GovTrackUS - Updates on Congress and The White House

[Mike SP]

Update on Activity in Congress and the White House

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House Ambles on; Senate "Procedure"

By Amy West (Sept. 12, 2025)

House

Continuing Business

Rep. Thomas Massie's (R-KY4 discharge petition on releasing the Epstein files needs only one more signature in order for Massie to force a vote on the bill. On Sept. 23, AZ will hold a special election to fill the former Rep. Grijalva's seat. One of the candidates is his daughter and heavily favored to win. If she does, she would likely be the 218th signature for the petition.

Bills Passed

These bills are all very early in the legislative process and nowhere near becoming law since they've only passed in the House.

• H.R. 3425: Personnel Oversight and Shift Tracking Act of 2025, which would direct the Director of the Federal Protective Service to establish processes to strengthen oversight, performance, and accountability of contract security personnel engaged in the protection of certain buildings and grounds, passed 402-0.
• H.R. 3424: SPACE Act of 2025, which would require the Administrator of the General Services Administration to collaborate with Federal tenants with respect to shared-space arrangements, passed 397-1.
• H.R. 3838: Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, which is the House's version of the National Defense Authorization Act, passed 231-196.
• H.R. 3486: Stop Illegal Entry Act of 2025, which would mend the Immigration and Nationality Act to increase penalties for individuals who illegally enter and reenter the United States after being removed, passed 226-197.

Senate

When we asked you all what you'd like us to write about during the August Recess, the biggest category of questions was "how does the Senate even work and why is it so confusing?" The shortest and most accurate answer - because this is how the Senate wants to do things - is not especially helpful.

So, where we can we'll keep identifying examples to help clarify how the Senate functions.

First, the Senate is considered a "continuing body" because that's literally true. Unlike the House, in which every member is up for re-election simultaneously every two years, the Senate staggers its elections into groups of roughly one third. For example, the next group (aka "class") to be up for election is Class II in 2026.

Second, being a continuing body means that Senate rules are set across Congresses unless the Senate as a whole votes to change them. But the Senate rarely does this. Instead, they use different byzantine combinations of votes to simply change the interpretation of the rules on the books. These changes in interpretation are called precedents. Ringwiss, an amateur parliamentary expert noted on Bluesky that even though the Senate decided to publish an updated version of their precedents twenty years ago, they still have not. As he further notes, the result is that you just have to know what a given change means and remember it because there's no resource to check against.

This last Ringwiss link describes the upshot of what the Senate spent the bulk of its time on this week. Let's go through it.

Senate Democrats have been refusing to agree to votes on blocks of Trump Administration nominees, even at lower levels, because they believe the nominees are unusually bad. Therefore, the Democrats argue, each one should be reviewed individually. This has eaten up a tremendous amount of floor time since in the past, under administrations and Senate control of both parties, the Senate has grouped lots of lower level nominees.

Senate Republicans do not care for this approach and consider it unwarranted obstruction. Democrats, for what it's worth, agree they're being obstructive, but believe it's warranted because of their view of the quality of the nominees.

So, Senate Republicans changed a precedent this week. How did they do that if a regular vote must first get past the cloture threshold of 60 votes to end debate? By overruling the chair. Ringwiss describes it this way

‘I make a point of order that 2 + 2 = 5.’

‘The point of order is not well taken.’

‘I appeal the ruling of the chair.’

In practice, after the introduction of S. 377, a resolution to allow nominees to be voted on in groups, that looks like this:

• Motion to Invoke Cloture: S. Res. 377 which fails 52-47 - the equivalent of "I make a point of order that 2 + 2 = 5".
• On the Motion to Reconsider S.Res. 377 which fails 52-45 - this the "The point of order is not well taken".
• Because On the Decision of the Chair S.Res. 377 not being sustained 45-53 is definitely the equivalent of "I appeal the ruling of the chair".
• Since the decsion of the chair was not sustained, e.g. overruled, the chamber then voted on cloture with a new simple majority threshold for passage and the Republicans got what they needed with 53-47.

Is this ludicrously complicated? Yes. Could the Senate just change the actual standing rule about how many votes are required for a cloture vote to pass? Sure.

However, both parties believe they need the elements of existing rules to remain as is. So, instead, whenever the majority feels it's too its advantage, it goes through a procedure like this to change a specific circumstantial interpretation of a rule. This is why I opened by saying the most accurate, yet least useful for understanding what's happening, description of why the Senate works the way it does is because this is how Senators want it.

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