It's Wednesday, April 20, and Day 67 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell laid down his Supreme Court blockade: no meetings, no hearings, no votes on his replacement, and Day 35 since President Obama named Merrick Garland to be Scalia's replacement. What's the Senate doing today instead of considering the Supreme Court nominee?
It's spending its energy on, well, energy. In a flurry of doing stuff yesterday, the body actually passed an energy bill yesterday, with most of the work having been accomplished off the floor. That work included acquiescing to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and his demands that there be no assistance to the people in Flint who don't want to drink poisoned water. So there's that. There's also the very real possibility that nothing will come of it because the House is still a thing.
"One of the concerns that I think that we have, or the obstacles that we have in front of us, is time on the calendar, and the fact that in order to have a conference, the House and the Senate have to be in town at the same time," [Sen. Lisa] Murkowski said in a news conference after the bill passed.
Never mind, that, they're still futzing around on energy stuff today. Because expending energy on something that may or may not happen when they could be confirming a Supreme Court justice is just how they do it under Mitch McConnell.
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