This week will kick off the 112th Congress.
As you're aware, the House transitions to Republican control this year, which for purposes of our This Week and Today in Congress features, we'll have to rebuild our models for gathering and disseminating information on floor and committee schedules.
Our usual source for House floor scheduling information is the Office of the Majority Leader. It's the Majority Leader's prerogative to set the schedule, so that's obviously where the best information comes from. During the last Congress, members of the Republican minority got their information on floor happenings from the Office of the Minority Whip. I expect that Democrats will likewise get their schedules from the Democratic Whip, Steny Hoyer, who of course was the Majority Leader in the 111th Congress.
But the new Congress doesn't convene until Wednesday, and it's only Monday now. That means there is no Republican-run Majority Leader web site to turn to for scheduling information just yet. Similarly, none of the new committee chairs have taken the keys to their sites yet, or posted their hearings schedules, if any. So I don't actually have that information for you today. I assume we'll start to see it closer to Wednesday.
I do, however, have this:
In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:
Convenes: 12:00 noon
Following the presentation of the certificates of election and the swearing in of elected members, there will be a required live quorum. All senators are asked to report to the floor at that time. The Senate will then be in a period of morning business with senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.
The Democrats, as we know, still have control of the Senate. So the floor schedule -- for what it's worth -- is still available to us in the same place. Not that it tells us anything. It certainly makes no mention of the possibility of an opening day push for rules reform. But we know that's on tap.
Speaking of which, it's probably time to point something out about that. While Senate reformers have been pointing at the first day of the new Congress, January 5th, as the key day for starting debate on reform, the truth is that we just don't know yet whether the bulk of the debate -- or even all that much of it -- will actually take place on the 5th. What's important about the method that the reformers, led by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), have chosen is that they'll want to formally object right at the outset to the continuance of the Senate's old rules, and instead move that there be an opportunity to amend them and/or adopt them anew. That's not what the Senate normally does, though. They usually just assume that the old rules continue, unlike the House, which does overtly amend and readopt them every two years. The key thing under Udall's proposed procedure is that an objection should be made before any substantive business is done in the new Senate, since that's been the agreed-upon signal that the continuance of the rules has been agreed to.
In past rules reform debates, after an initial objection was made, the reformers have sometimes secured unanimous consent agreements to actually postpone the debate while reserving all the rights to it that they claimed on the first day of the session. That has allowed the Senate to put the actual rules debate off for a while. Whether or not today's Senate will grant such a request may be a long shot, but then again, we don't know whether anyone will even ask for it. We'll have to see how that develops, and we'll talk more about how it might later on.
For now, all we can do is wait for everyone to swap the keys. But in the meantime, you can all take a look at these CRS reports to learn more about floor procedure on the first day of a new Congress:
- The First Day of a New Congress: A Guide to Proceedings on the Senate Floor (PDF)
- The First Day of a New Congress: A Guide to Proceedings on the House Floor (PDF)
Oh, there is one other thing we can do. We can count down the days with our good friend, Andy Harris (R-MD-01):