For once, big things are actually happening in Congress. No, really!

As we write this, the House has passed the final budget bill for this fiscal year (by a vote of 286-134) and sent it over to the Senate. The Senate may pass it tonight, if senators like Rand Paul can restrain their natural urge to be total [insert favorite plural derogatory expletive here]. If they do throw a monkey wrench into the works, we could have a very short-lived partial government shutdown, but if it gets resolved before the weekend is over then it won't do much damage at all. Either way, the bill's got the votes to pass the Senate, so it's now only a matter of time until President Joe Biden can sign it and the budget that was supposed to be in place on the first of October last year will finally be finished.

The bigger news, though, is that Representative Marjorie "Three-Names" Taylor Greene expressed her displeasure with Speaker Mike Johnson by filing a "motion to vacate the chair," which may result in a no-confidence vote when the House returns after one of its many, many two-week vacations. We say "may" there because the way Greene filed her motion-to-vacate (which waggish headline-writers are already calling the "MTG MTV") doesn't actually force a vote on any schedule. If she had filed it as "privileged," it would have to be acted on within 48 hours, but she decided not to -- which means she can just hold it over Johnson's head as a threat and then move to vote on it whenever she feels like.

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Congress is -- finally -- about to finish the most basic of their constitutional duties: funding the federal government by passing a budget for the current fiscal year. This comes almost six months from when they were supposed to have achieved this feat (the federal fiscal year starts at the beginning of October). And what is happening on Capitol Hill right now should be familiar to anyone who knows how the process has worked in recent years -- a huge bill that wraps multiple individual spending bills together is released at the last possible minute, with no time for any floor debate or even for many people to dig through the enormous length of the bill, and with a deadline in sight tomorrow night at midnight that may or may not be met (although any partial government shutdown will likely be brief and happen over the weekend when its impacts would be minimal, at least). This is all pretty much par for the budgetary course, these days. Six months late is an outlier -- usually the budget is wrapped up (at the latest) by December or January -- but budgets nowadays are never passed on time.

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Because this year's primary season has pretty much been a foregone conclusion on both sides of the aisle, political pundits have been denied their usual "who is up, who is down" frenzy of horserace reporting. Both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have already clinched their respective parties' nominations (and very early on), so there's really not all that much to write about when more states' primary returns come in. However, this hasn't stopped the pundits from pushing a story about how Democrats should be worried because of all the "protest votes" cast on their side. Biden is getting pushback from younger and more progressive voters on his backing of Israel in the Gaza war, as well as Democrats who are just not all that enthused about him running again. But there haven't been a lot of stories exploring the protest votes being cast on the Republican side, which is odd because there were actually more of them this week than on the Democratic side.

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Donald Trump is finally having to face some consequences for his past misdeeds. He has already had to put up two bonds to cover the judgments in the two defamation cases E. Jean Carroll won against him (to the tune of almost $100 million, combined, with interest), and he is now on the hook for the enormous judgment against him in the civil fraud trial he also lost. His lawyers are complaining that he doesn't have the money to pay the penalty (almost a half-billion dollars, with interest) and that he has been unsuccessful in obtaining a bond to cover the amount. If Trump doesn't post a bond or put up the money by early next week, the state of New York could start seizing his properties and liquidating them.

Trump, of course, thinks all of this is monstrously unfair. He is bitterly complaining about it to all his followers on his pet social media platform. And in the end he may well get some of these penalties against him lowered in the appellate courts (which is a fairly common thing, especially for extremely large jury awards). But until then he's still got to put the full amount up -- just like anyone else would have to do if they were in the same position.

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I admit, right up front, that I almost took today off. Seeing as how it is the day after St. Patrick's Day, I felt some temptation to "call in sick" as it were. Or I could have just written a very lazy column comparing Donald Trump's recent incendiary language on the campaign trail to the lyrics of two songs from Pink Floyd's album The Wall (which has quite a bit to say on the subject of the rise of fascism in a democracy): "Waiting For The Worms," and "Run Like Hell." Feel free to click on those links to read the lyrics, if you'd like to see how easy a comparison that would have been.

But instead I am going to write a different very lazy column on a subject that has always peeved me no end: the insanely-generous vacation schedules for members of Congress. Here is the quote that set me off today, from a blurb of an article about the ongoing discussions in Congress to prevent a government shutdown this Friday night:

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This week President Joe Biden and Donald Trump both secured their respective parties' 2024 presidential nominations. Most Americans, if the pollsters can be believed (and they do all seem to be telling the same story), are not exactly thrilled with this rematch and would have preferred different choices. But we are where we are, so that's not going to happen for another four years.

Trump moved quickly to consolidate his power by installing loyal toadies (including his daughter-in-law Lara) at the head of the Republican National Committee. An already-existing exodus of people working for the R.N.C. then accelerated, as 60 staffers were shown the door. The R.N.C. is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump campaign, in other words.

The new ever-more-Trumpy R.N.C. stumbled out of the gate, as it was first revealed that they were shutting down their minority-outreach offices, but then had to backtrack and say that they weren't going to do that. But the message was pretty clear. Lara Trump has publicly stated that "every dollar" the R.N.C. controls is now going to go to one sole purpose: electing Trump.

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There is an effort underway to reform the federal judiciary in one particular aspect -- but it will not completely end the practice which spurred the reform, and already Republicans in Congress are pushing back by declaring that new laws must be passed instead of just a new rule from the judiciary. This isn't too surprising, since conservatives have had much better luck using the tactic to achieve the outcomes they desire in federal courts.

The practice is known as: "forum-shopping," or even more colloquially: "judge-shopping." If an organization wants to attack a law or policy in an attempt to get it declared unconstitutional and overturned, they seek out a plaintiff who happens to live in a judicial division that all but guarantees they'll get a very friendly federal judge to hear their case. This can lead to injunctions being handed down that affect not only the people in that district, but in the entire state or even the entire country. Rather than taking their chances with some random judge, one is pre-selected before filing the suit -- a judge who can be counted on to rule for their side.

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In a surprise move yesterday, Representative Ken Buck announced that he will not be stepping down from his seat at the end of his current term (as he had previously announced), but instead will step down next week. By doing so, Buck has roiled the waters of the Republican House majority and his surprise move also may tend to quash Representative Lauren Boebert's hopes of remaining in the House after November.

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Tonight will be the (unofficial) end of the presidential primary season. If everything goes as expected (and it will), both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will secure the necessary majorities of delegates to their respective parties' national conventions, and will thus start to be described in the media as "the designated nominee" (or other similar words which convey both the unofficial nature of the milestone as well as the de facto end to the primary races). Neither man will officially become their parties' nominees until the conventions themselves, but nothing that happens between tonight and then is going to matter -- they'll already both have won.

There are primaries happening today for both major political parties in Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington. Republicans in Hawai'i and Democrats in the Northern Mariana Islands will also be voting. The combination of delegates up for grabs is more than both candidates need to cross the threshold of having won a majority of convention delegates, which will make this the real end of the road for primary season.

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President Joe Biden's White House released their budget proposal document today, which only serves as a nagging reminder that Congress still hasn't finished last year's budget process and still needs to pass roughly 70 percent of the current year's budget -- a task they were supposed to accomplish last September. They've let it slip so long that the process is now lapping itself, in other words. Biden's new proposal is for the budget that is theoretically supposed to be in place by this October (but will almost certainly be delayed at least until after the election).

Previous (and future) procrastination aside, however, the presidential budget request is no more than a wish list, really. Even when one party has the trifecta of controlling both houses of Congress and the White House, presidential budgets are still considered mere wishful thinking by Congress, who always just goes ahead and puts their own budget together. Presidential budget requests aren't exactly "dead on arrival" in Congress, but they are never passed without any changes -- they are always rewritten to some degree or another.

Currently, of course, Democrats only control the White House and the Senate. The House is in Republican hands, meaning even if the Senate did go along with Biden's framework it would still never emerge intact from the House. But presidential budgets do lay out the agenda and priorities for a president and his party, so it is interesting to see what Biden wants to do next -- even though "next" should really be read as: "in my second term, if I win," more than: "in the next budget Congress passes."

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