“We’ve had to tighten our belts a little bit,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday afternoon. “We’re certainly prepared to do that, and we have done that as a result in terms of specific budgetary requests.” That means playing a sort of musical chairs with staff, moving them around as needed to cover for vacancies.
It’s unlikely Congress is going to get a budget passed this year, but it should be able to get at least a short-term continuing resolution—perhaps even lasting into the new year—done next week. But within a week or so of getting that done, the debt ceiling is going to have to be either suspended or lifted. The Treasury Department says that it won’t be able to shake loose enough funds to stretch beyond mid-December for meeting the nation’s debt obligations.
Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have actually been having talks, with McConnell apparently backing down from his early October screed to Biden about refusing to ever help on the debt ceiling again. “We cannot let the full faith and credit of the United States lapse, and we are focusing on getting this done in a bipartisan way,” Schumer told reporters last week. “We agreed to kind of keep talking, working together to try to get somewhere,” McConnell said.
Those are the two must-do chores for the Senate in order for the nation to keep functioning. But there’s so much more. For example, getting the recently nominated Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed to be the Federal Communications Commission chair because her interim position expires at the end of the year. The Senate also needs to confirm commissioner nominee Gigi Sohn to break the 2-2 deadlock with Republicans on the agency. But mostly, they need to make sure at least Rosenworcel is confirmed so that the commission doesn’t accidentally revert to Republican control.
Rosenworcel is probably going to be on Dec. 1, along with another key recent nominee, Alvaro Bedoya at the Federal Trade Commission. That body has been operating with a “zombie commissioner”—Rohit Chopra, who left for his new job as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month. The rules of the commission allow him to have essentially pre-voted by email on a number of agency actions, but that’s a highly untenable situation for the long-term.
There’s also the extremely welcome development of two new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors nominees. One is replacing current chair Ron Bloom, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s BFF on the board. Bloom’s term is up Dec. 8. It would be great if these Postal Service confirmations could be done by the end of the year and the USPS could begin as soon as possible to—hopefully—boot DeJoy and start unwinding all the damage he’s done to the institution. As of yet, the hearing for the USPS nominees hasn’t been scheduled. This one might have to wait to the new year.
Republicans sure aren’t going to make it easy to get these seats filled. As of mid-November, the Partnership for Public Service counted just 179 individuals confirmed out of 410 nominees. “Trump had nominated 363 people for full-time positions and had just 201 confirmed by the 300-day mark in 2017, while Obama had 344 of 462 on the job and Bush 380 of 465 at this point in their presidencies,” the organization reports. There are actually 1,200 total positions in government that require an executive nomination and Senate approval and seemingly infinite ways in which the opposition party can gum that up.
It’s just one more way in which the Senate is flat-out broken and dysfunctional. The whole fact that Democrats are having to use the politically fraught and complicated budget reconciliation process to pass huge chunks of Biden’s agenda demonstrates how messed up it all is. In a sane system, Democrats would look at that and say that there’s got to be majority rule and abolish the filibuster. That’s not, however, what we have.
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