Between now and October 8, when this congressional session is set to expire, Senate Dems have a short list of what they really need to get through: the small business bill that they'll take up tomorrow, middle class tax cuts (and ending tax cuts for the rich), a stop-gap funding bill to cover all the appropriations bills that haven't been dealt with, hopefully judicial and executive branch nominations that have been languishing at an unprecedented rate, and Obama's $50 billion infrastructure bank. Most of the action will be in the Senate, since the House has already passed hundreds of bills and have basically been left to mess around with minor bills while watching the Senate spin its wheels.
Here's what would be priorities in a sane world:
Judicial nominations: At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick writes:
Barack Obama has seated fewer federal judges than any president since Richard Nixon. (Although, to be sure, when Nixon was President, there were only 60 percent of the number of federal judgeships as today.) Despite the Democrats' majority in the Senate, 102 out of 854 seats are vacant, and fewer than half of Obama's nominees have been confirmed....Of course, not all blame is created equal. While it's true that Obama has been slow to put forth judges and allowed the left-leaning American Bar Association extra time to vet his nominees, Republican obstruction has also reached new lows with this administration. As Russell Wheeler, who studies judicial vacancies at the Brookings Institution, explained to the Times, the longstanding political parlor game of stalling opposing federal-appeals-court nominations has recently "spread like a virus to the district courts." And despite some cries that Obama is stacking the bench with radical, wild-eyed liberals, the president has—with very few exceptions—nominated almost exclusively a slate of racially diverse moderates, who tend to receive near-unanimous support when they finally come to a vote. So when Senate Republicans suggest that Obama or Harry Reid is at fault for declining to stage a massive showdown over the judiciary in the Senate, it starts to sound a bit as if they are demanding greater obstruction of their own obstructionism.
The TANF Emergency Fund: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities highlighted the looming end of this program, which the House has voted to extend beyond it's September 30 sunset, but the Senate has yet to act on:
The TANF Emergency Fund, which President Obama and Congress created in last year’s Recovery Act, has given states over $1 billion to operate subsidized jobs programs that have proved successful on multiple fronts. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future....
As the Emergency Fund’s September 30 expiration looms, states are ramping down their subsidized jobs programs, stopping new placements and giving notice that existing jobs will end.
Obviously, with continuing dismal jobs reports, any effort to retain existing jobs is essential. Hopefully the Senate can squeeze this one in in the next ten days.
Middle class tax cuts: This is the big one and a constantly moving target. Obama has framed this masterfully, as Republicans holding middle class tax cuts hostage on behalf of millionaires. So far it seems to be working at getting Boehner and Cantor in conflict, as well as making it tough for McConnell in the Senate to take a definitive position. Would that Obama's supposed allies, like Lieberman House Blue Dogs and New Dems, who can't recognize a winning political issue when it's plastered in their faces, would get in line. This is the fight to take into the election, and hopefully the White House is working the phones with these short-sighted Dems.