The Lonely House Republican Still Coming to Work During the Shutdown

It was 2 p.m. on Tuesday in the empty Capitol, 14 days into the government shutdown, and Representative Kevin Kiley of California, one of the few House Republicans who showed up for work in Washington this week, was excited that he finally had something to do.

He strode through the underground tunnel connecting the Rayburn House Office Building to the House chamber to attend a pro forma session, the two-minute-long routine meeting that is required every three days during a recess.

As congressional doings go, this was underwhelming. The session was gaveled in and then immediately gaveled out, with no business conducted. Few of Mr. Kiley’s colleagues were there; by his count, he laid eyes on a total of 11 House Republicans throughout the day.

Still, it was a highlight in Mr. Kiley’s otherwise empty hours.

“This is the big excitement here!” he said. “It’s the only thing on the calendar!”

Mr. Kiley, 40, a politically vulnerable, center-leaning Republican in a rightward-lurching conference, decided to show up to work as a one-man protest against Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to send the House home indefinitely as the government shutdown drags on with no end in sight.

He said he thought lawmakers should be in Washington working on the appropriations bills they still need to pass, holding congressional hearings and marking up legislation — not back home on an unplanned hiatus for which staff did not even have enough lead time to pack with district events or constituent meetings.

“We’re supposed to be here — this is what the schedule said,” Mr. Kiley said during an interview in his office after the brief excitement of the pro forma session. “We were supposed to be here two weeks ago, and last week and this week.”

Mr. Kiley has been calling on Mr. Johnson to bring back the House, so far to no avail. He has no quibble with his party’s stance in the shutdown fight — he holds Democrats responsible for blocking the stopgap funding bill Republicans pushed through the House — but he argues that Republicans should be at work negotiating a solution rather than at home casting blame.

“The decision to shut down the government and the decision to shut down the House, which Speaker Johnson made, are completely independent things,” Mr. Kiley said. “I thought, ‘Maybe I can practice what I preach. I’ll come back myself, even if the speaker isn’t making it happen.’”

So on Tuesday, Mr. Kiley was sitting in his office with a few interviews planned and not too much else on his schedule.

“I’ve said that my door is open for any member who is here who wants to talk,” he said. “That’s, a lot of times, how you actually come up with a solution to these things.”

So far, it was mostly journalists who had taken him up on his open-door policy, but he said he had succeeded in having a few “informal conversations” with Democrats and Republicans.

Mr. Kiley is in a unique position to break so publicly with Republican House leaders.

He is one of five California Republicans who are all but certain to lose their seats in the next midterm elections if voters grant final approval next month to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s newly drawn congressional districts.

Mr. Kiley has been frustrated that Mr. Johnson did nothing to help him in the redistricting push, which President Trump instigated in efforts to give Republicans a better shot at keeping their small House majority. Earlier this year, Mr. Kiley begged the speaker to bring to the floor legislation to prohibit mid-decade redistricting across the country. Mr. Johnson refused.

Now, Mr. Kiley is behaving like a lame duck with nothing to lose, even while expressing optimism that he could still win in a newly drawn district. (Most of the other Republicans who have been publicly critical of Mr. Johnson’s decision to keep the House out of session are actual lame ducks: Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina have both criticized Mr. Johnson’s decision, and have both have announced they are not running for re-election.)

“The new sixth district does now include Yolo County,” Mr. Kiley joked. (YOLO, the colloquial acronym for “You Only Live Once,” was an attitude he conceded could be used to describe his recent interactions with House Republican leadership.)

“I’m never going out of my way to create conflict just for the sake of doing so, but I’m willing to do it when it’s necessary,” he said.

He is finding more opportunities these days.

Mr. Kiley has not signed the petition. If he did, he could provide the 218th signature needed to force a floor vote himself. Mr. Kiley said he had no plans to sign on and that his “focus right now is getting the government open and the House operating.”

He wouldn’t speculate about Mr. Johnson’s motivations, but said he disagreed with the decision to leave Ms. Grijalva in political limbo.

“She won her election; swear her in,” Mr. Kiley said. “The folks who voted for her, and even those who didn’t, don’t have a representative when they could.”

Mr. Johnson’s justification for dismissing the House amid a government shutdown is that it already passed a short-term government spending bill and has finished its work until the Senate finds a way out of the impasse. But the whole reason a funding extension was needed in the first place was that neither chamber of Congress had completed any of the individual annual spending bills required to fund the government.

The House could be working on those bills now, Mr. Kiley noted.

Besides, he argued, the more lawmakers are around, “the better opportunity we will have to end this impasse, because we can actually talk to each other and that’s kind of how a lot of things actually get done.”

He added: “If the Senate is unwilling to do what we want, then it’s at least worth exploring whether there’s a way to find common ground.”

None of that is happening right now. Instead, Democrats are holding showy protests and a constant stream of news conferences; Senate Republicans are holding show votes almost daily to spotlight Democratic intransigence; and House Republicans are scarce.

On regular conference calls Mr. Johnson has been holding with members, there has been little pushback against his decision to keep lawmakers home indefinitely. But Mr. Kiley said he was not alone in his objections; he’s just the most vocal.

“There a lot of members who believe we should come back,” he said. “When you’re not here, it becomes difficult for people to build the coalitions necessary to move things in a different direction.”

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, made a similar argument.

He told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Johnson was not bringing his conference together to meet in person because “there will be substantial pressure on Republican leaders to actually do what the American people are asking Congress to do, which is reopen the government and decisively address the Republican health care crisis.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.