This Week in Congress: the House returns, and the Senate takes off

Can you tell our pictures apart? Just us in the House here this week. Recapping Last Week in Congress

The House was not in session last week. So, good. I'm trying to take a vacation this week.

Major happenings in the Senate included the confirmation of Paul J. Watford to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the passage of the FDA user fees bill, the "failure" (with 51 votes) of the student loan bill, and the filing of cloture on the motion to proceed to the Paycheck Fairness Act.

This Week in Congress

The House is back in session this week, but thanks to the holiday weekend, they'll be coming in on Wednesday instead of the normal Tuesday return. Then they're back out of here again on Friday. Is it worth coming back to DC for just a few days like that? Well, it's appropriations season, so there's always lots of work to do, even though a lot of the House's appropriations bills are likely to face veto threats, since they'll mostly be working with numbers that throw wrenches into the works of the existing budget deal that came out of last summer's debt ceiling deal, and were ratified in the Budget Control Act.

That's something to keep in mind over the next several weeks, as the House works its way through their appropriations bills. House Republicans are working under the assumption that the relevant guidelines for spending are those contained in the plan they "deemed" adopted a few weeks ago. Congressional Democrats and the White House are working under the assumption that the relevant guidelines for spending are those contained in the Budget Control Act. So you literally have two sides reading from entirely different scripts. It'll be... interesting... to see how they resolve this. To say the very least.

The week actually begins with a slate of suspension bills, the first of which appears to be a House version of the FDA bill just passed in the Senate. Which is to say that they appear to be attempting the same play as with the VAWA, with the House ignoring the Senate's bill and passing its own, forcing the Senate to disagree with the House and request a conference, instead of vice versa. Also among the suspension bills, perhaps the most pretentiously-named measure of the year: Rep. Trent Franks' (R-AZ-02) "Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act." Naturally, it's an anti-abortion bill. Because what else would a House Republican be up to during appropriations season?

What do Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass have to do with abortion? Nothing. But Susan B. Anthony was female, and Frederick Douglass was black. And this bill would make it illegal to perform an abortion knowing that the abortion is sought based on the sex, gender, color or race of the child, or the race of a parent. So, uh... there you go. Presumably, either Trent Franks thinks no one would ever abort a white male embryo,  just couldn't think of which totally awesome white to name the bill after, or figures Frederick Douglass can do double duty. Ditto, black females. Asians are just S.O.L., I guess. And forget the rest of you. Whatever. The point is, there are totally famous names in this bill, and if you vote against it, you hate those people, and should move to Russia.

Thursday and Friday are given over to intelligence authorization, military construction (MilCon) and veterans' appropriations, a possible stab at energy and water development approps, and perhaps yet another motion to instruct conferees on the surface transportation bill. But it'll be a race against the clock to get back out of town for the weekend.

Full floor schedule is below the fold.