With 36 days until the midterm elections, and facing rising gas prices, an Iran war with no end in sight and increasingly dire midterm polling, Senate Republicans are facing a crucial choice this week: stay or go home? Some GOP lawmakers are caught between their desire to use the rest of the scant preelection legislative calendar to potentially improve their standing with voters and the likelihood there probably isn’t much they can really do anyway. After last week’s decision to stick around and try to make headway on a number of GOP priorities, the Senate now could leave town as soon as Wednesday evening. As of now, Senate Republican leadership will bring up final passage of the bipartisan bill overhauling the college sports industry, which is expected tonight. But the idea that a sports bill could be the last item of Senate business before Election Day has some optics-minded GOP senators concerned, so they are bringing up a House-passed bill — the Ratepayer Protection Act — aimed at curbing data-center-driven utility cost hikes. They hope the vote will divide Democrats on a hot-button issue and give endangered Senator Jon Husted (R-Ohio) something to tout back home. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) is expected to tee up the bill tonight for a vote Wednesday. Also on the agenda: Republicans are discussing votes on measures from Husted and Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska), who is in his own competitive race, to roll back California’s stricter standards for vehicle emissions. They’re also likely to vote on a House-passed bill to curb lawmaker stock trading. The stock trading bill is being led by Ricketts, and it includes voter ID requirements that have been championed by Husted.
For today, the Senate will reconvene at 3:00 P.M. and will vote on final passage of S.4668 – Protect College Sports Act of 2026 which would be the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer schools. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them. The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified as some in the industry pleaded with Congress to step in after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges. The bill’s backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections. Critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.
