Although Congress had planned to be on recess last week, the Senate used the start of its recess to pass legislation to provide aid to Ukraine + Israel, ban TikTok, and to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Many Congress watchers think last week was the end of serious efforts to enact legislation until after the presidential elections.

The House of Representative is scheduled to be in session over the next four weeks, through May 24th, which surely will make the members cranky. There's talk they don't have that much in the way of legislation to work on, so they may start cutting days.

Looking at the House's floor schedule, there are seventeen bills set for consideration under suspension, which means they need 2/3s of the members to vote for passage. Only one bill originated in the Senate, so passage in the House likely will mean a pile-up in the Senate.

Eight bills are lined up for floor consideration "pursuant to a rule," which means the House Rules Committee will have to favorably report a resolution that governs how the underlying measures are considered on the floor. That happened on Monday, and you can read the bills and any amendments the rules committee considered before favorably reporting them to the floor. It's interesting that the House Rules Committee is back in business after the defection of several Republicans had Democrats step in to set up legislation for consideration on the floor.

Committees of the House of Representatives is where much of the real action will take place, with 47 hearings and meetings set for the lower chamber this week. Once again, the Appropriations Committee leads the pack with 16 hearings scheduled --- the House is trying to move forward rapidly on making its spending decisions. Many appropriations hearings will feature big shots from the administration. This is where a lot of lawmaking actually happens.

Markups are scheduled in the House Judiciary Committee, the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, and the Committee on House Administration. It's notable that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will be testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, i.e., the House's tax-writing committee.

The Senate will be in session for the next four weeks, but I haven't seen any indication for what's on tap and we have to wait to see what Sen. Schumer says. In the absence of pressing legislation, we can expect efforts to move forward on nominations, although it appears the Senate is making its move to begin consideration of a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. In other words, the legal authority for the FAA has expired, providing members of Congress an opportunity to reconsider the organic legislation and make changes to it.

Unlike in the House, the Senate does not publish a handy list of all the legislation they expect to consider on the floor. At most, they tell you a day in advance. It's not uncommon for the Senate to pass legislation before it's publicly available. In fact, sometimes the only way to know what they've done is to read about it the next day in the Congressional Record. So keep on your toes.

Senate committees have scheduled 27 hearings and markups, with six taking place in the Appropriations committee, four in the Armed Services committee, and two or fewer in other committees. This points to an emphasis on moving the appropriations process forward as well as the national defense authorization process. We'll explain more about that in the months ahead.