In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:
FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010
House Meets At... 9:00 a.m.: Legislative Business
First Vote Predicted... 9:30 – 10:30 a.m.
Last Vote Predicted... 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
“One Minutes” (5 per side)
Motion to Concur in the Senate Amendment with a House Amendment to H.R. 4213 - The American Jobs, Closing Tax Loopholes and Preventing Outsourcing Act (Rep. Levin – Ways and Means) (Subject to a Rule)
Complete Consideration of H.R. 5136 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011 (Rep. Skelton – Armed Services)
Possible Further Action on The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (Rep. Gordon – Science and Technology) (Subject to a Rule)
Postponed Suspension Votes (2 Bills):
- H.Res. 407 - Expressing support for designation of May as "National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month" (Rep. Castor - Energy and Commerce)
- H.Res. 1391 - Congratulating and commending Israel for its accession to membership in the organization for Economic Co-operative and Development (Rep. Ros-Lehtinen - Foreign Affairs)
- Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.
Motions to go to Conference should they become available.
Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.
In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:
Convenes: 10:00am
Morning Business with senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.
There will be no roll call votes during Friday's session of the Senate.
Well, it looked for a while last night like there wasn't going to be a Today in Congress today. All signs had pointed to a full Friday workday for both houses at publication time yesterday morning, but by the evening it had become clear that the Senate wasn't going to stick around to work on the tax extenders bill (and remember, that includes UI/COBRA extensions, too) before breaking for Memorial Day recess. Until yesterday, Harry Reid had been threatening weekend votes to make sure that was all taken care of before heading out of town. But with no prospects for a deal on time limitations and the specter of yet another cloture vote looming, the Senate broke for the week instead. Sorry to all you unemployed folks out there. Oh, and you doctors whose Medicare reimbursement rates take a tumble, at least temporarily.
The Senate did, however, manage to finish work on the supplemental appropriations bill much sooner than I thought they might be able to. It looked like that one might also have kept them here into the weekend if it hadn't been for a deal yielding back all post-cloture time. Maybe Republicans were willing to do that so long as they knew they were also able to blow up any plans for moving on to the tax extenders bill, meaning they'd get out of town early, and an important bill would stall for over a week. A two-fer, in Republican minds!
The House blazed through its work on the defense authorization bill, too, voting on 72 of the 82 amendments approved for consideration, leaving just 10 amendments with votes pending. I'm really not sure why they didn't just tough it out and finish with those votes and adjourn for the break. It's good of them to come back in to finish up their end of the tax extenders business, but since they plan to amend it and send it back to the Senate, now that the Senate's gone there's little point in doing that today. So they really might have considered staying in session for another hour or two to knock off the rest of the votes, pass the bill, and maybe clear out the other pending suspension votes, and not even bothering with today's session. And why did they carry over two suspension votes into Friday, anyway? What's the point of that?
I don't know. I really thought that since they were in session so late already, they'd just stay in and finish up. But instead, they adjourned around midnight, with plans (not published until after then) to return this morning.
Still on the schedule along with the last night's postponed votes and the tax extenders is the orphaned America COMPETES Act, pulled from the floor over a Republican motion to recommit two weeks ago, defeated as a suspension bill one week ago, then rescheduled again, dropped again, and then re-rescheduled. I don't know what the odds of it actually seeing action today are. If the leadership thinks Members are going to start skipping town early, maybe they'll find themselves with a favorable combination of die-hards versus absentees that will give them the right mix to pass this bill and defeat a motion to recommit. It probably depends on how anxious the subset of wobbly Dems who vote for gimmicky motions are to get out of town for the break, I guess.
No committee meetings are scheduled for the day. So what you see above is what you get. We'll see how it goes!