House Passes HR 3081 and Recesses

Very early this morning the House passed HR 3081, the legislative vehicle for the Continuing Resolution that will continue funding the Federal Government while Congressmen head home to try to save their jobs. The bill will continue funding at current levels until December 3rd, potentially giving Congress time to pass some real spending bills when they return to a post-election session on November 15th.

As I mentioned in last night’s late blog post, the CFATS authorization was specifically extended in this legislation, so we won’t have to worry about if a general funding extensions would cover keeping CFATS running.

The house adjourned this morning pursuant to H. Con. Res. 321. This provides that the House will return to legislative work in mid-November. Yesterday evening the Senate but won’t technically be affected by the election recess. They will be in ‘regular’ session through November 12th.

According to an article on Politico.com this was done so that the President can’t put anyone into a normally Senate approved position via a recess appointment, a tool that Sen. Reid developed to counter President Bush’s use of that tool. The article provides an interesting discussion of why Reid is using it against the leader of his party. In any case, the daily Senate Sessions should just take minutes to complete.

There were a flurry of other bills passed by the House last night; I’ll get around to looking at the ones that could be of interest to the chemical security community in the coming days.