Congressional Hearings – Week of 9-19-11

Just two hearings this week in Congress that might be of interest to the chemical security community; a pipeline safety bill markup and a DHS authorization markup. Additionally the FY 2012 continuing resolution is scheduled to come to the House floor this week.

HR 2937 Markup

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has scheduled a markup of HR 2937, Pipeline Infrastructure and Community Protection Act of 2011, on Tuesday and Wednesday. This bill is not yet available on the GPO website, but it should be the bill that was discussed in draft form in an earlier meeting before this committee. There are similar bills being considered by other committees in the House (HR 2845) and the Senate (S 275).

There are two other bills that are scheduled to be marked up in the same hearing and both are controversial bills designed to limit EPA actions. The discussion on these, if they go first, could certainly consume all of the available time and might cause a postponement of the consideration of HR 2937. The two day format described on the Committee web site does not really alleviate this potential problem since the first day of the hearing is only for the presentation of opening statements by committee members.

S 1546 Markup

As I mentioned in my blog post on the introduction of S 1546 the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will be holding their second day of markup hearings on the DHS authorization bill on Wednesday.

Continuing Resolution Status

Rather than doing a separate very short blog post on the status of HJ Res 79, the FY 2012 CR, I’ll just report here that the Majority Leader’s web site notes that the bill will be brought to the floor for consideration on Wednesday.