No "bold" for oil, apparently.
The Hill thinks the path to decisive action is a bit more direct:
The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the Democrats' controversial bill that would cut the tax breaks received by the big five oil companies.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) filed cloture Monday night on the legislation, which means it would come to a vote at 6:15 p.m. Tuesday evening.
But neither the Senate's page listing cloture motions filed nor the floor schedule entry describing the deal arranged on the votes mention anything about cloture being filed. It's possible that the filing just wasn't noted, of course. And also possible that a separate deal arranged for a cloture vote today, rather than waiting for tomorrow, which the normal cloture procedure would ordinarily require. But I haven't seen any evidence of it.
Instead, we have this:
The Senate has reached the following agreement with respect to the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act and the Offshore Production and Safety Act.
At 2:15pm, on Tuesday, May 17th, the Majority Leader will be recognized to move to proceed to Calendar #42, S.940, the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act; and Calendar #43, S.953, the Offshore Production and Safety Act. There will be up to four hours of debate prior to a vote on the motion to proceed to S.940. The vote on the motion to proceed is subject to a 60-vote threshold. The motion to reconsider will be considered made and laid upon the table without intervening action or debate.
And what that means is that there'll be a vote on a motion to proceed today, not a vote on the actual oil subsidies bill itself. We went over what that means earlier, in Today in Congress:
[B]efore you can take up a bill, you have to get the Senate as a body to agree that that's what they want to do. Bills don't just come to the floor by magic. If you're lucky, you can get unanimous consent to do it. But if not, then you have to actually make a motion to proceed to consider the bill you want (a "motion to proceed" for short), and get a Senate majority to agree to your motion.
Thing is, the motion to proceed gets a debate of its own. And that debate is subject to the filibuster. And if you can filibuster the motion to proceed, then what you end up with is a debate on whether or not to end debate on the question of whether to start debate on the bill you actually wanted to bring to the floor. You may recall that we saw a lot of that in the last Congress. This Congress began with a "gentleman's agreement" by Republicans not to filibuster motions to proceed, in exchange for Democrats agreeing not to use procedural tricks to block Republicans from offering amendments. So I guess that deal broke down over this bill, at least.
So they're filibustering the motion to proceed to the oil subsidies bill, right?
Well, not exactly.
What we have in this situation, however, is what I call a "painless filibuster." Because one or both sides in the fight over whether or not S. 940 should be brought to the floor know that there are at least some opponents who are willing to threaten a filibuster, but nobody really wants to sit there and see how long those opponents can hold out, nor have to waste the time it takes to file for and invoke cloture, everyone agrees (in a unanimous consent agreement) to simply require 60 votes in order to pass the motion to proceed, rather than go through the hassle of actually having the filibuster fight. So the 60-vote threshold is built right into the vote. If you can get 60 for the motion to proceed, then it's assumed that you'd have been able to get them for a cloture vote, too. And vice versa, of course. So everyone saves time by agreeing to these "painless filibusters." But protecting big oil subsidies are the kind of thing you might have thought Democrats would be happy to force Republicans filibuster over.
But as we know, there are also a few oil state Democrats who might not be very happy at the prospect of this bill's passage. So we'll have... this thing, instead.
And now you begin to see why The Hill prefers simply to say that the Senate will vote on oil subsidies today, even though they really won't.