Terry Gerton We have elections next week, but I don’t want to talk about elections. I want to talk about what happens after elections, that infamous thing called the lame duck session in Congress. By the calendar, the House is going to have 20 scheduled days in session and the Senate has just 22. And as we’ve been talking for the last several weeks, the stack of to-do tasks is really tall. So let’s first ask this question, are there any rules about how the lame duck session is supposed to work or is it all just ad hoc?

Loren Duggan It’s sort of ad hoc. It’s just a continuation of the session that has been going since the beginning of the year, and that pretty much took a break for the election. But the only immutable rule here is that by noon on January 3rd, that session has to come to an end, along with the 119th Congress, and then the 120th Congress will meet at some point after that on January 3rd, unless they change it. But how they spend that time, what days they’re in session and what they do is kind of up to the members and how they choose to organize themselves. Obviously in the House, it’ll be leadership driven, and in the Senate, you kind of need consensus and things like that. But that will be one of the top things. How are you going to use this time? Especially depending on what the outcome is on November 3rd.

Terry Gerton Well, let’s think about how they will have to process the election results. So they come back on the Monday after the election. There will be changes. We don’t know exactly which ones, but there will be changes. Where do they start with chamber and committee leadership decisions?

Loren Duggan Well, those will kick off in earnest. And one of the first things you’ll see is the people elected on November 3rd, who are not currently members, will start coming to town as well for a new member orientation. So you’ll kind of have the old and the new meeting together for the first time. And some people will be lame ducks themselves either because they’ve already retired, they’ve lost their elections, but we will start to see the parties hold their internal leadership contests. And those start usually at the party level. And then they work down to the committee level as well. Now, those contests have already been started. If a member was retiring and left open a chairmanship as a result, they’ll be jockeying for that position already. And that could be chairman or ranking member because the parties, if they flip control, they’ll be running for still their party’s top spot, but they might have a different job title in the end, chairman or ranking member. But we’ll start to see that in earnest, really, when they come back and how early they hold those elections, whether they seek to delay them, maybe to process the results more fully is a question we’ll be watching very closely in the days after November 3rd.

Terry Gerton In addition to the changes in the members themselves, there will be a lot of staff turnover for the folks who were working for members who aren’t there anymore, incoming folks for the new people. Is it normal for staff to shift offices or do they sort of head off into the sunset? And what does this mean for committee staff, professional staff as well?

Loren Duggan There tends to be a lot of churn in this period because in committees, sometimes there are fewer slots if your party goes from majority to the minority and more if you go from the minority to the majority. So you could see some movement there. If your boss loses, you’re not out of a job right away, but you might start looking for a new job with a new member or maybe even off the hill. So there will be a lot of jockeying for those positions as well. New members are going to be looking to staff up. Sometimes they bring people in from the committee or people they know from other walks of life and then build a staff out from there. So, you start light and then build out an office from there, but that would be part of the churn. And one of the interesting things too is office space. At some point there will be an office lottery and house members will go and pick numbers and figure out which office they’re going to get next year because real estate is very important on Capitol Hill. You want to be close and in the best location possible so you can get to your meetings and people can get to you.

Terry Gerton In amongst all that personnel churn is the real work of legislating. Let’s talk first on the Senate side. They still have a long list of nominees that they need to get through hearings and confirmations. Is that going to be top of mind?

Loren Duggan I don’t know if it’ll be top of mind, but it will be an important thing for them to get done. They could, of course, we don’t have the results yet, but if they lost control of the election, the Republicans, then they would have fewer opportunities in the new Congress to get all of President Trump’s nominees through. So that might heighten the interest in pushing through some nominees in this period that maybe they would’ve waited under different circumstances if they maintained control. But there are a number of people who have been sent out of committee that are awaiting action. With this process that they’ve created, this Congress, to batch lower-level nominees together and move them in packages, I would not be shocked to see them start that process at some point when they come back to try to move a lot of those forward. If there’s another high-profile departure that they need to deal with on its own, another cabinet secretary or something like that, that might move to the top of the pile as well, just given the dynamics there.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Loren Duggan of Bloomberg Government. All right, Loren, let’s move then to legislating. As we’ve talked, we will be in a continuing resolution through the 12th of December. I’m already hearing a lot of conversation about they’re just going to extend that CR into the new Congress. They could actually have appropriations hearings and bills. What do you think is going to happen there?

Loren Duggan It’s a good question. And that is going to be one of the biggest deadlines on the calendar, December 11th. And, that piece of legislation carries a lot with it as well. The CR also extended surface transportation programs that dealt with hemp regulation, which is something that a lot of lobbying groups have gotten involved in. So, a lot questions to answer before then. Yes, they could come up with some sort of bicameral, bipartisan agreement to try to push forward on that, but that might be a heavy lift. The Senate never produced bills before they left for the election. The Appropriations Chair, Susan Collins, is in one of the top and most competitive Senate races. So the House will often tout that they’ve got all their bills out of committee, they have stuff ready to go into those talks. But whether they can wrap up those talks toward the end of the year when they still need that supermajority 60-vote support in the Senate to get something through, that’s a tricky process. But we’ll see what their mood is when they come out of the election season.

Terry Gerton Let’s talk then about some of the other must-pass legislation. There’s the National Defense Authorization Bill, there’s the Farm Bill, there’s those surveillance authorities in FISA, tax extenders, disaster aid, other expiring authorities. How are they going to get all of that onto the agenda?

Loren Duggan It’s a good question. NDAA is often something they try to get done by the end of the year. There are important authorities for personnel that are in that legislation that make it a must-pass bill by the end of the year. You could see some push to get that done and there’s a well-worn tradition of getting that through. Other things, that’s going to depend on how quickly they can negotiate differences between the bills. We saw the House pass a farm bill, the Senate committee put out its version. Maybe there’s a path forward there. Some of the other things you mentioned, and if they’re non-controversial enough to get attached to something else, that might be the way. There’s only going to be, as we say, so many trains leaving the station before the end of the year, and it might be about can you get an agreement and attach it to something and move it forward? Water Resources Development Act, bipartisan, bicameral, there’s a lot of interest in that. That could be a candidate to be attached to one of these other bills if they can get agreement and move that forward.

Terry Gerton Whose job is it to say, we really have to have a bill that addresses tax extenders, the NDAA, who keeps track of must pay, must extends, and who decides, well, that can wait?

Loren Duggan Well, the committees that oversee these things are usually their top champions and they’re getting in the ears of their leadership and saying, I really want to move this bill, I really think we can get this forward. And sometimes they demonstrate support: I got this letter, two thirds of the Congress is ready to move on this, let’s try and find floor time. In the house, it’s a lot easier to just put things on the schedule and knock them out. In the Senate, everything is kind of an agreement in the end, and floor time is going to be very precious to get these things over the line. So we’ll have to see what they can work on, on that kind of consensus basis, especially if, and maybe we’ll talk about this as well, there’s talk of another party line reconciliation bill, which would be a time consuming effort as well, even if it is something that only needs a simple majority vote.

Terry Gerton Well, along with reconciliation, there were some things that almost got done before the break, like permitting, like the NCAA sports rule, like transportation authorization. So those are close, even though they’re not technically must-dos. Could those all get bundled into some kind of package and maybe pushed over the line?

Loren Duggan Possibly the permitting bill, which is a Senate deal, is due for a Senate vote when they come back. That’s the first item of business is to try and move that forward. There is broad support for that. We’ll see if that holds up through the election. You write a deal in late September and you don’t vote on it until November, there can be some pushback or some changes, but we’ll see. College sports got through the Senate, got over to the House. We’ll see if the House likes that or wants changes, and then that would have to go back for agreement there. Surface transportation might be tougher. There have been some House bills produced, no Senate bills there. So wrapping that up on funding more or less highway, transit, road safety programs, that might be a tougher one just given the lack of progress, at least public progress that we’ve seen so far.

Terry Gerton All right, so we have ourselves laid out an agenda that would keep the shoemaker’s elves busy for 25 days here in the lame duck session. What do you expect to see move first?

Loren Duggan Well, I think they’ll have that permitting vote. We’ll see how far it gets from there. But then I do think that spending is going to be pretty top of mind. They’re going to be here for a couple of weeks, go home for Thanksgiving and come back. And that’ll be a question they’ll have to face and maybe what they package with that. If they’re going do that reconciliation process, they have to start that really early cause it’s going to take time to get a resolution through both chambers and the following legislation and getting all that through. So if they decide to do that, I would probably see them start pretty early in that November work period to get the ball rolling on that so they can try to make progress if that’s what they decide they want to do.