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: 9:30am
Following Leader remarks, the Senate will proceed to a period of morning business until 11:00am with the time equally divided and controlled between the two Leaders or their designees.
At 11:00am, the Senate will resume consideration of the House Message on HR1586. There will be 20 minutes of post-cloture debate time remaining, with Senators Baucus and DeMint, or their designees, controlling 10 minutes each.
At approximately 11:20am, the Senate will proceed to a series of up to 3 roll call votes. Those votes will be in relation to the following items (we will vote on the DeMint motions in the order in which they are called up):
- DeMint Motion to suspend Rule 22 in order to make a motion to commit (individual income tax rates on small businesses);
- DeMint Motion to suspend Rule 22 in order to make a motion to commit (individual income tax rates); and
- Motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to HR1586, with Murray amendment #4575 (FMAP/Teacher Funding).
Tomorrow, the Majority Leader would like to reach an agreement to vote on confirmation of the nomination of Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and to consider the Child Nutrition legislation (S.3307).
* Though this doesn't technically qualify as today in Congress, word is that the House will reconvene next Tuesday to deal with the Senate's expected passage of H.R. 1586.
Why does the House need to vote again on a bill they already passed? Because H.R. 1586 was originally something very different, and the Senate stripped all the contents out and replaced it with the FMAP and teacher funding. So the current text of H.R. 1586 is entirely new as far as the House is concerned. (Even though the House has also passed FMAP and teacher funding before. They did it as part of the supplemental appropriations bill, H.R. 4899, and it's not enough that they both pass it, it has to be in the same bill, with the same number.)
Did you all enjoy the awesome and enlightening extra day of post-cloture debate on the motion to concur in the House amendment with an amendment? What a great way to spend the Wednesday before the August recess, when there's still a Supreme Court nomination pending! And just in case you haven't had enough, Jim DeMint (R-SC) would like your agreement to suspend Rule 22 (which he'll later and under different circumstances insist is sacred and inviolable) so that he can offer a motion to commit the bill and amend it that would otherwise be out of order since cloture has been invoked. This, I suppose, is what he's decided to leverage out of the informal agreement not to object to any unanimous consent request to allow a cloture motion on the Kagan nomination to be filed while the floor was still occupied with post-cloture time on the motion to concur on H.R. 1586. If he's going to be asked not to object to Reid's request to get around Rule 22, then he surely figures he can feel free to ask his colleagues to let him have a crack at getting around Rule 22 as well. Not that he needed their permission to try.
So DeMint will take two shots at amending H.R. 1586 through the motion to commit (or rather, motions to allow him to offer motions to commit), and then the Senate will wrap that bill up and send it back to the House, for action next Tuesday.
After that, they'll try to get an agreement on Kagan and maybe the child nutrition bill. We've seen how things go when they're just hoping to get an agreement, of course. But this time there's the added leverage of the recess. We'll see if that helps any to get them out on time.
Today's committee schedule appears below.