Opinion: Amid pre-election jockeying, some partisan greatest hits in Congress

Here’s the latest sign that Democrats are worried about keeping control of the U.S. Senate: They’re about to shutter the chamber six weeks ahead of the election so their vulnerable incumbents can spend more time on the campaign trail.

Good luck with that. Six weeks may not be enough time to find a way to close the enthusiasm gap between Democratic and Republican voters, which threatens to give the latter an unbeatable edge in turnout in the red states served by the four Senate Democrats most at risk of defeat.

Not that they haven’t tried. As has been his custom, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada recently brought two red-meat bills to the floor despite the fact that Republicans were certain to kill them through the filibuster. As expected, both failed to get the 60 votes needed to end debate and go to a vote.

One was a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn three Supreme Court decisions, including Citizens United, to allow Congress and the states to set “reasonable” limits on campaign fundraising and spending, and to allow them to bar corporations and interest groups (including unions) from influencing elections.

The other was the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill to make it easier to obtain damages from an employer that pays women and men unequal wages for the same jobs. The measure, which Republicans successfully filibustered earlier in the year as well, aimed to sway female voters, an important Democratic constituency.

And there may be more to come. According to the Hill, Senate Democrats may bring up two other filibuster magnets: the proposed increase in the minimum wage and a bill to allow more Americans with student-loan debt to refinance. As with the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republicans blocked both of those proposals earlier this session.

Not to be outdone, the House is expected to push through two greatest-GOP-hits compilations this week.

One, HR 2, would pull together a number of bills the House has already passed (and Senate Democrats have ignored) to increase the production of fossil fuels. Included are provisions that would open much of the California coast to offshore drilling.

The other, HR 4, is a compendium of previously passed bills (also gathering dust in the Senate) to cut taxes, promote logging and mining on federal lands, and make it more difficult for federal agencies to regulate ... anything.

The posturing typifies what both chambers of Congress have been doing for much of the last three and a half years, which is a good explanation for the body’s abysmal approval ratings. If leadership is finding a way to accomplish things under difficult circumstances, then we haven’t seen much of it on display in Washington for a while.

The one bright note is that lawmakers are poised to pass, sans drama, a temporary funding bill to keep the federal government open until early December. Congress even seems ready to give President Obama the money and authority he sought to arm Syrian rebels, albeit with strings attached. So we may make it all the way to 2015 without the government shutting down again.

Thank heaven for small favors.

Follow Healey’s intermittent Twitter feed: @jcahealey