Bills Introduced – 9-20-16

I had to go back and re-look at Tuesday’s bill introductions as only six resolutions were listed when I checked Congress.gov yesterday. Sure enough there were 44 bills introduced in the House and Senate on Tuesday. Of those, only two may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 6071 Making continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2017, and for other purposes. Rep. Flores, Bill [R-TX-17] 

HR 6073 To direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct research and development to mitigate the consequences of threats to voting systems, to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require the voting systems used in elections for Federal office to comply with national standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for operational security and ballot verification, to establish programs to promote research in innovative voting system technologies, and for other purposes. Rep. Johnson, Henry C. "Hank," Jr. [D-GA-4]

It will be interesting to see if HR 6071 or HR 5325 (the Senate ‘vehicle’ for the FY 2017 interim funding) will become the legislation used to continue operation of the Federal government through the start of the next fiscal year. Since we no longer have to worry about the year-to-year extension of the CFATS program, I probably will not be doing the in-depth coverage of the interim spending bill that I have done in years past, unless of course it contains some language of specific interest.

HR 6073 is really an IT cybersecurity bill, but I thought I would at least mention it in passing. It is unlikely to gain traction because of the states’ rights aspect of control of the election mechanism. I suspect that after the almost inevitable charges of election hacking that will arise out of November’s election, that this topic will arise again in the next Congress.