Dave Weigel reports that some Republicans, miffed by certain advances made by Democrats in the lame duck sessions, plan to reintroduce the “End the Lame Duck Act,” legislation that would ban future lame duck sessions after Congressional elections.

Makes you wonder what might have been.

What did the Republican letter at the beginning of the lame duck say? Until the tax issue and the funding of the government gets worked out, they would not move forward on anything. That was the threat. And in fact, they won on both of those counts in a big way. They got the Bush tax cuts extended for two years, and they can hold out at that time for another extension. And they stopped an omnibus spending bill and secured a short-term continuing resolution, which blocked funding of health care and financial reform and gave the next Congress an early opportunity to set spending priorities.

That was really all they cared about.

The Senate continued a mad rush in their fairly productive lame duck session today, passing a food safety bill and filing cloture to end debate on ratification of the new START treaty.

The omnibus spending bill is rife with interesting backstories and competing agendas. It’s clear to me that Jim DeMint’s pressure to read the full omnibus, which stands at over 1,900 pages, has three parts: 1) to cement his standing with the Tea Party against “pork” and really spending in general; 2) to run out the clock not on the spending bill but the rest of the Senate’s agenda, especially START, the DREAM Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; 3) to create another Waterloo for President Obama, and put him in the difficult situation of having to sign a bill with a bunch of earmarks in it.

So there will be a vote, and based on passage of the rule, it’s going to pass along partisan lines.

The lame duck session, which in its first week has lived up to its name, just got a bit more interesting.

Today begins the final two months of the Democratic majority in the House, and the large majority in the Senate. So what do Democrats plan to do with that majority, as well as their 255-178 spread in the House? Not a heck of a lot. The lame duck session will be dominated by talk about what to do on the Bush tax cuts, but there are some other issues that are likely to get taken up as well.

It’s worth noting that there are enough “emergency” pieces of legislation to tide over a session that could be as small as three weeks (one week before Thanksgiving, and perhaps only two weeks after). Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running. There are several pieces of legislation that expire on November 30, like extended unemployment benefits and the “doctor’s fix” for Medicare reimbursement rates. And then there are the Bush tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year. Clearly that doesn’t leave much room for energy, child nutrition, DADT, the DREAM Act, labor bills, a Chinese currency measure, the new START treaty or even the deficit commission recommendations, parts or all of which had been promised a vote in the lame duck.

Harry Reid told Univision he would put forward a vote on the DREAM Act in the lame-duck session, regardless of the outcome of the midterm elections on Tuesday.