Senate Republicans WANT the deadline to be real and so it will be. They’ll “get sooooo close” but time will run out. Then all through the election they’ll tell us they REEEEALLLY tried to keep their promise but ran out of time because of the rules. And of course “it can’t be done in an election year”, but “NEXT YEAR for sure it will happen if you re-elect us”.
And, as an added benefit (for them), working on this in September will result in not having any time to work on taxes and the wall and budget and anything else voters care about. If you ask today, they’ll repeat what they’ve been saying for months: “We can do multiple things at a time”. If you ask in December they’ll say they ran out of time as an excuse for not getting anything done this year.
If only they had more time they would have gotten SO MANY conservative things done (those days they aren’t in DC aren’t vacation, that’s when they “connect with voters” so don’t ask them to make more time that way and lose an excuse for not getting anything done)
I can’t remember a more obstructionist Congress, which is weird in that Congress had a majority of the same party as the president.