Rule for Consideration of Senate Amendment to HR 1

Early this morning the House Rules Committee finished up their own min-votarama on potentially adding provisions for floor amendments to the consideration of the Senate amendment to HR 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. By a final vote of 7 to 6 (pg14), {with Rep Roy (R,TX) and Rep Norman (R,SC) joining the Democrats in voting ‘Nay’} approved the rule for the consideration of the bill with limited debate (1 hour) and no floor amendments to be considered. The House is scheduled to take up the rule today at 9:00 am and then (if the rule is approved) consider the Senate version of HR 1.

There is really nothing in this bill that is of specific importance here. There are just three mentions in the 870 pages of the bill of the word ‘chemical’, two of them mentions in passing of ‘fentanyl precursor chemicals’. The term ‘cybersecurity’ gets mentioned five times, four of those mentions coming from §200006, Enhancement of Department of Defense resources for improving the efficiency and cybersecurity of the Department of Defense. Most of that section deals with DOD audits, but paragraph (4) allocates $20 million for defense cybersecurity programs of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That is the only specific cybersecurity spending mentioned in the bill. There are no mentions of UAS or drone spending, much less new funding for counter UAS activities.

The votes against the rule by Roy and Norman may indicate that the House may have problems adopting the Senate amendment. There are a total of ten House members that regularly (not always to be sure) vote against bills along with Roy and Norman for ideological reasons. If all members are present (and that is an open question of how many will show up for this vote) the Republican leadership will fail to pass this bill if just four Republicans vote against the bill (and no Democrats support it), there is no provision for a tie breaking vote in the House.

Actually, not passing the bill today does not necessarily kill HR 1. This vote is on the Senate amendment. After a failed vote on that amendment, there might be a motion made to insist on the originally passed House language and request a conference committee be formed to work out the differences between the two bills. That would move behind closed doors the battles over details that we have been seeing for the last couple of weeks with another up and down vote in both bodies possible before the August recess.