A Race to November: Lots Of Work, Little Time On Capitol Hill

ABC's Matthew Jaffe Reports: Senators return Monday from their Independence Day recess with a full plate of work awaiting them and not much time before a planned August recess and the campaign season for the midterm elections.

The issues lawmakers tackle in the coming month will help frame that election – from big ticket items like Wall Street reform, which is likely to pass, and climate change legislation, which most likely will not, that both sides will use as campaign tools. Crowding the schedule is the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan, $34 billion in emergency war funding the Pentagon needs to pursue the war in Afghanistan, and maybe even a long-sought extension of unemployment benefits.

On Wall Street reform, Democrats remain just shy of getting the votes they need to overcome the key 60-vote threshold in the Senate. If they can convince two out of three fence-sitting Republicans – Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ore Olympia Snowe of Maine – to get behind the measure, then they will have the votes they need for passage, even without a replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd. Brown and Snowe both voted with Democrats on a procedural motion in May, while Grassley voted against cloture but in favor of final passage. All three are still making up their minds on the most recent compromise that House and Senate negotiators hashed out before the Independence day recess. Democrats received a huge boost just before the recess when Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell announced that she would support the bill after voting against it in May.

On the unemployment front, Democrats have been trying unsuccessfully for months to restore unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, but have been stymied time and time again by Republicans loathe to add $34 billion to the government’s growing deficit. There are now nearly 2 million laid-off workers still waiting for their benefits to be restored. Just before the recess Democrats fell only one vote short, so expect Majority Leader Reid to take another stab at the bill once a replacement for Byrd has been sworn in.

On climate change and energy reform legislation, the path for Democrats is much less clear. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s staff has been spending the recess putting together “different options” on energy & climate change legislation, a Reid spokesman said. Their plan is to run the options by the Democratic Caucus this coming week, with the goal to settle on a bill that the President can help get through the Senate.

On war funding for Afghanistan, the House on July 1 took a bill that had already passed the Senate with $37 billion in funding and other spending and then voted on amendments to that bill. The only amendment that passed was a measure to save teacher jobs, fund Pell grants, and pay for border security. But that bill has driven a rift between President Obama and Congressional Democrats – the White House has said it would veto because money to save teacher jobs is taken from cuts to the President’s signature Race to the Top program. Now the entire bill comes back to the Senate, which could take it up sometime this week.

Meanwhile, over in the Judiciary Committee, lawmakers are set to vote in committee on Tuesday on whether to report Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate. That could be pushed back a week to Tuesday July 20th if Republicans demand a hold-over as expected.

Finally this week senators will be keeping an eye on developments in West Virginia and how officials there will fill Byrd’s vacant seat. The state’s attorney general determined that Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin III can call a special election this year to fill the vacancy. Manchin told a web publication that he will not announce if he will run for the seat. Manchin said in an interview with POLITICO Saturday that he will not announce if he will run himself until the state legislature clarifies the law determining when an election for the seat can be held and until he names an interim successor to hold that seat until then. In the meantime Democrats, of course, are eager for Manchin to appoint someone to fill the seat until November. That would restore Democrats to a 59-seat majority, a key boost in their push to get anything done on the Hill.