Analysis: Messaging bills are loud, but do voters hear them?

WASHINGTON — The end of July is always a whirlwind of activity in Congress. It’s the last chance to pass bills and hold hearings before the August recess, so the calendar gets jam-packed. This week was no different, with the House voting on spending bills late into the night — sometimes to no avail, as GOP unity frayed.

And on Thursday, exhausted by this sprint, the chamber gathered to address one final piece of legislation, one presumably more important to Republican leadership than everything else left on the agenda: H. Res. 1371, a resolution “strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”

Summer is silly season in Congress, a time when political messaging ahead of autumn’s elections tends to take precedence over the drudgery of governance. Lawmakers universally deride the time wasted on these messaging bills — but only when they’re in the minority. When Congress returns for another short September session before leaving D.C. for the campaign trail in October, you can expect to see more.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., calls this the “summer of show votes.”

When we talk about “messaging bills,” we can often refer to very different flavors of legislation. “They’re not all the same,” said former Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who returned to teaching political science at Duke University after retiring from the House last year.

Some messaging bills serve as a lawmaking place marker, like an opening proposal that establishes members’ starting policy positions and may reveal where deals could be struck.

These can be really aspirational bills — “bills that are not feasible in the near term but may be in the future,” Price said. “It’s often the kind of thing that unifies the party offering it and of course forces the other [party] to take a difficult vote.”

But it’s the other kind of messaging bill, the type motivated by nothing more than electoral politics, that politicians bemoan whenever they’re in the minority but are only too happy to deploy when they’re in control. “In the cases of the more purely politically motivated bills, there is a gotcha element,” Price said. “You can probably find they become more prevalent in election season.”

It can be tough to distinguish between the two — bill sponsors almost always insist they are serious about even the most unserious of proposals — but in polarized times, politicians sometimes drop the façade. When House Democrats tried to force a vote on a bill that would protect access to contraception in June, they made their intentions clear. “I want to put Republicans on record,” Minority Whip Katherine M. Clark told CNN.

Still, expecting any single vote on a bill, let alone on a nonbinding resolution or on obscure parliamentary ephemera like a motion to recommit, to change a voter’s mind seems patently silly. After all, we operate in an environment that encourages Republicans to claim credit for securing federal funds for infrastructure projects when they actually voted against those bills.

Making noise

Even if a single attempt might not register with voters, the repetition of multiple signaling exercises may contribute to a larger narrative.

“It’s not necessarily that a vote on a particular resolution or a bill is going to immediately translate into winning these three congressional districts, but you inform the conversation and put it in ways that are more politically advantageous to you,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist who once worked for former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Heye pointed to the campus protests around the war in Gaza. Republicans have held hearings and introduced a bevy of legislation highlighting the issue, which has split Democrats. The House has also taken votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law, like one that would force the White House to deliver military aid to Israel no matter what and another that would sanction the International Criminal Court after prosecutors there announced they were seeking an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.

“There may not be much substantively that Congress can do, especially with private universities, but they can shine a light on it,” Heye said. “And that changes some of the conversation.”

The electoral incentives are similar to those behind lawmakers’ propensity to grandstand even when the hearing room is empty and barely anyone is watching on C-SPAN. Each individual doomed vote or stem-winding speech may do little to influence voters, but they add up over time.

Under this framework, it makes sense that Senate Democrats forged ahead with a second attempt this spring to bring up a collapsed immigration compromise. While political obsessives already know Republicans walked away from the deal — explicitly so they could deny Democrats a political win in an election year, even while acknowledging they could hardly dream of a more conservative package — the average voter isn’t paying close attention. If they bring up something multiple times, voters might not just hear about it, but actually retain and internalize this information enough to counter prevailing campaign narratives around the border, or so politicians hope.

If you take that view, then once or twice isn’t enough, which may be why Republicans held dozens of votes over the years trying to repeal Obamacare. Initially unpopular, voters in time grew to rely on the law for health insurance and support it. By the last serious repeal attempt in 2017, which the Senate narrowly and dramatically rejected, Obamacare had gone from an electoral millstone around Democrats’ necks to a source of strength.

That’s also why politicians rarely let their votes alone do the talking. Republican campaigns seized upon Democrats voting against a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in order to keep undocumented immigrants from voting in federal elections — something federal law already bans — with a series of ads highlighting the issue.

It’s not just the strategists in party leadership pushing to put up messaging bills, said Heye and Price. In fact, they’re mostly driven by the demands of rank-and-file members, who want to demonstrate to the party insiders and donors back home that they are doing something in Washington, even if it’s purely performative.

Some researchers have found that voters may respond differently to all this depending on their political party. Republicans are more ideologically driven, meaning they give credit for fighting the good fight, even if it’s all for show, according to one study by political scientists Adam Cayton and Ryan Dawkins. Meanwhile, Democrats judge politicians more on their individual votes. Either way, in a media environment where partisan fights get more attention than legislative accomplishments, it pays to make a lot of noise.

Message undelivered?

But how much are average voters paying attention to the daily workings of Congress? Research suggests most voters don’t know much about policy. On a sunny Tuesday in June, Roll Call decided to quiz some of the patriotic tourists visiting the Capitol, asking them if they could describe anything either chamber had voted on recently. We agreed to use just their first names, to avoid potential embarrassment.

Out of nine tourists, seven couldn’t name a single thing. Tammy, a 53-year-old accountant and Republican from Wilmington, N.C., knew Congress was “looking to fund what’s going on in the Ukraine,” but “I don’t know if they passed it or not.” (The supplemental did pass, in April.)

Olivia, a 21-year-old nursing student at Catholic University, couldn’t point to anything recent, saying she could only recall that Democrats worked to curb insulin prices, but “besides that, nothing.”

Her mother, visiting from West Chester, Pa., then interjected: “Nothing for immigration, that’s for sure. Don’t get me started.” (She was unaware of the Senate’s test vote this spring.)

Kim, a retiree from Lake Wales, Fla., who at the time was resigned to voting for Joe Biden for president because he was “the lesser of two evils,” knew the House had voted to automate Selective Service registration, which is a provision in this coming fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act. John, a 45-year-old Air Force officer also based in Florida and planning to vote for Biden, pointed to the House’s vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt, and could also mention three earlier votes held “a few months” ago — the TikTok disinvestment-or-ban law in April, the fiscal 2024 appropriations packages finalized in March, and last year’s internecine speakership fights.

Both men said they were daily news consumers. Kim listened to CNN and Fox on satellite radio in the car, while John followed news outlets on social media, reading posts and articles “a couple of hours every day.”

Since that balmy day in June, a lot has happened in politics, from the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to the Democratic shakeup that saw Joe Biden exit the presidential race. With Kamala Harris emerging as the expected nominee of her party, it was no wonder that House Republicans spent some of their last summer hours in Washington on a messaging blitz against her.

During floor debate Thursday, they took potshots at Harris’ handling of border issues, while Democrats reminded C-SPAN viewers that the GOP walked away from the bipartisan immigration deal. They squabbled over the meaning of “border czar” and traded competing statistics.

Homeland Security ranking member Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called the legislation a “press release disguised as a resolution” and jabbed at Republicans for starting recess a week earlier than planned.

“Make no mistake, this resolution is only before this body because Vice President Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president,” he said on the floor. “Testing new campaign messaging, though, is not a good use of the House’s time.”

Then, the House voted in favor of the resolution, 220-196. Now adopted, it will amend no statutes, change no regulations, affect any policy — but it at least gave lawmakers something to talk about.