Spending Bill Hearing Announced

Late last night (actually early this morning) the House Rules Committee announced a hearing to consider the rule for three pieces of legislation; FY 2022 spending bill (as an amendment to the Senate Amendment to HR 2471), HJ Res 75 (short term continuing resolution to allow consideration of the spending bill in House and Senate to take longer than Friday midnight), and HR 6968 (introduced yesterday), the Suspending Energy Imports from Russia Act. All three bills are scheduled for consideration in the House today. The hearing was held this morning and the Rule was approved.

Spending Bill

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022 is a huge bill (2741 pages), even by consolidated spending bill standards. In addition to the standard 12 spending bills (included as Divisions A thru L) there are Divisions covering:

Covid Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2022,

Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2022,

Haiti Development, Accountability, And Institutional Transparency Initiative Act (The Original Bill Amended),

Intelligence Authorization for Fiscal Year 2022,

Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act Of 2022,

Israel Relations Normalization Act Of 2022,

Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Program,

Authorization Of Appropriations for High Technology Pilot Program,

And others…

Short Term CR

HJ Res 75 would extend the current FY 2022 spending at FY 2021 levels through March 15^th. This should give the House and Senate time to deal with the Amendment to HR 2471.

Russian Energy Imports

HR 6968 is the expected response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. The basics prohibition is found in §2(a)(1):

“Not withstanding any other provision of law, all products of the Russian Federation classified under chapter 27 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States shall be banned from importation into the United States, other than products imported on or before 11:59 p.m. eastern daylight time on the date that is 45 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.”

The rest is qualifications, exceptions and methods to stop the exceptions.

Needless to say, more details to follow.