WASHINGTON — Senate leaders agreed Tuesday to clear a legislative clog that has delayed the confirmation of President Obama's attorney general nominee for more than six weeks and distracted attention from bipartisan efforts to pass major policy measures in the early months of a Congress newly under Republican control.
Loretta Lynch, a US attorney in New York, is expected to win confirmation as soon as Thursday under the deal, which ended a partisan dispute over abortion restrictions in an unrelated bill. Senate GOP leaders insisted on clearing that impasse before moving forward with Lynch.
The agreement prompted Republicans, starting with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, to boast about Congress ''getting back to work'' after a narrowly averted shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security presented doubts earlier in the year.
''There's some encouraging signs that lots of people are noticing,'' McConnell told reporters Tuesday.
Later in the day, the Senate began the process of voting on amendments to long-stalled legislation to combat human trafficking, with final approval expected Wednesday. That would clear the Senate to vote on Lynch and then move on in the coming weeks to several bills that have passed in committee votes with at least some bipartisan support.
They include legislation establishing a congressional review of any final deal with Iran over its disputed nuclear program, something that was initially strongly opposed by Obama but that ended up clearing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a unanimous vote.
Also waiting in the wings are major bills that would enhance national cybersecurity efforts, to reauthorize federal education programs, and to grant presidential ''fast track'' authority to negotiate trade deals.
Members of the House and Senate budget committees are now hashing out a final spending plan whose passage will allow both houses to begin the process of taking up appropriations bills, which become vehicles for policy proposals that might not otherwise make it into law.
The biggest feat has been on a long-term ''doc fix,'' a bill making changes to the rates Medicare pays doctors. Obama signed it into law this week after the Senate okayed a deal forged in the House between Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, and minority leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat.
Another example of the modest-but-notable gains came Tuesday when Congress sent to the White House an energy-efficiency bill, drafted by Senators Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, and Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, that had broad bipartisan support in the previous Congress but became a political football ahead of the November midterm elections.
The senators reintroduced the bill, and, in an after-midnight vote, it passed the Senate in late March with no opposition. The House gave its approval by acclamation Tuesday.
The Medicare legislation, meanwhile, succeeded out of a bipartisan willingness to tackle a pesky yearly ritual of rate readjustments and the willingness of most Republicans to look past a significant budget impact.
The anti-trafficking bill and the Lynch nomination for attorney general, to many observers, should have moved much more swiftly, but they became entangled in partisan battles over abortion and immigration, respectively.
But if McConnell can keep the forward momentum, he can claim to have made good on his pledge to lead a ''responsible, right-of-center governing majority,'' as he put it in a December interview with The Washington Post.