HR 1540 Passes in House

This afternoon the House passed HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 by a recorded vote of 322 to 96; a margin that must be counted as ‘bipartisan’. The bill was heavily amended, so the bill looks quite different than when it was approved by the House Armed Services Committee.

Amendment Results

I have been watching two particular amendments that could be of potential interest to the chemical security community; one dealing with cyber security, and the other dealing with GPS interference. Yesterday the Langevin (D, RI) cyber security amendment failed on voice vote and that ‘failure’ was confirmed this afternoon by a recorded vote of 172 to 246. While this isn’t technically the death of HR 1136 (the bill from which this amendment was extracted as nearly whole cloth), the vote almost ensures that no committee will take any time considering this legislation.

The Turner (R, OH) amendment was grouped into an ‘en bloc’ amendment with 10 other less than controversial amendments for a single period of debate and a single vote. It was the sixth such en bloc amendment considered today in an effort to speed up the processing of this bill on the House Floor. As is typical with en bloc amendments this passed by a voice vote.

Senate Action

Interestingly this bill is being sent to the Senate on the same day that the Government Printing Office (GPO) finally got around to printing a similar bill produced by the Senate Armed Services Committee; S 981, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Typically we would expect the Senate to substitute the language of S 981 for the House passed language of HR 1540. The differences would then get worked out in Conference.

I haven’t had a chance to peruse S 981 yet, but rest assured I’ll be looking for cyber security language in that bill.