What We’re Reading This Week, July 27-31

Posted on July 30, 2015

Here’s a sampling of articles the Federal Relations team have been enjoying this week.

Senate Meltdown – It’s hot in DC but it’s hotter in the Senate Republican caucus. The Senate was in session last weekend to get the highway trust fund reauthorized, but that session broke down as Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) attempted to attach an Obamacare repeal to the bill. Behind the scenes, it was much, much worse with the Senators breaking internal protocol and attempting to engage outside groups in an attempt to make fellow Republicans look bad. Senators are M-A-D. Read more at Politico.

Wreck of the Southern Railway train (Smithsonian)

Green Meltdown – The bipartisan Energy Innovation Act bill sponsored by Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is drawing the ire of environmental groups, most notably the Serra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. Read more at National Journal.

Cutting Student Debt – Indiana University has come up with a creative way to keep students from over borrowing student loan funds; each year, they tell them how much they already owe in debt. Students are taking out 11 percent less, which is admittedly not a huge dent, but a dent nonetheless. Read more at Vox.

Taking Advantage – It’s long been a question/accusation that for-profits schools taking advantage of veterans for GI benefits. The PBS NewsHour goes in depth on the engagement between the University of Phoenix and the US Army. Watch the segment at PBS.

China’s Slowing Economy? – The world’s second largest economy has hit some fairly large bumps this week as the CSI300 index of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen plunged 8.6 percent, to 3,818.73, while the Shanghai Composite Index .SSEC lost 8.5 percent, to 3,725.56 points. It is the biggest one day crash in the Chinese market since 2007. Earlier this month, the Chinese government took unprecedented intervention and support measures at the speculation of a full-blown market crash crash. There seems to be no reason for the investor souring on the market and overall has raised questions over the viability of government efforts to prop up prices as an economy slows. China’s industrial profits fell 0.3 percent in June from a year earlier. The International Monetary Fund has urged China to eventually unwind its support measures. Ultimately, this slow down will impact American imports. Read more from Reuters, NPR, and Bloomberg.

Capitol Dome restoration. Architect of the Capitol

The 1% – With the first Fox News debate to air August 6th, Republican presidential nominees are scrambling to up their poll numbers. Fox has long stated that it will invite only the top 10 candidates per the polling data. Fox will use five, yet to be named polls, and their data as of 5 pm August 4th. There is two weeks to go and a lot of people on the bubble (polling anywhere from 2.8 to 1.8 percent). Read more at The Hill. However, Fox News has recently changed the criteria, opening access to the debates to more candidates, by requiring participants reach at least 1 percent in polls. However, Fox will bifurcate the process by holding a debate at 9 pm of the top 10 candidates and a “forum” at 5 pm of those not in the top 10, but with at least one percent in the polls. Read more at Politico.

You Can’t Sit With Us – The powerful, Republican Koch brothers are decidedly not on team Donald. Despite a long-standing cordial relationship, the Kochs are denying Trump access to their state-of-the art data and refusing to let him speak to their gatherings of grassroots activists or major donors. The Koch brothers have one of the most broad-reaching, well-funded, and powerful conservative operations currently operating. While Trump is currently triumphing in the polls, access to the Koch network would give him a huge boost. Read more at Politico.

My Better Half – Meet the spouses of all those people running for president. See them at National Journal.

TSA has an instragram account.

Senate HELP Hearing on Sexual Assault

Posted on July 29, 2015July 29, 2015

The Senate HELP Committee’s will hold another hearing related to the Higher Education Act reauthorization today. This hearing will focus on combating campus sexual assault. Sexual assault is one of four key areas for which Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) established staff working groups to guide the committee’s reauthorization process. Sen. Alexander is in Tennessee today due to an unexpected conflict, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will lead the hearing in his absence. Much of the focus of the hearing, indirectly, will be on the Senate’s Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) legislation, which was introduced last Congress and again this year.

There will be two panels at the hearing today. First up, CASA sponsors Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Dean Heller (R-NV), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will speak on much-discussed CASA bill. A second panel will feature safety advocates and higher education officials: Dana Bolger, Co-founder of Know Your IX; Dolores Stafford, Executive Director of the National Association of Clery Compliance Officers and Professionals and President and CEO of D. Stafford & Associates; and Mollie Benz Flounlacker, Associate Vice President for Federal relations at the Association of American Universities. University of California President Janet Napolitano will also testify about the bill – which includes provisions she supports and others she takes issue with – and the need to improve existing laws.

The hearing starts at 9 a.m. EST and will be live streamed.

ED Secretary Duncan Outlines HEA Agenda

Posted on July 27, 2015

At a speech today at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Education Secretary Arne Duncan outlined the Administration’s priorities for a higher education reauthorization.The bulk of the remarks focused on affordability, which has been a focus for the Obama Administration for nearly his whole tenure. Secretary Duncan reiterated the dual goals of paying for college and limiting college debt. He also focused on degree completion and the Administration’s goal that those that start college, finish college. Part of this formulation will be colleges and universities putting “skin in the game” and attaching federal student loan funding to the outputs of institutes of higher education, focusing on degree completion and graduates who get jobs. States will also have skin in the game and will be called upon to stop the disinvestment of higher education.

Read the remarks here.

Appropriations Process Stalled

Posted on July 27, 2015

Congress is beginning to wrap up their work in preparation for their August break. Later this week, House members are expected to leave until after Labor Day. The Senate is scheduled to be in session next week, but they could decide to wrap up sooner. Regardless, lawmakers will be leaving DC with no real movement toward resolving the bipartisan gulf over sequestration.

House and Senate appropriation committees have completed work on all 12 spending bills in their respective chambers. That is an accomplishment that has escaped Congress in recent years. But despite the committees’ efforts to advance appropriations bills through the committee process, House and Senate leaders have had a tough time bringing those bills to the floor for consideration due to partisan positions that collectively ended the process in mid-July.

When lawmakers return to the Capital after Labor Day, they will have only about three legislative weeks before the October 1^st start to the federal fiscal year to reach a funding agreement that would stave off a partial government shutdown. In other words, timing is tight, the stakes are high, and appropriators are frustrated. There is no doubt that a continuing resolution (CR) will be necessary but yet there is no agreement on how long a CR will run, or whether or not we will see the two sides come together to negotiate a budget deal like the one we saw in 2012 to stave off sequestration.

House Looking at a Continuing Resolution

Posted on July 23, 2015

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) today said that Congress will need a continuing resolution before the end of the FY2015, which is September 30th.

There are three types of federal appropriations measures. Regular appropriations bills provide most of the funding that is provided in all appropriations measures for a fiscal year and must be enacted by October 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. These are the 12 regular appropriations bills which have been passing the House and Senate up until earlier this month. If regular bills are not enacted by the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress adopts continuing resolutions (CR) to continue funding, generally until regular bills are enacted. Supplemental appropriations bills provide additional appropriations to become available during a fiscal year.

The House has been largely stalled in moving appropriations bills forward since the FY2015 Interior Appropriations bill issues with the Confederate flag. It has largely been speculated that Congress will move towards a CR, which is a very commonly used funding device, and then begin working on a larger omnibus appropriations bill — a bill that combines many of the appropriations bills into one package. Omnibus appropriations bills are typically moved as straight up or down votes, at or near to the Christmas holidays.

While Boehner gave no indication as to how long a CR would be crafted or what it would look like, his mention is the first admission by senior Congressional leadership that a CR will happen.