A bipartisan group of House members has proposed legislation that would force the government to close thousands of unused bank accounts it holds that are costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

The Closing Long-Empty Accounts Now (CLEAN) Act is meant to address a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that said the government was spending more than $2 million a year to maintain 28,000 empty bank accounts.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) tried for the fourth time to get Republicans to agree to go to conference on the House and Senate budgets.

Warner asked for the unanimous consent agreement on Wednesday, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) once again objected unless Democrats agreed to prevent the conference committee from raising the debt ceiling or taxes.

The first GOP amendment voted on for the Senate’s water infrastructure bill was about gun rights.

The Senate is considering the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), which would authorize projects related to flood and storm risk reduction, coast and inland navigation, and ecosystem restoration.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced an amendment to the bill dealing with gun use on Army Corp of Engineer’s land.

Coburn’s amendment failed on a 56-43 vote Wednesday — 60 votes were needed for passage. It would have allowed individuals to carry guns at water resources development projects administered by the Secretary of the Army.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) announced Wednesday that he would withdraw one of his amendments to the Senate water infrastructure bill.

Coburn had introduced an amendment that would have required federal studies on guns. That amendment was scheduled to get a vote at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. said his bill would allow the government to focus on “crash prevention programs, not national helmet mandates.”

"The Republic of Korea will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea," President Park Geun-hye told Congress.

Sen. Warren called the increasing amount of student debt a "quiet but growing crisis."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the words of Republicans against them Wednesday, quoting their past calls for regular order.

“For years Republicans have been singing the praises of regular order,” Reid said. “They said how they missed the days of committee markups, how they long for amendment vote-a-rama, and how they pine for a budget resolution … but then Republicans got what they wanted.

The Senate's top Republican sharply criticized President Obama's nominee to head the Labor Department on Wednesday saying he is willing to go around the law to achieve his objectives.  

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) cited several examples of the actions of Thomas Perez, head of the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, that he says proves that he "does not merely push the envelope; all too often, he circumvents or ignores a law with which he disagrees."

“Taken together, all of this paints the picture, for me at least, not of a passionate liberal who sees himself as patiently operating within the system and through the democratic process to advance a particular set of strongly held beliefs, but a crusading ideologue whose conviction about his own rightness on the issues leads him to believe the law does not apply to him," McConnell said on the Senate floor.

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