The House is not in session this week. They're recessed for the month of August and are due to return the week of September 13th.
In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:
Convenes: 2:00pm
Following Leader remarks, the Senate will proceed to a period of morning business until 3:00pm with senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.
Following morning business, the Senate will resume consideration of the House Message on H.R.1586. At 5:45pm, the Senate will proceed to a roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur with amendment #4567 (Teacher Funding and FMAP) in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to HR1586.
Next week, in addition to considering the Teacher funding and FMAP amendment, the Majority Leader would like to consider an energy bill, the nomination of Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and any other items cleared for action on the Legislative or Executive calendars.
Uh-oh! The sun rose, so you know what that means. A cloture vote in the Senate! Today's cloture vote is on the substitute amendment that will strip the original text out of H.R. 1586 -- which started out as a re-authorization bill (definition) for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but will now become the vehicle for funding the teacher jobs and aid to the states that got stripped out of the supplemental the week before last. Remember what that was all about?
Why strip out the contents of an FAA authorization? Because the offset for the spending comes in part from closing the foreign tax credit loophole, which means it's a revenue measure. And revenue measures are supposed to originate in the House, under the Constitution. Remember? So they're taking a bill from the House and "amending" it so that they can comply with the rule. This bill originated in the House. They're just taking every single thing in it out and putting in something completely new. Ta-da!
So they'll be working on getting cloture on that substitute amendment. But just for fun, I'll point out that the entire history of this bill is that the House passed it in March of 2009. The Senate didn't even take it up until a full year later, in March of 2010, and when it did, it slogged through two full weeks of debate on it, amended it, and sent it back to the House. The House agreed to the Senate amendments and added still more amendments (which took them all of one day, by the way) and sent it back to the Senate again. So the reason I'm telling you all this is so that you'll recognize that what they're voting on today is a cloture motion on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment with an amendment.
I wish I was kidding you.
The good news here is that since it's just a motion to concur with an amendment, the one cloture vote is all they'll need. Whether or not they can get it done, no one yet knows. But at least it's just one cloture motion.
The amendment, as I understand it, is fully paid for with cuts made elsewhere, which means it meets the demands of the Maine Senators and therefore should pass muster in the cloture voting. But then again, Republicans have Democrats over a barrel in that it's a week before they're supposed to adjourn for recess, and Democrats also are apparently entertaining ideas of taking up and finishing an energy bill and the nomination of Elana Kagan to the Supreme Court. A failed cloture vote might mean abandoning the teacher funding and state aid until after the recess, in order to take a shot at the other agenda items. Frankly, they should probably think about dropping the energy bill instead, since it's pretty well watered down and is mostly of little interest to serious environmentalists at this point. Better to spend their time on Kagan and making sure there are some teachers still working come September.
But hey, that's just me. I'm just a regular chump with kids in school, so what do I know?
The week's committee schedule -- limited just to the Senate since the House is already gone -- appears below.