HR 3746 Rule Published – Debt Limit Bill

Yesterday, the House Rules Committee met to craft the rule for the consideration of HR 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. As expected, the Committee crafted a closed rule, with limited debate (1 hour) and no amendments to be offered on the floor. The Committee did approve (and incorporated into the version of the bill to considered on the floor) one amendment that made a variety of technical changes to the bill.

There were 81 amendments submitted to the Committee, while would have made relatively minor changes to the language of the bill, most would have made significant changes to the deal crafted over the weekend. If almost any of the 80 other amendments had been incorporated into the final bill, they would have essentially killed the deal that brought the bill to the floor of the House today.

The Committee vote on the bill yesterday was unusual, a 9 to 7 vote in favor of adoptions. Typically votes in this Committee are 9 to 4, reflecting the party composition of the Committee. Yesterday two Republicans {Rep Norman (R,SC) and Rep Roy (R,TX)} voted against the bill. These two, along with Rep Massie (R,TX) were appointed to the Committee as part of the deal through which Rep McCarthy (R,CA) was finally elected to Speaker of the House. I suspect that there was a great deal of arm twisting applied to Massie to get his yeah vote. If his vote had gone the other way, I suspect that the Democrats would have provided a single yeah vote to move the bill to the floor.

According to reporting by the NY Times, it does not look like Chip Roy, the prima facia leader of the Republican opposition, will resort to the use of a vacate motion to slow consideration of the bill. But, as I noted yesterday, he does not really control the bomb throwers on the right. A motion to vacate may still come if/when the bill is approved in the House. Even if (as I expect that he would) McCarthy survives such a vote, it will almost certainly fatally damage his tenuous control of the Republican fringe in the House and will force him to work more often with Democrats to move legislation (especially spending bills) through the House during the remainder of the session.

On a side note, there were only 21 bills introduced yesterday. That was not surprising given that both the House was originally scheduled to working in their districts (read fund raising) this week. One bill that is worth mentioning here is HR 3750 introduced by Rep Mills (R,FL), it would provide a one-week extension of the debt limit. If HR 3746 fails in either the House or Senate (still a possibility, however remote), this bill may become an important vehicle extending the deadline for a new deal.

Bills Introduced – 5-29-23

Yesterday, in a rare Memorial Day session, the House met in pro forma session to introduce one bill, HR 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, Rep. McHenry, Patrick T. [R-NC-10]. This is the debt ceiling bill that was finalized in negotiations earlier over the weekend. The full text of the bill is available.

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the rule for consideration of HR 3745 later today. This will almost certainly be a ‘closed rule’ with limited debate (not too limited, there will be time for venting and posturing), and no amendments will be accepted. A vote on the bill will almost certainly be held in the House tomorrow

Extremists on both sides of the political spectrum in Congress will find much in this bill with which to object. Some measures will go too far, while others will not go far enough. The political middle will find those measures to be more palatable. I suspect that there will be sufficient votes in both the House and Senate to pass the bill when it comes to a vote.

The big question now is what will the bomb throwers do in either house. In general, the right-wing extremists got what they wanted, they forced Biden to negotiate on the debt limit and forced spending cuts. They did not get all that they wanted, but after some pointed and loud complaints they will vote against the bill to establish their credentials (and aid fundraising). They, as a group, will not give Speaker McCarthy too much of a hard time on the bill. McCarthy did as they wanted and was largely successful.

But, and this is a LARGE BUT, there are members of this group who have made their reputation by (and receive their funding for) disrupting the operations of the House. This is where a single bomb thrower could offer a privileged motion to vacate the Office of the Speaker, and the House would be required to stop what it was doing and vote on that motion. Now it would take 217 votes to actually remove the Speaker, and that is not going to happen over this bill (the moderate Democrats will 'save' McCarthy). But it would slow down operations a small amount and it would make McCarthy’s future more difficult. But, even with a motion to vacate, the House will vote on this bill and almost certainly pass it on Wednesday.

The Senate is a different story. There are not ‘bomb throwers’ in the Senate, it is much too dignified and proper to allow such members. It does, however, have rules in place for the slow and measured consideration of legislation. And it takes (maybe several) unanimous consent motions to work around those rules to pass legislation quickly. And the Senate has any number of members on the left and right who would insist on following the rules and object to such unanimous consent motions. It is very likely that the Senate will go through the prolonged debate process to pass this bill, but it will pass.

Committee Hearings – Week of 5-21-23

This week, with just the House in Washington, there is a full slate of hearings scheduled. In this space, an oversight hearing on the NTIA and a markup of the DHS spending bill are of potential interest.

NTIA Oversight

On Tuesday, the Communications and Technology Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Oversight and Reauthorization of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration”. No witness list is currently available, but it will almost certainly include the NTIA Director. The hearing notice lists 18 pieces of legislation (only two of which have been introduced to date) upon which the hearing will focus. Legislation of potential interest here (links to committee drafts) are:

HR___, the National Telecommunication and Information Administration Reauthorization Act

of 2023,

H Res___, To express the sense of Congress with respect to WHOIS information accessibility, and for other purposes,

HR___, the Digital Economy Cybersecurity Advisory Act of 2023, and

HR___, the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Act.

DHS Spending Bill

On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee will hold a markup hearing on “Fiscal Year 2024 Homeland Security and Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Bills”. No word is publicly available on what changes may have been made last week by the DHS Subcommittee to the Committee Draft.

On the Floor

The House has a fairly lite schedule this week, with nothing of particular note here. Interesting that there is not a note on the bottom of the schedule about a potential vote on a budget ceiling bill. With a June 1^st deadline for action, the House would need to complete action this week since they are not scheduled to be in Washington next week.

Bills Introduced – 10-5-13

Both the House and Senate were in session in a relatively rare Saturday session yesterday, but not much was achieved. I was surprised to see that 25 bills had been introduced in the House; all were spending related, but none did anything to resolve the current standoff. Twenty-four of them are worth mentioning for their particularly innovative level of political silliness.

HR 3247 thru HR 3258 Latest Title: Making continuing appropriations for all departments and agencies of the Federal Government, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Rep Grayson, Alan  (D,FL)

HR 3259 thru HR 2370 Latest Title: Eliminating the debt ceiling for a period defined, and for other purposes. Sponsor: Rep Grayson, Alan (D,FL)

The CR Bills

For brevity’s sake I’m going to refer to these as the CR bills and the Debt Limit bills. The CR Bills are 12 nearly identical bills offering really ‘clean’ CRs as an option for getting the government re-started. Each is two sections long and provides spending authority based upon 2013 spending levels with sequestration. The only difference between the two bills is that the first is for 30 days and the last is 365 days with the ones in between being for a period 30 days longer than the earlier bill in the series.

These are not nearly written in the ‘proper’ format for a CR and miss a lot of the legislative gobbledy-goop that covers all of the appropriate programs and loopholes. For instance the CFATS authorization extension language is missing.

Various lawyers have made the argument to me that providing funding for the program {which these bills would under the ‘each project or activity for which budget authority was provided‘ language in§2(1)} is sufficient authorization to keep CFATS running, but legitimate arguments could be made that it would not necessarily include all of the limitations on that authority provided in the §550 language. Significant changes would still require regulation changes with the publish and comment requirements, but that might be the only restriction on such changes. Remember though, legitimate arguments are the stuff that civil suits are made of.

The Debt Limit Bills

I don’t spend too much time in this blog talking about the debt limit because it doesn’t usually have any direct impact on chemical safety, security or cybersecurity, so I’ll just touch briefly on this last series of bills introduced yesterday, the debt limit bills. These bills are not yet available from the GPO (or Thomas for that matter) so we can’t be sure that they are a similar set up to those that Rep. Grayson proposed for the CR bills, but titles and the number certainly suggest that they are.

Moving Forward

Grayson is not a member of the Appropriations Committee or the Ways and Means Committee (that considers Debt Limit matters) and is a Democrat so there is no chance that any of these bills will receive any consideration in Committee or make it to the floor of the House. This will be the last mention that these political grandstanding bills will get.