The Hitchhiker's Guide to the House CR Vote on Thursday (With a Couple of Wrinkles)

Here is a little bit of guidance the continuing resolution and how it will unfold over the next couple days.

For starters, the House Rules Committee convenes Tuesday at 5 plm. to write the blueprint for how they will handle the new CR on the floor later this week. This will feed back live.

The House must first write a "rule" before handling most pieces of legislation on the floor.

The House will debate and vote on the rule Wednesday which will pave the way for the actual legislation to hit the floor Thursday.

Here are the wrinkles:

Inherit in the deal struck between President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., were requirements that Reid hold straight, up or down votes on defunding health care for this fiscal year and also on cutting funding for Planned Parenthood.

The way to do this is by what's called an "Enrollment Correction." And it's technically not a bill, but a type of resolution.

But even though the deal was brokered with Reid to have these votes, the process starts in the House since the House is the originator of HR 1 (the original CR, which the House approved in February cutting $61 billion, but was never adopted by the Senate).

So....

Contingent in the rule that the Rules Committee is writing today, will be a provision for the House to first act on cutting money for the health law in FY '11, as well as stripping money for Planned Parenthood. Of course, the House has already done that in HR 1. But they have to kick it over to the Senate.

Thus, following Thursday's vote on the CR, the House will then take separate, simple majority votes on defunding health care for this year and Planned Parenthood, and then shoot the CR -- plus those enrollment corrections -- over to the Senate.

In the Senate, there will be two motions to adopt the resolution to "correct" the enrollment of the bill. Like many things in the Senate, it will require 60 votes. There was some chatter on Capitol Hill that it may only require a simple 51 vote margin. But that would only be required on a motion to table (or set aside the resolutions...kind of like punting without having to grapple with the actual issue at hand).

That would be the easy way to handle it...

However, moving to table in this case would vitiate the agreement Reid struck to have "up or down votes" on health care and Planned Parenthood.

So even though these will be Senate functions, they have to start in the House.

Fox News Senior Senate Producer Trish Turner contributed to this report.