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Author: Christy Gullion

Congress: Issues to Watch this Week

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The House is back in session this week after a weeklong recess period. They will be in session for two weeks before taking another break during the first week in June. The Senate is in this week, but will recess during the week of Memorial Day.

Appropriations:  Appropriators appear to be adhering to their plans to move annual spending bills earlier than normal this year. Several of those measures are advancing this week – in both chambers. On Tuesday in the Senate, subcommittees will consider their Military Construction-VA and Agriculture spending bills with the hopes of moving them to full committee by the end of the week. Both bills have a history of bipartisan support and will be among the first the Senate considers on the floor in late June or early July. Meanwhile, the House will advance their Commerce-Justice-Science bill (HR 4660) for possible floor action by next week. House appropriators also plan to move two domestic spending bills this week: Agriculture and Transportation-HUD.

Sexual Assault Prevention:  Today Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will hold her first of three roundtable discussions about sexual assaults on college campuses. The hearing will focus on federal reporting laws, including the Clery Act, which requires schools to report on a broad array of crimes that occur on and near campuses, and what is known as the SaVE Act, language included in last year’s Violence Against Women Act reauthorization that requires new training, including bystander intervention, for incoming students and new university employees, along with new reporting on stalking and domestic violence.

McCaskill is teaming up with Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) on the effort to combat sexual assault on college campuses, similar to their successful advocacy for a bill to overhaul the way the military deals with sexual assaults. Subsequent roundtables will focus on Title IX protections, and the campus administrative process and criminal justice system.

FIRST Act:  On Wednesday, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will mark up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act of 2014 (HR 4186), which authorizes spending levels and specifies policy objectives in allocating resources for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Veterans in Higher Education:  On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee holds a full committee hearing to learn about access and supports for veterans in higher education.

FY 2015 Appropriations Update

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Both the House and Senate are in session this week. The Senate could consider energy efficiency and tax extenders legislation, while the House considers charter schools legislation and contempt charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Senate appropriators will learn about their committee allocations for their FY 2015 spending bills. This will allow them to begin drafting each of the 12 annual measures. The allocations, known as 302(b)s, won’t be official until approved by the full panel, which generally happens as the first appropriations markup for the year now set for May 22nd. Committee members will then have less than 90 days to mark up and debate as many of the 12 annual spending bills as possible before the August recess.

Meanwhile, House appropriators are about a month ahead of the Senate and are ready to move two more domestic funding measures: Transportation-HUD and Commerce-Justice-Science. House appropriators are due to back their allocations this week and have already moved their first two spending bills, Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch, with temporary allocations.

Welcome Back Congress!

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Members of Congress return to Washington, DC today after a two-week recess period. Today marks a nine-week work period where at least one chamber will be in session. But the House will recess again in two weeks, the Senate will take off all of Memorial Day week, and the House will take another recess the first week in June. Then both chambers will recess for the week of Fourth of July. After that, there are just four weeks until the five-week August recess, which stretching through the first week in September. That break will be followed by maybe as few as a dozen working days before early October when the House leadership has promised members they can go home to campaign full time for the mid-term elections. The Senate is likely to follow suit.

That’s not much time for genuine legislating, especially given that both parties plan to spend much of the time using the Capitol as a sound stage for their political messaging.

This week, the House is expected to begin considering the first two FY2015 appropriations bills of the season: Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch. The Commerce-Science-Justice measure will be next in the queue, with the House Appropriations subcommittee taking it up Wednesday. Senate appropriators are moving more slowly on their bills but we expect to see a lot of action on appropriations measures between now and the August recess period.

First Two FY 2015 Bills to Advance

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The first two FY 2015 bills are set to move through the House Appropriations subcommittees today: Military Construction-VA and Legislative Branch.

The Military Construction-VA bill proposes $71.5 billion in discretionary spending for the VA and the military construction accounts of the Defense Department, a decrease of $1.8 billion from the FY 2014 enacted level, with the cuts coming from the military construction portion. The Legislative Branch bill would provide $3.3 billion for the House and joint operations, about $122.5 million less than requested and matching FY 2014 spending. As is customary with the Legislative Branch spending bill, the House and Senate will each defer to the other chamber in setting its own funding levels.

Today in the Senate, Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) will lead a markup of tax extenders legislation with the hope of ending the impasse over temporary tax breaks that expired at the start of the year. The package would extend for two years popular business tax preferences such as the credit for research and exploration and individual breaks for mortgage interest and mortgage debt relief. But only 45 of the 55 breaks that expired December 31st made Wyden’s list. Nearly 100 amendments to the bill have been filed so the final outcome is yet to be seen. We will report more after the committee markup.

This Week: Doc Fix, Unemployment Benefits, and Budget

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The House is not in session today, but the Senate is and is expected to advance another short-term fix to Medicare’s payment system, or the “doc fix.” The yearlong patch (HR 4302) would extend Medicare payments to physicians and prevent cuts to Medicare payment rates that were expected to take place in April without congressional intervention. Members of both bodies had hoped to clear a long-term proposal (HR 4015), but lawmakers never agreed on a way to pay for it. The current short-term patch expires tonight, so the Senate is under pressure to get the next short-term patch in place.

Later today, the Senate will likely begin debating a five-month extension to unemployment insurance. Senate Democrats plan to use a House-passed bill (HR 3979) as a vehicle for the extension to the benefits, which kick in after a person exhausts standard unemployment assistance. Under the proposal, the five-month extension would be paid for by a combination of offsets including temporarily reducing companies’ pension payments and extending US Customs and Border Protection user fees through 2024. The bill would also provide retroactive payments to those whose benefits have already been cut off. Though the measure seems to have enough support to pass the Senate, House Republicans have been cool to the proposal, in part because they consider it too difficult to implement given the now three-month lapse in benefits.

House members will return to the Capitol Tuesday and spend most of the week focused on their Budget Resolution. The FY2015 spending plan House Budget Chairman Ryan (R-WI) plans to release this week will include $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction to balance in 10 years. As a result, lawmakers say the new budget blueprint will recommend deeper and more accelerated cuts in spending necessary to make up for slower projected revenue growth over the next decade. That could take the form of deeper cuts to Medicaid, which would be converted to a block grant program in the House budget, or from speeding up the conversion of food stamps into a block grant program. The plan will, however, abide by the $1.014 trillion discretionary spending limit, as well as $521 billion defense and $492 billion nondefense caps, in the two-year budget agreement Ryan negotiated with Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) late last year.