Today in Congress: pick a number between 0 and 30. That's how many hours we'll do nothing.

What are we waiting for? Nothing in particular. Recapping yesterday's action:

The House is not in working session this week.

The Senate just barely managed to invoke cloture on the nomination of Andrew Hurwitz to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, voting 60-31 to end debate'later'on the nomination. The actual confirmation vote doesn't happen until today.

And that was pretty much it. Except that the Republicans also started the Rule XIV process to try to bring the House's "Protect Medical Innovation Act" to the floor.

Looking ahead to today:

The House meets in pro forma session today.

The Senate will be letting the entirely useless post-cloture time on the Hurwitz nomination run as a way of killing time until after the weekly party caucus luncheons today. Why is post-cloture time on a nomination useless? Well, the whole reason there's such a thing as post-cloture time at all is to give Senators time to amend the pending measure before the final vote on passage. But of course, you can't amend a nomination at all. So the existence of post-cloture time is an accident of history, basically arising from poor drafting during the updating of the cloture rule in 1949. Prior to that, cloture on nominations wasn't permitted at all. At the time the original rule was written, filibustering a nomination wasn't a serious consideration, but of course, it did eventually happen that it became necessary, and thereafter the language of Rule XXII allowed cloture to end debate on "any measure, motion, other matter pending before the Senate." The drafters appear to have simply forgotten, however, that post-cloture time on nominations would be nonsensical, at least for the reason post-cloture time was originally contemplated for all other measures. So no exception was ever written in, and that's how we got here today.

Yay, Senate! You're Very Serious!^TM

Where were we? Oh, yes. So after lunch, they'll probably agree unanimously to yield back any remaining time and hold the actual confirmation vote. Then after that, they'll start working on amendments to the farm bill. Or at least they'll go back to officially debating the farm bill, while continuing to try to work out an agreement on the side over how to deal with amendments to it. I suppose that might become another excuse not to actually wind up the Hurwitz nomination early. If you can let the clock keep running on that even after lunch, that gives the Senate something else to do while they work on a deal for farm bill amendments. It's six of one, a half dozen of the other, though. Either way, the situation is that they'll just be wasting C-SPAN2 time until they work something out on the farm bill, or just give up and file for cloture on that, too.

Today's floor and committee schedules appear below the fold.