The Senate is mere hours away from calling it a month and taking off for the Fourth of July recess, which will last until July 15. The House plans on being in for a few days next week, but then will be gone until July 19. That is, unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer happen to notice that the country remains in a simmering crisis and decide that maybe working on legislation for just a handful of days between now and the middle of September is a bad idea. By a handful, I mean nine days for the House from July 2 until September 13, and 16 for the Senate.

Maybe in recognition of that, the Senate is possibly canceling recess for the week of Aug. 9. No final decision has been made, reportedly, but “senators have quietly been advised to keep their plans for that week fluid.” The House, which is taking more time off but has also accomplished more than the Senate in the first half of this year, is still scheduled to be gone. A lot.

It’s not as if there aren’t issues that have to be addressed by Pelosi, one of which is getting ridiculous and infuriating. She’s giving the Senate until the end of this week to decide if they want to try another vote on the Jan. 6 commission before she moves on to decide whether to have a House select committee investigate. Let us review where we left that whole commission proposal.

It succumbed to a Republican filibuster on May 28, almost one month ago, after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans it would be “a personal favor” to him to block it. Despite that, six Republicans joined with Democrats in support of the legislation. That’s four short of beating a filibuster, for anyone counting. Four votes that almost certainly won’t be there in a re-vote. Which couldn’t happen at this point until mid-July at the earliest.

Drilling down more on the calendar, the only way that the six Republican votes hold on the commission is with changes demanded by Republican Susan Collins, changes that would give the commission even less time to complete its work than is already in the authorizing legislation.

As it stands now, a final report would be due from the commission on Dec. 31, 2021, just six short months away. That wasn’t good enough for Collins (in her role as McConnell’s agent of destruction), who has insisted that all of the work of the commission wrap by then, meaning no staff would be available for follow-up. It could mean that no members would be available to testify before Congress on their findings next year.

By the time the Senate revised the bill, voted on it, and sent it back to the House for passage we could be well into September, possibly October, because there are an awful lot of critical things Congress has to do between now and then. Two of them are must-pass: either an omnibus budget to fund fiscal year 2022 starting on Oct. 1 or a continuing resolution that carries funding over; and a hike to the nation’s debt ceiling, so the U.S. doesn’t default and send the global economy into a tailspin.

Then there’s doing something about the fact that we’re not going to have valid elections anymore if Congress doesn’t act on the voting rights and elections reforms that Republicans filibustered this week. There’s infrastructure and the budget reconciliation associated with it, which has already been pushed from Biden’s original July 4 deadline for it because everyone decided that Republican senators should get a chance to mess it up. It has to move forward in the next few months if it is going to happen at all.

Yes, members of Congress do actual work even during recess—some of them, anyway. Not in my home state of Idaho, but plenty of others do. As vital as some of that work is, it’s not doing the heavy lifting on legislation that really needs to happen, and as soon as possible. Because things are going to get even more urgent, and fast, as a good chunk of the nation—literally—catches fire.

So yes: Pelosi and Schumer and all their members should go do their July 4th parades and talk to their constituents, and then they should get their asses back to D.C., where they should stay until they save what’s left to be saved here.