Just a quick post. Yesterday, the Senate voted to invoke cloture (63-35) on the Mikulski-Shelby substitute to (i.e., the Senate version of) the continuing resolution, HR 933. In a nutshell, this obviates threats to delay this funding bill, which I have discussed previously (here and here).

I bring this up because it bolsters the case I made in the previous post that the Senate might be operating in a fairly consensual/bipartisan manner.  While McConnell (and 1 Democrat, Jon Tester (D-MT)) voted against cloture, 10 Republican Senators putatively “crossed over” to vote in favor of cloture.  The motivations for these votes are beyond the scope of this post and, regardless of their nature, I think it is worth noting that, yesterday at least, the Senate agreed to get to what has to be gotten to.

With that, I leave you with this.