Supreme Court vacancy watch Day 220: Nine days and counting to fund the government

It's Wednesday, September 21, and Day 220 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell decided no nominee would get any Senate attention: No meetings, no hearings, no votes. It's also Day 189 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy. 

The Senate was supposed to be dealing with government funding today, as there are now just nine days left before the end of the fiscal year and government funding. They voted Tuesday evening to advance the bill, even though it hasn't been seen by anybody yet. They are considering a "shell bill" which will eventually—hopefully within the next eight days!—include all the funding stuff that it has to include for the lights to stay on, plus maybe finally doing something about Zika and Flint, Michigan. Republicans are also fighting for a bunch of other unnecessary political crap.

The holdup appears to be over various add-ons Republicans want, although the status of those items in the ongoing talks was not immediately clear. One rider is a bill to stop the federal government from enforcing new rest rules for truck drivers. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said earlier Tuesday that another obstacle was McConnell trying to block a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule that requires the disclosure of campaign donations.

So while they're fighting that out behind the scenes, they're doing the things that McConnell apparently had to agree to in order to get his Republican colleagues to go along with the spending bill—basically, a resolution to express the Senate's disapproval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. So they did that today, and it didn't pass.