Anyone wonder why the House is meeting at 11 a.m. Thursday as the 112th Congress, only to adjourn and reconstitute itself at noon as the 113th Congress?

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office sent out its schedule for the day on Wednesday night with the following statement: “On Thursday, the 112th Congress will meet at 11:00 a.m. for legislative business and adjourn sine die. The House will convene for the start of the 113th Congress at 12:00 p.m.”

We at HOH were a little puzzled, then we remembered there was no formal adjournment resolution that both chambers signed off on. So we asked our friends in the House periodical and daily press galleries and they affirmed it for us: There was no formal resolution to usher out the 112th Congress. It’ll just kind of end today, and the new Congress will start as the Constitution instructs it to at noon.

What a perfect coda for the most contentious, fired-up, hard-to-please Congress in recent memory. They couldn’t even formally agree on when to end things.