The Senate reconvened at 10:00 A.M. and resumed consideration of the nomination of Douglas R. Bush to be an Assistant Secretary of the Army. The Senate will then vote on the nominations of John P. Howard III to be an Associate Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and Loren L. AliKhan to be an Associate Judge of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, both for a term of fifteen years. Following that, the Senate will vote on the nomination of Amy Gutmann to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Federal Republic of Germany and the nomination of Lisa A. Carty to be Representative of the United States of America on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, with the rank of Ambassador. The Senate may also vote on as many as seven other nominations.
The House reconvened at 12:00 P.M. and is working on H.R. 3076 – Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, legislation that eliminates a requirement that the Postal Service prepay future retirement health benefits. The bill also allows the Postal Service to provide non-postal services as part of an agreement with state and local governments and requires that the Postal Service make deliveries six days of the week. The House is then expected to begin work on H.R. 6617 – Further Additional Extending Government Funding Act, (Section by Section) which will fund the government through March 11th. Included in the short-term spending measure are a few anomalies including $350 million for the military’s Red Hill water contamination crisis in Hawaii, funding for nuclear submarines, and for the Interior Department’s cybersecurity safeguards. Passage of the measure will be the latest in a string of short-term funding bills that lawmakers have passed, and President Joe Biden has signed into law since September 30th. Congressional negotiators on both sides of the aisle have been working on a bipartisan basis to try to secure a full-year funding agreement, but a deal has not yet been reached. House and Senate appropriators have been haggling over spending for weeks, but have been unable to bridge key differences, particularly over overall spending levels. With the expiration of the 2011 Budget Control Act, the two parties have less incentive to abide by the principle of parity in military and nonmilitary spending increases. The 2011 law was designed to force compromise by triggering automatic spending cuts in the absence of an agreement on defense and nondefense funding. Yet the chairmen and ranking members of the Appropriations committees have been unable to reach a spending deal in large part because they’ve had to go back and forth between negotiating amongst themselves and separately their party leadership to get signoff on major concessions. It is expected leadership will get involved this week as the Omnibus is cobbled together.
The House may also consider up to five postponed bills under suspension of the Rules.
