The Senate returns next week to a busy hearing schedule, including a series of hearings in the Senate Banking Committee to review the financial crisis and review the Wall Street reform bill. The latter hearing on Thursday will feature testimony from top-line financial regulators, including Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin and several others.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing Tuesday on new oil-and-gas technologies, as Republicans and Democrats continue to spar over how to lower the price of oil and gas. The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday holds its own hearing on rising energy prices.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) confirmed Thursday that he is considering leaving Ohio in order to to keep a seat in Congress.

"If I don't have anywhere I can run in Ohio, I have to start thinking about what my options are," Kucinich in an interview with a television station in Lakewood, Ohio. "I prefer to continue serving the district I've served for as long as I have.  But that's not my choice to make in terms of the map."

Ohio is losing two congressional seats in the redistricting process, and Kucinich's is likely on the chopping block. If that happens he could end up drawn into a district with Rep. Betty Sutton (D-Ohio) or find himself having to run against Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) if he wanted to continue representing the state.

A key committee meeting in the House next week will be held by the House Armed Services Committee on May 11, when it holds a markup of the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

House Foreign Affairs holds two meetings next week, one to examine U.S. export control policy, and another assessing the Peace Corps after 50 years.

Closer to home, the House Education and the Workforce Committee examines "federal overreach into school meals."

House Republicans and Democrats introduced separate energy bills on Thursday that reveal the parties are still split on how to lower gas prices.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) introduced the Taxpayer and Gas Price Relief Act, H.R. 1748, which incorporates many of the ideas Democrats raised in Thursday's debate on a bill requiring the administration to conduct a handful of offshore lease sales. (The House adjourned until next week after passing that bill, and the Senate is also out until next week.)

The measure would end billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies and increase breaks for clean energy producers.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Thursday said he would like to tie an increase in the debt ceiling to an end to all funding for last year's healthcare law.

"I'd put the cutting off of all funds to Obamacare on that debt ceiling bill and say, there's going to be no raising of the debt ceiling here by the House of Representatives unless we shut off all the funding that's going to implement or enforce Obamacare, at least until such time as the Supreme Court should rule," King said.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) on Thursday called on the Obama administration's Justice Department to end its investigation into CIA interrogation techniques in light of the fact that the CIA has said its techniques helped develop intelligence used to find Osama bin Laden.

"The reason I bring this up is this administration has said in the past that certain types of enhanced interrogation techniques equaled torture," Lungren said on the House floor. "I do not believe that to be true, and for that to remain on the record subjects those men and women … to the cloud of prosecution in the future and the accusation that they involved themselves in forms of conduct that would be defined as torture by some of the highest officials in the United States.

The House on Thursday passed H.R. 1230, which would require the Department of the Interior to conduct four specified lease sales for offshore oil drilling.

Members approved the bill in a 266-149 vote. While several Democrats objected to the bill on the House floor, 33 Democrats supported it in the final vote, and only two Republicans voted against it.

The Senate has stood without any pending legislation, concrete plans to take up legislation or scheduled votes regarding legislation since it fell short on a cloture vote on the Small Business Administration (SBA) funding bill Wednesday afternoon.

On Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, the chamber remained largely dormant, with a few senators occasionally coming to the floor to address a pet issue or a matter regarding their home district. 

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), for example, eulogized an influential constituent in a floor-speech Thursday, afternoon. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) expressed his discontent with "progressive" priorities of the federal bureaucracy.