Congress is Out for the Summer

Yesterday the Senate held their last session for the month of August, heading back to their home districts for the Congressional summer recess. The House left a week earlier. This is an annual event for Congress and the only unusual thing about it this COVID-19 affected year was that both houses stayed a week longer than normal, hoping for an agreement on a new COVID-19 response bill.

There is still a remote possibility that both the House and the Senate could come back to Washington for a one-day session to take-up a relief bill, but no one is really expecting that to happen. The two sides are just too far apart in an election year. The political calculation has been made that no action will draw less voter ire than would giving in to the other side.

While the COVID-19 relief bill has drawn the most attention from the national press, the bigger concern is how Congress will deal with the annual spending bill process. With the House returning to Washington a week later than normal (to make up for leaving late), there will be just two and half weeks from the time they get back to the end of the fiscal year. Some sort of spending measure needs to be passed in that time to prevent a government shut down on October 1^st.

No one expects the Senate to take up the two minibus spending bills passed by the House last month and the Senate Appropriations Committee left Washington yesterday without introducing any spending bills of their own. So we will have to see a continuing resolution passed to keep government spending going at the current rate through the November election and probably through to mid-December to allow a backroom deal to be worked out on an omnibus spending bill.

The lack of a deal on the COVID-19 relief legislation bodes ill for reaching an agreement on a continuing resolution. If the House can come up with a clean (few or no policy or spending riders) CR, then the Senate will be likely to take that bill up and pass it. Unfortunately, the prospect of adding a few priority Democratic policy/spending riders will be a temptation that will be hard to resist. I would not be surprised to see some COVID-19 response measures or some additional postal service spending to support mail-in ballot handling from being included in a first attempt at a CR.

On a more personal basis, the Washington vacation will have the effect of slowing down the posting on this blog as there is less legislative news to talk about. This happens every August. This year, however, I will probably be taking up some of that writing slack time with additional postings about the Critical Infrastructure Security Operations Center (CI-SOC) over on my other blog, Future ICS Security News.