111th Congress Adjourns Sine Die

Yesterday the 111^th Congress closed up shop, heading home for the holidays. Unless some emergency calls them back into session before hand, the next time the Senate and House meet will be on January 5^th, 2011 at noon that being the date set for the first meeting of the 112^th Congress. The Senate has all ready signaled that it expects to work that day.

2nd Session of the 111th Congress

Yesterday Congress officially convened the second session of the 111th Congress. Officially they did nothing except adjourn for at least a week. The House is scheduled to meet again on January 12th and the Senate plans on another ‘pro-forma’ session on the 19th. The House did accept the submission of some bills/resolutions but they won’t be officially entered into the system until the 12th. There is only one security related congressional hearing scheduled; the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will look at aviation security on the first full day the Senate is actually working (January 20th). The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Operations Committee has announced that they will be holding a hearing on the same subject this month, but has not yet set a date. No word on CFATS hearings yet.

Something Important

Please excuse this brief interruption of discussion of mundane matters like chemical facility security, but Congress is finally getting around to addressing the really important issues in America. Tomorrow the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will be conducting a markup of HR 390, The College Football Playoff Act of 2009. The bill introduced by Rep. Joe Barton (R, Tx) would make it illegal to promote, market or advertise “any post-season NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system”. With two other Republicans from Texas as co-sponsors, it is obvious that this bill was introduced long before it became obvious that a school from Texas would play in this year’s national championship game. Or maybe they just realized that Texas would be losing to #1 Alabama in that game…

Homeland Security Reorganization II

The House Homeland Security Committee held their first meeting of the 111th Congress on last Wednesday. The Committee completed their reorganization, adopted an oversight plan, and looked at what they wanted to accomplish this session. Chemical Facility Security There were only brief mentions about pending chemical facility security legislation in the various sources reporting about the meeting (the meeting was open to the public, but not webcast so I did not get a chance to follow the meeting). The tone of the comments suggests that Chairman Thompson is not planning on re-introducing HR 5577 from last session. Rather it seems that the new Committee will write new legislation. That could prove interesting. Other Homeland Security Legislation Three pieces of homeland security legislation from Committee members has already been re-introduced and passed in the House this last week. All three were passed in the House last session but were not taken up by the Senate, nor was Chairman Thompson able to get them added to the DHS spending bill. None of them have a direct impact on the chemical community with the possible exception of Rep Harmon’s (D, CA) bill (HR 553) to prevent over-classification of Homeland Security produced information. This legislation would require that DHS produce unclassified versions of intelligence reports. This would allow for more sharing of such reports with security planners at high-risk chemical facilities. It looks like the House Committee is going to join with the Senate Homeland Security Committee in trying to pass the first DHS Authorization Bill. Authorization Bills provide guidance to Congress and , to a lesser extent, the affected Department on what the priorities will be for that Department. Spending guidelines are set, but not actually appropriated in these bills. Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced their version during the ending days of the 110th session. It will be interesting to see the differences between these two versions of that authorization

Chemical Facility Security Legislation

We are little more than a week away from the convening of the 111th Congress. With the CFATS authorization expiring this year there is going to be a lot of legislative attention focused on chemical facility security. We have been hearing from a number of advocacy groups about their push for increased authority for DHS in this area (see: “The Buzz Continues about Chemical Security 101”). Now the American Chemistry Council weighs in on matter in an interview on EENews.Net. Marty Durbin Interview The interview transcript on this site comes from an interview that Marty Durbin, a VP for the American Chemistry Council did on the ‘On Point’ interview show distributed by Environment & Energy Publishing. The transcript on the web page contains a link to the video of the interview as well. The interviewer, Monica Trauzzi, tosses a couple of easy questions at Mr. Durbin to get the ACC point of view about the upcoming legislative calendar and what the ACC looks for from Congress on chemical facility security. This is certainly not a hard hitting investigative interview, but it does provide some insight into what ACC is looking at in the coming session. HR 5577 The comments made by Mr. Durbin make it sound like the ACC had been supportive of the efforts to get HR 5577 passed in the 110th Congress. Actually, the ACC has been supportive of extending the current CFATS program. In so far as HR 5577 did specifically do that, ACC can claim support for the legislation. They had previously expressed concerns about some of the other components of HR 5577, specifically the IST provisions and the wording of the Federal Pre-emption provisions. In this interview Mr. Durbin does not specifically address those concerns. Chemical Security 101 Ms. Trauzzi does set up a slow-pitch softball question about the recently released Center for American Progress report on inherently safer technology. The ACC response is surprisingly collegial, offering the observation that the “Center for American Progress has done some good work and clearly we share the objective they have in making sure that all the critical infrastructure is adequately protected against threats of terrorism”. The hardest slam after that is that “it may be an oversimplification” and even that is softened by the comment that there are “a lot of different pieces to the puzzle and you've got to use all the tools in the toolbox”. It appears that IST is no longer the political bogey man, but rather a political reality that will have to be dealt with. The Writing on the Wall From this interview it seems clear that the ACC is clear that the upcoming Congress is not going to take the easy way out and pass a simple extension of the current CFATS program like HR 5533. With that option apparently closed, the ACC is looking for the next best thing; making CFATS permanent with some relatively minor changes. While they will probably fight to get some wording changes to the IST provisions and perhaps some modifications to the worker representation clauses, it does not appear that the ACC will make a serious move to stop a bill similar to HR 5577 from passing early in the 111th Congress. I think what they are much more concerned with is that there will be a major re-write of the whole chemical facility security plan. If CFATS expires a new proposal would probably not include the risk-based performance-standards that are the key part of CFATS enforcement. If Congress starts getting involved in writing specific requirements for security programs, it could start to get really expensive for the chemical industry.