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.

HR 3081 – the CR Legislative Vehicle

I made a mistake in my earlier posting about the pending Continuing Resolution. I reported that the legislative vehicle would be S 3676. The article I quoted reported that the Senate would use the State Department Appropriations bill, but did not include the bill number. I checked the House Appropriations Committee web site and they only listed the Senate bill on their chart of Appropriation Bills Status. This evening I had a chance to check the Senate web page that shows the results of today’s votes and it lists HR 3081 as the vehicle that the Senate will use to discuss and vote on the CR.

The Senate voted this evening to approve the cloture motion on HR 3081 (the vote tally was not reported as of 9:22 pm EDT). That means that the Senate will begin their discussion of HR 3081 tomorrow, probably starting with the offering of the amendment in the nature of a substitute that will be proposed CR. No other word on the Senate web site tonight about what other amendments might be offered before the vote on the CR is taken. That information may be available in the morning when the Congressional Record Daily Digest for today is posted.

The use of HR 3081 will obviously make the previous discussion about constitutional issues completely out of date and worthless. Oh well, that’s the way it goes.