bills get done. When Congress will adjourn sine die is a biennial betting pool I have not won in years.

The shape, size, and sweeteners of the end-of-year package will depend on the November 3 results. Every government affairs team I know has something it is trying to get into it. When it is all over, some of us will wish we had the old three months to make our case.

Hat tip to the National Constitution Center, whose essay on the Twentieth Amendment supplied the 1922 story, and to its incoming president, Hiram Chodosh. Congratulations, Hiram.