The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. It held pro forma sessions on December 20, 23, 27, and 30, and on January 3. And then, of course, there is the pro forma pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey.īut my favorite is the pro forma Senate session, where you might see two senators at their desks for 20 minutes at a time saying nothing, doing nothing.Ĭopyright © 2007 NPR. At the end of each pro forma session, the Senate would adjourn until the. Bush has a lot of pro forma presidenting to do, like photo ops with families of war heroes and hurricane victims. We also have pro forma senators, five of them - Dodd, Clinton, Obama, Biden and McCain - too busy running for president to do much in the Senate beyond rushing home for important votes. Search this text This text was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning. And that was a water projects bill with too much money for too many communities to be stopped. Only one Bush veto has been successfully overridden. The veto remains a powerful weapon of pro forma government. As expected, it was blocked by a filibuster in the Senate, sparing the president the need to veto it. The House passed a bill, but with the latest of many efforts to include bring-home-the-troops language. So the government mince along on what are called continuing resolutions, which permits spending at the same rate as last year, also, for outdated programs.Ī $50 billion emergency appropriation to sustain the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also ran into the pro forma syndrome. So it is that for the fiscal year that started on October 1st, Congress has so far passed only one of the regular appropriations needed to fund the government. You might call it a pro forma government when Congress can't get around to fulfilling its primary constitutional duty of voting the money necessary to run the government. I am reminded of my days reporting from the Soviet Union, where people said, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. It strikes me that a lot of government has become pro forma. That is to ensure that President Bush won't sneak in some recess appointments, which he can only do when Congress is not in session. The Senate remains on what is called a pro forma session, with a couple of members showing up briefly twice a week but not doing anything. Circuit to set aside an order of the National Labor Relations Board, claiming that the Board lacked a quorum because three of the five Board members had been invalidly appointed. Here's NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.ĭANIEL SCHORR: Congress is home for the holidays. Argued January 13, 2014Decided JRespondent Noel Canning, a Pepsi-Cola distributor, asked the D. Tomorrow's schedule for the Senate floor says 9 a.m. But that doesn't mean there's nothing official going on. And the House Web site says: no House schedule found for this week. The wire service daybook reads: no scheduled events. And indeed, there is little news to report today from Capitol Hill. It is Thanksgiving week, and Congress traditionally takes a recess at this time.
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