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News and updates

News and updates

Price Confirmation for HHS Slips to Februrary

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Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, announced that the actually confirmation vote for Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who is the Trump nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), will not occur until mid-February.

The HELP Committee  that will hear from Price on January 18, and the Senate Finance Committee is expected to hear from Rep. Price soon after, but the date has not yet been set. The Senate  Finance Committee has primary responsibility for the HHS nomination, since it has jurisdiction over taxes and entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

A mid to late February nomination means that Price and HHS could not present the Trump Administration plan to repeal-and-replace Obamacare until the beginning of March, at the earliest.

Senate Passes Budget with ACA Repeal Instructions

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Early Thursday morning, Senators voted 51-48 to adopt the FY2017 budget resolution, with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) casting the only Republican vote against it. With just 51 votes, the Senate moves forward with plans to repeal the ACA while avoiding a filibuster from Senate Democrats. Ultimately, the Senate considered 19 amendments before the final vote — and stymied each one, mostly through procedural votes.

The key amendment of the vote-a-rama was an amendment offered by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), who was joined by other moderate GOP Senators, would delay an initial deadline to write legislation to repeal the 2010 health care law,. The amendment was ultimately withdrawn without a vote.

The Corker Amendment would have pushed back the Jan. 27 deadline for four House and Senate committees to write legislation to repeal the health care law, the sole purpose of the budget resolution under consideration. A vote on the amendment would have been a key indicator of where Senators stood on a growing debate among Republicans about how quickly Congress should repeal the law, especially without a clear replacement ready to go.

The FY 2017 budget resolution includes reconciliation instructions with the purpose of repealing the health care law, which would occur through separate legislation.

 

Confirmation Hearing Underway

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Confirmation hearings for Cabinet nominees are now underway, with nominees for many of the high-profile posts appearing before the relevant Senate committees this week.

Sen. Jeff Session (R-AL), the Attorney General nominee, started his two-day confirmation hearing on Tuesday, January. 10. Recordings of the hearing are available here and here.  Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State nominee, went before the Senate Foreign Relations committee on Wednesday, January 11. The hearing is available here.

Retired General John F. Kelly, who has been tapped to serve as the Secretary of Homeland Security, appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on January 10. The hearing is available on the committee website.

The hearings will continue into the rest of the month. Federal Relations will continue to provide updates.

Vote-a-rama

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It’s budget week on the Senate side (as well as confirmation week). The Senate is expected to start their all nighter on Wednesday. The Senate Democrats have vowed to take up all the debate time allotted (and more).

The bare-bones budget resolution, S.Con.Res. 3, released last week includes instructions to relevant committees to draft legislation aimed at repealing the health care law through reconciliation, a process that sidesteps the threat of Democratic obstruction or filibuster in the Senate. Getting the budget measure passed requires allowing Democratic Senators an almost endless opportunity to offer amendments aimed at expressing their opposition to repeal.

What the Senate will tackle this week is unique, since most measures can be filibustered. The 1974 Congressional Budget Act inoculates the consideration of any budget resolution from a filibuster and limits debate to 50 hours total. Once the time is up, everything must be voted upon.

What makes a budget resolution different is the clock. Once cloture is invoked on a customary bill, all motions, amendments, and passage must conclude by the end of debate time, which is 30 hours. Already, a budget bill receives 20 additional hours of debate.  Furthering the curiousness of the Senate budget process, however, is that any amendment that is offered must be disposed of before adoption of the resolution.

That means, regardless of the fact that the allotted debate time may expire Wednesday, any Senator may call up additional amendments and get a roll call vote even after debate time has expired. This is when things get fun. Senators may (and do) continue to seek votes on amendments after time has expired making the session can drag on and on. (No joke, there are cots for Senators to sleep on for the all nigher.) While Senators do not receive any additional debate time, past precedent has allowed a minute or two for Senators to explain their amendments before the vote. This barrage of a series of votes is what is known as “vote-a-rama”. 

Once a vote-a-rama stretches late into the next day, the minority party will often relent and allow a final vote once they have had enough opportunities to get Senators on record usually defeating amendments containing popular priorities, used primarily for messaging purposes.

The House is expected to fast track the legislation after the measure passes the Senate.

The measure also comes as a growing number of Republicans say that any repeal legislation should await a replacement plan, which might be difficult given the Budget resolution asks the various committees to produce a plan by January 27th. 

Meanwhile, the Senate has a busy week with a number of confirmation hearings both this week and in the coming weeks.