The Senate spent Tuesday doing what the Senate does best, which is confirming a lifetime appointment by a vote count that would embarrass a homeowners association. By 52 yeas to 43 nays, Senators invoked cloture on the nomination of Angela Veronica Colmenero to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas, which means Colmenero has effectively already won a seat on the federal bench for as long as she cares to keep it, with the formal confirmation vote merely a formality due by Friday. Nobody on the floor bothered to explain why they were voting the way they were. Nobody had to. That is what cloture is for.
The Rest of the Menu
If judicial confirmations are the entree, everything else Tuesday was garnish. Senators also advanced cloture, 70 to 21, on an amendment to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that exists because Congress has apparently decided that name, image, and likeness litigation is a more pressing use of floor time than anything involving an actual federal agency. Two bills passed by unanimous consent, one modifying the boundary of the Vicksburg National Military Park and one conveying a reversionary land interest in Sacramento; both are the legislative equivalent of clearing out a junk drawer, and neither will trouble a headline writer. The Senate also agreed to a pair of commemorative resolutions, because a body that cannot pass appropriations bills on time can always find the votes to recognize a heritage month.
Buried in the “New Public Laws” notice, easy to miss and clearly meant to be, was Public Law 119-110, better known as S. 307, addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault of Bureau of Prisons staff by the people BOP is paid to incarcerate. It was signed on September 16 and only logged in Tuesday’s Congressional Record, which tells you something about the pace at which Congress documents its own work. That a law protecting federal correctional employees from assault by inmates needed to be written at all is the kind of institutional admission that deserves more than a passing line item, and it is the kind of story this publication intends to come back to once the implementation record exists to judge it against.
The Meeting That Isn’t Explained
The single most interesting sentence in the entire Daily Digest was also the least detailed. The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will hold a business meeting Wednesday “to consider the request to direct Senate Legal Counsel to file an application seeking immunity.” Immunity for whom, in what proceeding, and why the request needed to be phrased with the specificity of a ransom note, the digest does not say. Congress is under no obligation to tell the public what its committees are up to before they do it, and on Wednesday it will not. We will be watching to see who walks out of SD-342 needing a lawyer less than they did walking in.
