This Week in Congress: House is closed; Senate seeks cloture. (Again. Of course.)

No one here but us Senators! Recapping Last Week in Congress

Considered in a vacuum, last week in the House was relatively productive. There was the passage of a (terrible) version of the VAWA that the Senate is almost certain to reject, having already passed their own much better version with substantial bipartisan support, as well as the passage of the NDAA that's currently under veto threat. So yes, things moved. But it may end up being the case that they end up going nowhere.

The Senate began last week with the passage of the Export-Import Bank reauthorization bill. This was the bill filibustered during the previous week, which you may recall set off Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), driving him to reverse his previous position on filibuster reform. Of course, we all appreciated that here, but if you're handicapping things minute to minute, it's worth remembering that yes, the bill actually did pass unamended, which is exactly what Reid was looking for. So how mad might he still really be? On the other hand, there's little doubting that the Republicans will do this to him again on something else. And then again and again and again.

In fact, that was the very next thing they did, and so the Senate wound up the week approving two appointments to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, but also with Reid filing cloture motions on a judicial nomination and the FDA bill, plus seeing Republicans block the Iran sanctions bill.

This Week in Congress

The House is not in session this week. It's the off week in their regular two-weeks-on, one-week-off schedule, and it back up to the Memorial Day week, so they won't come back in until next Wednesday. I suppose they could just as easily have taken next week off too (the Senate will), but they'll just work a short week instead.

The Senate starts this week off with the two above-mentioned cloture votes on the schedule. The game plan is to go to the judicial nomination first, probably because you can get directly to a cloture vote on the nomination itself, without having to deal with a motion to proceed. (A motion to go to executive session for the purposes of debating a nomination is not debatable.) If the cloture vote fails, they'll move on to the cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the FDA bill. (They're stuck with the motion to proceed on that one.) But remember, if the cloture vote on the judicial nomination succeeds, then the nomination becomes the exclusive pending business until it's resolved. That could be a quick matter, if Republicans regard the die as cast based on successful cloture, and yield back post-cloture time. The problem, of course, is that they might just want to be jerks about it, and insist on burning up the 30 hours of post-cloture time on the nomination, even if it's a foregone conclusion, just to slow down everything else.

And that's not only a full explanation of the schedule, it's an explanation of why we so rarely know much about the Senate schedule more than a day in advance. You never know when someone's going to turn something that could be settled with a ten minute vote into a 30 hour waste of time.

Full floor and committee schedules are below the fold.