The measure would name a room in the Capitol Visitor Center after Gabe Zimmerman.

The Senate voted on Wednesday morning to move forward with a bill to authorize funding for the Department of Defense in a 88-1 vote.

The spending bill, S. 1867, has been pending on the Senate floor for about a week and half as floor managers Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) have attempted to corral more than 100 amendments, both germane and otherwise, that senators have attempted to tack on to the bill. 

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has proposed legislation that would establish a right for all airline passengers to have one free checked bag and one free carry-on, an attempt to scale back the baggage fees that many airlines have started to charge passengers.

"Many airlines consider checking a bag not to be a right, but a privilege — and one with a hefty fee attached," Landrieu said. "The Airline Passenger BASICS Act will guarantee passengers one checked bag without the financial burden of paying a fee or the headache of trying to fit everything into a carry-on."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday filed a cloture motion to proceed on the latest iteration of President Obama’s summer jobs bill — the payroll-tax cut. 

The cut — or officially The Middle Class Tax Cut Act, S. 1917 — would cut the employee and employer payroll tax to 3.1 percent, half of the 6.2 percent tax they would normally face. The bill applies this cut to the first $5 million in payroll for companies, which Senate Democrats estimate will cut payroll taxes in half for 98 percent of U.S. companies with payrolls below that cap.

Senate Leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went off the script Wednesday morning as they debated President Obama's payroll tax cut, which the upper chamber will likely debate later this week.  

A freshman Republican expressed his disappointment Wednesday that President Obama didn't mention God in his Thanksgiving address. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday introduced legislation that would make it a crime under U.S. law to take young girls out of the U.S. for the purpose of genital mutilation.

Reid's bill, the Girls' Protection Act, follows up on the successful passage of another Reid bill in 1996 that criminalizes this procedure in the U.S. on girls under the age of 18. But he said that law has what he called a "vacation loophole" that allows female genital mutilation, or FGM, to take place on U.S. girls when they are out of the country.

The House returns for its first full day of work since the Thanksgiving break, and aside from advancing several GOP priorities such as those regarding union elections and deregulation, members will approve a resolution honoring a slain staffer to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), Gabriel Zimmerman.

The resolution, H.Res. 364, will name HVC 215 of the Capitol Visitor Center as the Gabriel Zimmerman Meeting Room. The resolution will get 40 minutes of debate, and will need a two-thirds majority vote for passage under a suspension of House rules — no hurdle at all for a bill that will likely pass unanimously.

The Senate will hold an 11 a.m. cloture vote on Wednesday to close debate on S.1867, the Department of Defense Authorization bill.

The Senate adjourned at 7:35 p.m. Tuesday night and is set to return at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.