Bills Introduced – 09-29-13

The House was busy yesterday with spending issues. Not only did they amend and re-pass the continuing resolution they also introduced a number of other bills related to how spending should be accomplished in the coming months. Two of those bills might be of specific interest to readers of this blog.

HR 3210 Latest Title: Making continuing appropriations for military pay in the event of a Government shutdown. Sponsor: Rep Coffman, Mike (R,CO)

HR 3213 Latest Title: Making appropriations for all departments and agencies of the Federal Government for fiscal year 2014, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Rep Grayson, Alan (D,FL)

HR 3214 Latest Title: Making continuing appropriations for personnel critical to national security during a Government shutdown. Sponsor: Rep Gallego, Pete P. (D,TX)

The alert reader will note that I listed three bills not two. I’ve included HR 3210 which also passed last night because I can now list the author of the bill and a GPO copy of the bill as introduced is now available. This saves me a blog post.

The Grayson bill, Fiscal Sanity Act of 2013, is a full year continuing resolution that is short, sweet and incomplete. All real CRs follow a pretty standard format with a lot of necessary legislative gobbledygook. This bill deals with funding the federal government for FY 2014 and deals with the debt ceiling for all of 2014 in three short (two pages) sections. Unfortunately that doesn’t get the job done. For example, there is no language explicitly extending the CFATS authorization. Fortunately, since Grayson is not a member of the Appropriations Committee and is a Democrat to boot, there is no way that this bill will ever see the light of day; political grandstanding at its worst.

The Gallego bill has not yet been received/published by the GPO so it is not clear just exactly who is ‘critical to national security’. It could even include CFATS inspectors. I suspect that the bill will give the DOD and DHS Secretaries authority to decide who is critical. That would be an interesting last minute decision process to watch.

We’ll have to wait and see when it is printed. 

BTW: If the government shuts down on Tuesday, we probably won’t see an official version until after the fiasco is over.