Copyright 2012 Bloomberg.

Kathleen Hunter and Roxana Tiron

 

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. House and Senate, facing a backlog of unfinished business, plan to be in session together for 13 days before the Nov. 6 election. Even so, members plan to do what they’ve done all year on the biggest tax and spending decisions: Nothing.

 

By Oct. 1, Congress needs to pass a stopgap federal spending bill, renew farm programs and help the U.S. Postal Service pay for retiree health care. Lawmakers left Washington for a five-week recess without providing drought aid to ranchers or acting to protect computers against cyberattacks.

 

Neither Democrats nor Republicans see an advantage in spending time before the election on averting automatic income tax increases and $1.2 trillion in spending cuts that start taking effect in January. Each side wants to try to improve its negotiating position depending on which party will occupy the White House and control the House and Senate.

 

“The one thing they keep agreeing on is to postpone big decisions,” said Julian Zelizer, a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It’s easy for them to agree on that.”

 

Upon returning to Washington Sept. 10, Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass a stopgap measure to fund government operations for six months, which congressional leaders and President Barack Obama tentatively agreed to last week.

 

The agreement came after Tea Party-backed Republicans dropped their demand for less spending than the $1.047 trillion budget in a 2011 law that raised the federal debt ceiling.

 

 

“The time to pick a fight on a government shutdown is not now,” said Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican and co-founder of the chamber’s Tea Party Caucus. “Our country is under a cloud of uncertainty.”

 

House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters Aug. 2 there would be “a lot of conversations over the next five or six weeks” on what Congress will try to accomplish in September.

 

As of Aug. 3, Congress had sent 63 bills to Obama for his signature this year. Many name post offices and convey land parcels, and most of the rest extend programs lawmakers had already passed.

 

The slow pace of legislating mirrors that of 2011 when lawmakers sent 90 bills to Obama that eventually became law. Last year’s output barely topped that of 1995, when 88 bills became law, fewer than at any time since the Congressional Record started keeping track in 1947.

 

 

The Republican-controlled House and Democratic-led Senate have spent time taking so-called messaging votes on measures that won’t advance in the other chamber. That includes House Republican bills to repeal all or part of Obama’s 2010 health care law and Senate Democrats’ plan to set a minimum 30 percent tax rate for the highest earners.

 

“Actually getting legislation to the president’s desk isn’t as high a priority as making a symbolic point,” said John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. “This is the consequence of split party control of Congress at a time when the parties are highly polarized.”

 

Freshman Representative Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican, said he’s “concerned” with the “pretty short timetable” in September. Huelskamp had pressed for adoption of the six-month spending measure before the recess.

 

As with the government funding, Congress may end up with stopgap measures to continue laws that are set to expire. Boehner acknowledged that House leaders don’t have enough support to advance a five-year farm bill approved July 12 by the House Agriculture Committee.

 

 

The law authorizing funds for Department of Agriculture programs, including nutrition and conservation initiatives as well as farm subsidies, expires Sept. 30. Though the Senate passed its version of a five-year farm bill, “the House is pretty well divided,” Boehner said.

 

Just before leaving Washington for the recess, the House passed a measure providing financial help to livestock producers affected by the worst drought in a half-century. The Senate didn’t act on the legislation.

 

A postal overhaul also may languish. The U.S. Postal Service said it won’t make a required $5.5 billion payment due Aug. 1 to the U.S. Treasury for future retirees’ health care.

 

The service has said for months it couldn’t afford that payment, nor a $5.6 billion payment required by Sept. 30.

 

 

The Postal Service, which has more employees than any U.S.- based publicly traded company other than Wal-Mart Stores Inc., has said it expects to temporarily run out of cash in October unless Congress alters or ends the retiree health-care obligation and lets it make other changes.

 

Also on the Senate’s September to-do list is a $205.1 billion proposal to renew a group of lapsed or expiring tax breaks and prevent the expansion of the alternative minimum tax for 2012 and 2013.

 

While Congress addresses those matters, the major tax-and- spending issues will wait, Zelizer said.

 

In a “minute-by-minute political world, both parties are waiting to see the outcome of the election,” he said. “They want to know where the political pressure is, what the election results are and what’s in their best interest.”