Legislators from the House of Representatives and the Senate this week continued the erratic process of reconciling versions of bills passed by each chamber.

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In the chamber, that sounded too much like a process issue, with little direct relevance to the matter under discussion.

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Mr Thompson said this was the "start of a process" and the Standards Committee would come back to the chamber to discuss the issue of committees in the future.

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The two current Senate bills are now being reconciled into a version that the upper chamber will vote on soon, and the outcome of that process must be reconciled with whatever merged bill passes the House.

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The first is whether Congress would be willing to rewrite the tax code as part of the budget reconciliation process, which would foreclose a filibuster in the Senate and allow the chamber of pass a tax code rewrite with just 51 votes.

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On June 18th Obert Mpofu, Zimbabwe's powerful and wealthy minister of mines, told a meeting of his country's chamber of commerce that he had got a letter from the Kimberley Process demanding Mr Maguwu's immediate release if Zimbabwe were to be allowed to resume diamond trading.

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The buddy system did however lead to an "inevitable delay compared to the normal process" as information was transferred from England and Northern Ireland, she told the chamber.

BBC: Democracy Live site links