Committee Hearings – Week of 2-7-21

With the Senate beginning the impeachment trial for President Trump and the House conducting a ‘Committee Work Week’, the hearing schedule is lite. There is one cybersecurity hearing in the House and a Senate organization meeting that may be of interest.

Cybersecurity

On Wednesday the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on “Homeland Cybersecurity: Assessing Cyber Threats and Building Resilience”. No details are available at this time. There seems to be some sort of problem with the Committee web site; links are currently returning a “Internal Server Error – Read” message and have been most of the weekend. I will try to have more details available before the meeting.

Organizational Meeting

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will hold their organizational meeting on Thursday. No details are available since the Committee web page is still the Republican version, showing Sen Wicker (R,MS) as the Chair instead of Sen Cantwell (D,WA) as established in Sen Resolution 28. This is not an uncommon problem when there is a change in leadership. Hopefully the webpage will be updated before Thursday so we can find out if there will be any subcommittee or rule changes in the offing.

Committee Work Week

The House in the 117^th Congress is trying something different with their schedule. It used to be that the House was either ‘In session’ with meetings in Washington, or in ‘District Work Weeks’ with the congresscritters at home campaigning and fund raising. The original House Calendar for 2021 added a third option, ‘Committee Work Week’ where committees would meet electronically to conduct their business, allowing members to be at home campaigning and fund raising while take limited breaks to attend various committee meetings. This was made possible by changes to the House rules last session that allowed for electronic hearings.

I would suspect that this was initiated for two reasons: COVID-19 response and hearing productivity. If there were no floor votes requiring members to leave the committee room, then there would be fewer excuses for the empty seats in the Hearing Rooms and hearings could be more productive. We will have to see how that works out.

In the last week of January, the February schedule was changed to flip the first two weeks of the month with the first week ‘In Session’ and the second (this week) ‘Committee Work Week’. It also replaced the traditional holiday ‘District Work Week’ for Presidents’ Day with an additional ‘Committee Work Week’. I would suspect that the Leadership is concerned about getting a COVID relief bill put together with at least some hearing support.