The filibuster is expected to go through the night, against fast-tracked nominees by the Trump Administration. Booker’s protest appears to be in response to a recent wave of Republican nominees being fast-tracked through the confirmation process, many of whom are aligned with Trump’s second-term agenda and Elon Musk’s increasingly influential role in federal advisory circles.

  • vvilld@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    You don’t understand what a CR is if you think it’s permanent. A continuing resolution is stopgap funding when a budget reconciliation fails to be passed.

    You don’t understand how Congress works. A CR isn’t used when Budget Reconciliation isn’t passed. It’s used when spending bills don’t pass.

    The "normal’ (or what’s supposed to be normal) process for funding the government is that the Congress passes a Budget, which is a set of funding guidelines, but doesn’t actually allocate money. That budget is then used by various committees to write appropriations bills, which is what actually allows the government to spend money. Those spending bills are typically supposed to only cover 1 year, with new appropriations given every year.

    Except Congress has been a dysfunctional mess for decades. They rarely actually pass Budget or appropriations bills. That’s why we’re always under these shutdown threats, because Congress doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. So when they come down to crunch time and can’t pass spending bills, they pass a Continuing Resolution (CR). A CR is an appropriations bill, but instead of using a recent budget as a guideline, the CR just says “continue funding the government at the exact levels it was with these minor adjustments” (usually cutting funding by 2-5% and/or increasing in specific areas, like disaster relief if there was just a hurricane or something).

    A CR, just like a normal appropriations bill, funds only to a set level. They don’t have a time limit in that they say “funding will stop on X date”, but they know how fast the government spends money, so they can predict that $XXX will last YYY days. In that way, they can say “fund $XXX worth” knowing that will expire on a certain date. CRs are just as “permanent” as any appropriations bill

    A Budget Reconciliation is a completely different thing. It’s a process that allows the Senate to adjust existing spending bills while bypassing the 60 vote threshold for cloture required by the filibuster rules. When the Congress writes a spending bill, they include language within it to say, “this portion of the budget can later be adjusted through reconciliation”. The intention is to strip out particularly contentious parts of the larger bill to allow the larger bill to pass while letting Congress then address the stickier issue on its own. So, for example, you don’t have to hold up funding national parks just because you can’t decide how much to spend on a new military drone program, for example.

    However, since Reconciliation allows the majority party to bypass the filibuster, it’s use is primarily to pass legislation that the majority knows they can’t do through normal legislation (due to the 60 vote threshold the filibuster puts on everything). There are certain rules which I can get into if you want that limit what types of things can be done through reconciliation and how often. But your framing in your comment above about how CRs are supposedly temporary until a Reconciliation Bill is passed is just flat out wrong.