HR 7073 Passed in House – NextGen Pipeline Systems

After debating HR 7073, the Next Generation Pipelines Research, [removed from paywall] for about 14-minutes yesterday under the suspension of the rules process, The House completed consideration of the bill this afternoon, passing it by a largely bipartisan vote of 373 to 41; with Democrats and Republicans splitting the Nay votes almost evenly. The bill, which would require Department of Energy to establish a new grant program to “carry out demonstration projects on low- to mid-technology readiness level subjects to achieve deployment of technologies”, now moves to the Senate for consideration.

This late in the session it would be very surprising to see the Senate taking up this bill, it is just not politically important enough to take up the time needed for consideration under regular order. The regular alternative for a bipartisan bill would be for it to be considered under the Senate’s unanimous consent rule, but that is not likely to work with this bill given the opposition of radical Republicans in the House. Their Senate counterparts are well known for objecting to consideration of bills under the unanimous consent process, thus killing the movement towards passage.

This bill might be suited for addition to the end-of-year omnibus spending bill. Since the Ranking Member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee {Sen Cruiz, (R,TX)} may be disinclined to block a pipeline research bill, there would not be an automatic veto preventing this bill from being added like we have seen with many homeland security related bills and Sen Paul (R,TN).