HR 4310, NDA, In Conference

It didn’t take the Senate long to respond to the House action on HR 4310, the National Defense Authorization FY 2013. On Wednesday, the same day the bill was returned without action, the Senate passed two additional amendments to the bill and passed it again. On Thursday the House looked at the bill again, didn’t like the Senate version and decided to go to Conference. Neither action took long, less than one hour total in both houses.

As one would expect with a bill this complicated the Conference Committee is quite large, so it will be interesting to see if they can agree on a compromise version of the bill that can pass in both the Senate and the House in the two plus weeks that we have before the 113^th Congress is sworn in on January 3^rd. I expect that they will.

For readers of this blog, the real question is what cybersecurity provisions will remain in the bill if/when it does get through the conference process? Only time will tell.

House Returns Both Versions of NDA to Senate

Yesterday the House passed H. Res 829, a very short measure that returned H 4310 and S 3254 to the Senate without action. Readers of this blog will recall that these two identical bills were passed last week in the Senate and are the National Defense Authorization Act FY 2013.

The two bills were returned because, “in the opinion of this House, contravenes the first clause of the seventh section of the first article of the Constitution of the United States and is an infringement of the privileges of this House” {§1(a)(1)}. This constitutional provision maintains that all “Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives” {Article 1, Section 7}.

I did not notice a tax provision in the language, but I wasn’t looking for one either. Apparently the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (or more likely the Committee Staff) did, because he was the one responsible for this Resolution. There was no debate on the issue in the House and its full consideration took only 53 seconds.

I thought that it was unusual that the Senate amended HR 4310, substituting the language from the Senate bill as this is typically done with spending bills not authorization bills. That is done to avoid just this type of issue. It appears that in using HR 4310 as the vessel in this case stepped on the toes of the House Ways and Means Chairman as his Committee had no say in that bill.

It will be interesting to see if the Senate takes the matter back up and removes the offending section of the bill or just lets this go until the next session. I kind of expect the latter. If they do that the cybersecurity provisions of the 113^th Congress version of this bill will undoubtedly be different.