The House is not in session today.
In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:
Convenes: 10:30am
Following any Leader remarks, the Senate will proceed to the consideration of several resolutions relating to changing the Senate rules, en bloc. There will be up to 8 hours for debate equally divided and controlled between the two Leaders or their designees. If all time is used, at approximately 7:15pm there will be a series of up to 5 roll call votes in relation to the following resolutions:
- Wyden-Grassley-McCaskill resolution relative to "secret holds" (subject to a 60-vote threshold);
- Udall (CO) resolution regarding waiving the reading of an amendment, (subject to a 60-vote threshold);
- S.Res. 8 (Harkin) (subject to a 67-vote threshold);
- S.Res. 10 (Udall (NM)) with a substitute amendment which is at the desk (subject to a 67-vote threshold); and
- S.Res. 21 (Merkley) with a substitute amendment (subject to a 67-vote threshold).
The Senate will recess from 12:30 until 2:15pm to allow for the Democratic caucus meeting.
Here are the remains of the push for Senate rules reform. The stuff on "secret holds" gets rid of the "secret," but not the hold. What they're going to do is give the Senator who asked for the hold one day to reveal his name in the Congressional Record and in a new section of the Senate Calendar. If the name isn't revealed, then the Senator who objected on the floor on behalf of the unnamed Senator will have his name printed in the Record and on the Calendar instead.
But the hold still stands, and nobody gets to vote on anything until they pass a motion to proceed, which can be filibustered and therefore requires the same 60 votes as always.
Could they just have started pinning the holds on whomever objected on the floor, even without this? Yes. But for some reason, they never did. This resolution serves notice that they're going to start. And it creates a new place to print the names of the people they're going to blame.
The Udall (CO) proposal is most likely that part of his earlier S. Res. 12, which will allow waiver of the requirement that the entire text of amendments be read aloud on the floor, so long as they've been available and printed for some number of hours. His original proposal said 24.
And Senators Harkin, Udall (NM) and Merkley will offer their full proposals for actual filibuster reform (with some slight modifications), but all will be subject to the 2/3 cloture threshold for rules changes. It's not necessarily a 67-vote threshold, though, since the rules actually require 2/3 of Senators present and voting. In theory, cloture could be invoked with as few as 34 votes, or 2/3 of a quorum of 51. But that ain't happening.
Why the 60-vote threshold for the first two items? They're technically not rules changes. They'd establish "standing orders" of the Senate rather than actual changes to the standing rules. Operationally, they're not that much different. But so long as it's not a rules change, the cloture threshold is 60. And that is a hard 60, since it's 3/5 of Senators "duly chosen and sworn," as opposed to present and voting. Could you do a lot or maybe even all of the rules changes people wanted with standing orders? Yeah, probably. Why don't they? I don't know. Would it make a difference? Probably not, since there wouldn't be 60 votes for most of them, either.
So, drop on by C-SPAN2 and see who's coming out for which of the proposals. The vote totals are likely to be a little bit distorted by the presumption that certain thresholds won't be met. That'll have the effect in some cases of bringing out "yes" votes that are freebies, knowing there won't be enough to make a yes vote count, and in some cases of bringing out "no" votes that are motivated by not wanting to side with what they think will be a losing cause. That's something that's by no means limited to rules-related votes, of course. It's just another of the many transparency problems created by the filibuster.
You can be clear about your own preferences, though, using the Daily Kos action email engine to tell your Senators how you'd like them to vote on reform.
It won't get you the sweet, sweet government health care, but it's worth it just the same.