Capitol Hill after the State of the Union Address

[Elizabeth Baldwin Letchworth]

“Date night” on Capitol Hill went off without a hitch Tuesday night and the President’s State of the Union speech has been analyzed word for word by many. Meanwhile, the House and Senate chambers went back to work on Wednesday and continued their work this past week with the Senate finally concluding their opening day “housekeeping” resolutions and resolving the Senate Rules change impasse that had stalled much of the opening day routine matters. By week’s end, the Senate made minor rules changes to help make the Senate seem more in order. The changes are true “inside baseball” procedural modifications dealing with the “outing” of Senators who want to hold up legislation or nominations and removing the ability of a Senator to ask the clerk to read an amendment out loud,  if the text is available on the internet. These two changes are minor in comparison to what had been threatened by a small number of Senate Democrats at the beginning of the 112^th Congress.

The Senate did conduct some votes on the more radical proposals, however, none of the game changing ideas offered by the Senate democrats came close to passing. The proposal by Senator Harkin (D-Iowa) to reduce the number of votes needed to close off debate, the so-called cloture/filibuster rule, only garnered 46 votes. A major rules change like the one offered by Senator Harkin, needs 67 votes to pass in the Senate under the Senate rules. With the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) backing down from his threat to drastically change the Senate, starting with having the Senate declared NOT a continuous body, the Senate was able to announce long awaited committee assignments for the 112^th Congress as well as other organizational resolutions. 

Next week the Senate will begin debating legislation possibly dealing with the Federal Aviation Administration which has been operating on extensions for a couple of years. They may also consider the termination of the taxpayer funded presidential campaigns and the two national conventions. This bill, HR 359, was debated and voted on in the House this past week and passed the House by a vote of 239 to 160. Both bills could be vehicles for the Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) to call for a vote on the repeal of the Obama Health care law. The House passed repeal, HR 2, has also been teed under the Senate rules up by Sen. McConnell for a possible motion to proceed vote in the very near future.

The two Senate Leaders are trying to “play nice” right now in an effort to get much of the opening day, organizing items, put in place.  What remains as far as the organizing items is the resolution that would constitute the committee budgets. This resolution is needed for Senators to hire their appropriate committee staffers. The leaders hope to have an agreement on these funding levels by mid-next week. 

Finally, before the week ended in the Senate, the tea party Senate caucus was formally announced and the small group held their first “town hall” style meeting and are urging other Senators to join. The tea party caucus will focus on reducing the federal debt and government spending. The members of the new caucus include Sens. Paul (R-KY), DeMint (R-SC), Lee (R-UT) and Moran (R-KS).

The House of Representatives will be in recess next week to reconvene on Tuesday, Feb. 8.

Stay tuned to see if the final Senate housekeeping measures can be resolved and if the Senate will conduct its first vote on or in relation to the Health Care repeal bill in the coming days.

 Elizabeth B. Letchworth is a retired, elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority and Minority. Currently she is a senior legislative adviser for Covington & Burling, LLC and is the founder of GradeGov.com (http://www.gradegov.com)