Well, that planned amendment postings got somewhat ruined with the downtime we had recently. While I guess I could put it together now, it’s really kind of pointless given that the full text of the bill, as passed by the Senate, has been printed. Hopefully the new Congressional session will be a bit more productive.
With both the House and Senate adjourned sine die (a nice Latin way to say that the first session is officially concluded), the next item of business is for both Houses to reconvene on Tuesday, 5 January, for what look to be mostly pro forma sessions. After that, the House remains out of session until Tuesday, 12 January; the Senate won’t be back until Monday, 18 January. Obviously, a high priority will be melding the House and Senate bills—while a formal conference may be obstructed by Republican procedural objections (forcing a conference would eat about six days), informal negotiations may be able to bypass the official process while providing roughly the same result (in the form of amendments to the other body’s amendments and such). But what else is on the Congressional agenda?
In the Senate, we’ve got the first hint of an official schedule, at least for Wednesday, 20 January:
After a period of morning business, the Senate will proceed to consideration of Ex. Cal. 421, the nomination of Beverly Martin for the 11th Circuit Court, with 60 minutes of debate evenly divided and controlled by Sens. Leahy and Sessions immediately followed by a vote on the nomination.
At a time to be determined by the Leaders, the Senate will proceed to H.J. Res. 45, the Debt Limit (Increase) resolution. After Reid offers a substitute, which will only change the amount by which the debt limit is increased, the following amendments are in order:
- Thune (TARP)
- Murkowski (endangerment EPA regs)
- Coburn (rescissions package)
- Sessions (spending caps)
- McConnell (relevant to any on the list)
- Reid (relevant to any on the list)
- Reid (pay-go)
- Baucus x3 (relevant to any on the list)
- Conrad/Gregg (fiscal task force)
All of these are subject to a 60–vote threshold for adoption, as will be the final passage vote, which will happen right after all of the amendments get dealt with.
As for the House, there’s nothing concrete about their early schedule yet. There are, of course, plenty of rumors about upcoming immigration and jobs bills floating around, but they haven’t actually materialized yet. Given that the Senate still has a huge backlog of House bills that they could be working on—climate change comes to mind—we’ll just have to wait and see.
