This strategy session sounds like a thinly veiled campaign event designed to make 150 potential donors feel important and listened to. If is actually a sincere effort to try to solve this problem let me take five minutes to completely solve it with my three step plan.

In a move that could be seen as election-year expedience, a friendly nod to the nuclear industry, or a sign of a coming battle with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the Obama administration announced Thursday that it would nominate Kristine Svinicki for a second term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Reid had gone public just a day earlier with his objections to Commissioner Svinicki getting another five-year appointment when her tenure expires at the end of June.

Allow me to agree with Rand Paul. We already have significant sanctions on Iran, which mainly hurt the population rather than the regime. The Senate wanted to take another dip with an even more stringent set of sanctions. And Paul said no.

It’s unusual when the Senate passes one bill in a single day, but today they’ve passed two. And both are an indication of the seriousness of legislating in the modern age.

We’re headed for a real showdown. The House has now rejected the bipartisan transportation bill from the Senate. Harry Reid has said that he would not accept a 90-day extension and wants to see the Senate bill pass. Something has to give.

The Senate leadership has given up on trying to pass their version of the STOCK Act, instead planning a vote on the House bill. The two big Senate amendments that lose out here are the Leahy-Cornyn amendment responding to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened prosecutorial use of the “honest services fraud” statute against public officials and businessmen, and one from Chuck Grassley, on “political intelligence.”

The Senate plan for the JOBS Act today, a financial deregulation bill that would weaken investor protections with no economic benefit, was for three cloture votes – an amendment to add investor protections to the bill, an amendment to attach a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank to the bill, and, if those failed, a cloture vote on the bill itself.

It looks like Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans have backed down on their obstruction of judicial confirmations. But it’s a little unclear; what we know is that McConnell and Harry Reid reached a deal that will allow the judges to get a vote. However, the JOBS Act, the financial market IPO deregulation bill which McConnell sought prior to the judicial issues, will get a vote first, and it’s not clear all the GOP Senators are on board.

The Senate defeated several Republican amendments to the transportation bill yesterday, but the major ones all lost votes on the Democratic side. In fact, two got majority votes in the Senate, though they needed to cross a 60-vote threshold. The amendment to kill the EPA’s rule on limiting toxic emissions from industrial boilers failed 52-46.

Harry Reid has scheduled a vote on the Blunt amendment, which would allow employers to refuse insurance mandates on virtually any medical service simply by stating a moral objection to the practice, for tomorrow. Reid actually introduced the amendment himself when the Republicans wouldn’t.