On Monday night, the House cleared a measure that would extend aviation programs through July 15, 2016, giving Congress another three and a half months for the two chambers to seek an agreement on a long-term reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Procedurally, the House concurred with a Senate amendment to the short-term extension (HR 4721) the House had passed on March 21. The original House measure extended aviation programs through July 15, 2016, but included revenue-raising provisions through March 31, 2017. On March 17, the Senate amended HR 4721 to extend both aviation programs and revenue provisions through July 15 of this year.
The current authorization FAA reauthorization is set to expire March 31. Enacting this extension gives Congress over three months to reach a long-term agreement literally just before lawmakers leave for the presidential nominating conventions and the August recess.
Already the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has approved HR 4441 a six-year, $69 billion measure in February and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has marked up S 2658, a $33.1 billion bill that would authorize the programs through FY 2017 in March.
Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is enjoying this week.
Next Battle Front – As discretionary spending declines, the federal government has used its oversight authority with increasing regularity to intrude in the affairs of colleges and universities well beyond federal aid compliance and basic tax and regulatory concerns — it has begun looking at endowments. Read more in the Huffington Post.
Divvying Up the Delegates – Senator Marco Rubio lost the primary in his home state of Florida this week, and with that, Rubio suspended his campaign. Meanwhile, Rubio has already collected nearly over 150 delegates and the bulk of them are up grabs to vote for someone else at the convention. How could that impact the convention? Read more in Roll Call.
Aerial View of the House Office Buildings and U.S. Capitol – November 6, 2015 (AOC)
Top 10 – The Economist has come out with it’s Global Forecast Risk Assessment for April, and the Trump presidency made the list. A potential Trump presidency is a 12 on a scale of 1 to 25—classifying it as slightly less of threat to the world than a new cold war between Russia and the West and slightly more of one than an armed conflict in the South China Sea. See the Forecast here, and get an overview from Slate.
New Nominee – Judge, and Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland has tutored Northeast D.C. students for 20 years. He paid for Harvard Law School by taking a summer job as a shoe stock clerk, selling his comic book collection, and counseling undergraduates. He was also valedictorian of his public high school. At his graduation, a group of parents pulled the plug on another student giving a speech that railed against the Vietnam War. When it came time for Garland to give his speech, Garland ditched what he had prepared and instead delivered an impassioned defense of free speech and First Amendment rights. Read more about Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee in the New York Times.
More of a Limping Duck – While Senate Republicans have declared they would not confirm any Supreme Court nominee from Obama, Judge Merrick Garland has been a hit and the Senate has communicated that, while they will not confirm before the election, they will confirm Garland after the election in the lame duck session — depending on who wins the Presidency. Read more in Roll Call.
Hail the New King – John King was confirmed by the Senate last week. When Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, announced he would leave the post in October, Obama chose King, then Duncan’s deputy and advisor, to succeed him. At the time, the Administration had no plans to seek his confirmation. With out cry from Congress, the Administration moved forward with the nomination. Here’s a few things you might know about King. Read them in the LA Times.
Oh, There’s Trouble – The House passed its budget out of the House Budget Committee this week. All but two Republicans on the panel voted to send the bill to the floor, where it is likely doomed because of resistance from fiscal hawks in the House Freedom Caucus. The final vote was 20 to 16 — all Democrats opposed the measure. Without support from the 40-member House Freedom Caucus, the trillion-dollar budget proposal will come up short on the House floor. The House GOP can only afford to lose 28 votes to ensure a bill’s passage without Democratic support. Read more in The Hill.
Higher Ground – Last fall, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken’s decision allowing college football and men’s basketball players to be paid up to $5,000 per year in deferred money. But the Ninth Circuit upheld that the NCAA’s rules restricting payments to players violate antitrust laws. Ed O’Bannon lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to take NCAA case. Read more at CBS Sports.
Going Rogue – Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication. Read more in The New York Times.
Smart Then Big – When the first tyrannosaurs evolved, about 170 million years ago, they lived in the shadows of larger meat-eaters like Allosaurus. For tens of millions of years, tyrannosaurs remained small. The evolutionary jump of tyrannosaurs from people- and horse-size to behemoths has remained a mystery. A recent fossil finding in Uzbekistan is providing paleontologists with a missing link in the lineage. They have discovered a tyrannosaur with many of the giant’s characteristics — but not its stature or heft, meaning first it got smart, then it got big. Read more in The New York Times. Plus, scientists in Montana have found a pregnant T-Rex, including preserved soft tissue, which is highly unusual. Read more in The Washington Post.
Iconic – If you’ve been to DC recently with Federal Relations, it’s been hard not to notice that the Capitol Dome is surrounded by scaffolding. The renovation started in 2014, and is finally coming to a close — the scaffolding is currently coming down. See a video about the renovation at Roll Call.
The House Budget Committee released their FY 2017 budget resolution Tuesday to win support from dissident conservatives through a combination of assumed cuts in mandatory spending programs and new budget rules.
The House Budget outlines the Congressional tax and spending framework, which does not go to the president and does not become a law. The purpose of the budget is to lay out a path for Congress to balance the budget in 10 years by cutting spending by $6.5 trillion. Combined with projected savings from (the controversial) dynamic scoring estimates of the impact of repealing Obamacare and overall deficit reduction, the budget would save $7 trillion over a decade, according to the House Budget Committee documents.
The budget stays with the FY 2017 discretionary spending caps from last year’s budget deal, which are $551 billion for defense and $518.5 billion for nondefense, it assumes defense spending will rise and nondefense spending will be reduced in relation to the statutory spending caps and inflation over the subsequent nine years.
Members of the Freedom Caucus already have dismissed the mandatory program cuts because there is no guarantee — in fact it is unlikely — they would get through the Senate and be signed by President Barack Obama. Also controversial is that the House budget uses the higher numbers from the recent budget agreement and not the lower, BCA/Sequester numbers agreed to several years ago.
But the proposed budget offers another avenue to potential support. Since it is not a law, a budget resolution can only assume that certain policies are enacted.
It will be marked up by the panel at Wednesday morning, despite continuing uncertainty over the plan’s fate on the House Floor given opposition by House Freedom Caucus conservatives who agreed Monday night to come out in opposition.
Here’s a selection of articles that Federal Relations is enjoying this week.
All Hail – John King was cleared by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee this week to move forward and be confirmed as the next Secretary of Education. Read more in the Washington Post.
Not Really Helpful – In most college sexual assault cases, schools take the early step of instituting a no-contact order between the alleged victim and the accused assailant. The order, similar to a restraining order, serves as an interim accommodation for the person reporting an assault. It helps keep the two parties away from each other before, during or after an investigation by the school, but it does not really protect victims. Read more in the Huffington Post.
Midnight sun in Advent Bay, Spitzbergen, Norway (LOC)
99 Problems – But for college students, the problem is rising tuition prices during the past 15 years coinciding with falling incomes of American families. Read more in The Washington Post.
InCent-ivizing – A pair of bills would provide tax breaks to employers who help their workers pay of student loans. Companies that offer the benefit typically can’t deduct those payments from their tax bill. Read more in The Huffington Post.
Auto Law Breaking – A top official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday said student loan companies are at risk of breaking the law if they place people in default when the co-signer of their loan dies or declares bankruptcy, signaling that the bureau may start legal action. Read more in The Washington Post.
Grads Got It – A new study suggests grad students may outperform faculty members in the classroom and may also benefit from time away from their dissertations. Read more in Inside Higher Education.
“Likable” Guy – Donald Trump says everyone loves him. That’s not so true. In fact, the Republican has a problem getting Republican women to vote for him (only 29 percent of female Republican registered voters approved of Trump, while a whopping 68 percent did not). Trump’s bigger problem is that he’s driving female Republican voters to vote for Hillary. Read more in National Journal. Trump also has a problem where his general favorability rating is a negative 40 percent. Read more in Vox.
Unleash the Dogs of War – As the primaries keep rolling on, it looks more likely (or people keep talking about) a brokered Republican convention, but what does that really look like? Read about that in The Boston Globe. And who would a brokered convention really help? *Hint, it’s Trump.*Read more at NBC News.
International Women Day was this week and Google had a doodle honoring Clara Rockmore, who’s birthday was March 9th, a thermin master and godmother in electronic music. Enjoy above.
