From The Retired Enlisted Assocation:
As Congress returns to work this week they only have 28 working days left before the November elections. But they only have 26 working days left before the start of the new fiscal year for the federal government when they’re supposed to have all 12 of the bills passed to fund the federal government for another year. Those are called appropriations bills and so far they have passed none.
The House is ahead of the Senate, having passed 5 of the appropriations bills, with another 5 ready to go now that they’ve returned to work. The reason the House has been able to do this is because they operate by simple majority rule. The party with the most members can win passage of anything it wants as long as all of its members vote for it. In the case of the House, it’s the Republican with the majority.
The Senate is different because of the rules that have been developed over the years. Each Senator has much more power than each Representative in the House and if any Senator objects to a bill, he or she can bring it to a stop by threatening to filibuster the bill. While an actual filibuster is very rare, the threat of one means that each bill has to have 60 votes in to pass if there is any threat that a Senator might chose to filibuster. Although the Democrats have the majority in the Senate, they don’t have 60 votes – which means, if they can’t find enough Republicans to get 60 votes for a bill nothing can pass if a filibuster is threatened.
To make things even worse this year, the Senate is the only body which must approve Presidential appointments such Cabinet officials, so now that President Obama has nominated Robert McDonald to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Senate must hold hearings and eventually vote on him.
In addition, the President has requested new money to deal with the crisis of growing illegal immigration on the southern border so that will also require hearings and a vote.
With all of this to do and only 26 working days left before the start of the new fiscal year there is more and more talk that Congress will once again have to resort to a “continuing resolution,” which is a bill to continue to fund the government at FY2013 levels in order to avoid another government shutdown. Both parties know that shutting down the government in an election year is not a good thing to do.
As always, we will keep you advised in the coming weeks as Congress tries to get its work done.
