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Category: On the Hill

Senate HELP Hearing on Sexual Assault

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The Senate HELP Committee’s will hold another hearing related to the Higher Education Act reauthorization today. This hearing will focus on combating campus sexual assault. Sexual assault is one of four key areas for which Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) established staff working groups to guide the committee’s reauthorization process.  Sen. Alexander is in Tennessee today due to an unexpected conflict, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will lead the hearing in his absence. Much of the focus of the hearing, indirectly, will be on the Senate’s Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) legislation, which was introduced last Congress and again this year.

There will be two panels at the hearing today. First up, CASA sponsors Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Dean Heller (R-NV), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) will speak on much-discussed CASA bill. A second panel will feature safety advocates and higher education officials: Dana Bolger, Co-founder of Know Your IX; Dolores Stafford, Executive Director of the National Association of Clery Compliance Officers and Professionals and President and CEO of D. Stafford & Associates; and Mollie Benz Flounlacker, Associate Vice President for Federal relations at the Association of American Universities. University of California President Janet Napolitano will also testify about the bill – which includes provisions she supports and others she takes issue with – and the need to improve existing laws.

The hearing starts at 9 a.m. EST and will be live streamed.

House Looking at a Continuing Resolution

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) today said that Congress will need a continuing resolution before the end of the FY2015, which is September 30th.

There are three types of federal appropriations measures. Regular appropriations bills provide most of the funding that is provided in all appropriations measures for a fiscal year and must be enacted by October 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. These are the 12 regular appropriations bills which have been passing the House and Senate up until earlier this month.  If regular bills are not enacted by the beginning of the new fiscal year, Congress adopts continuing resolutions (CR) to continue funding, generally until regular bills are enacted. Supplemental appropriations bills provide additional appropriations to become available during a fiscal year.

The House has been largely stalled in moving appropriations bills forward since the FY2015 Interior Appropriations bill issues with the Confederate flag. It has largely been speculated that Congress will move towards a CR, which is a very commonly used funding device, and then begin working on a larger omnibus appropriations bill — a bill that combines many of the appropriations bills into one package. Omnibus appropriations bills are typically moved as straight up or down votes, at or near to the Christmas holidays.

While Boehner gave no indication as to how long a CR would be crafted or what it would look like, his mention is the first admission by senior Congressional leadership that a CR will happen.

Senate Hearing on HEA

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The Senate will be holding a hearing on the HEA this Wednesday entitled Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: Exploring Barriers and Opportunities within Innovation. The hearing will be held at 10 am on Wednesday, July 22.

Watch the hearing here. 

Senate Passes ESEA

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Today, the Senate finished its debate and votes on amendments to S. 1177, the Every Child Achieves Act, a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In total, of the 79 amendments that were voted on, 66 were adopted and 13 failed.

The Senate has passed a bipartisan overhaul of the long-expired No Child Left Behind education law by a vote of 81-17.

The bill would continue to require annual testing in reading and math but restores power over low-performing schools back to states.

The partisan House-passed version, which passed earlier this month,  goes to an extreme that Democrats and the White House have condemned. The most contentious point of the House version is that it would allow federal dollars to follow students to another public school of their choice.

To devise a version that can become law, lawmakers will have to satisfy White House concerns about the bill’s protections for poor and minority students and House GOP demands that the bill diminish the federal role in education.

 

House Pulls FY16 Interior Bill

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The House has pulled their FY16 Interior Appropriations bill amid controversy of a Confederate flag amendment. The House has previously considered and passed three amendments restricting funding for federal lands displaying the Confederate flag. Due to Republican concerns these restrictions might impose, an additional amendment was proposed to allow funding on federally owned park land displaying the Confederate flag. The crux of the issue: Civil War battle fields, the bulk of which are now federal park land and have memorials and cemeteries headstones with the flag on them. The bill did not have the votes to pass the House without the new amendment that allowed display of the Confederate flag on federal lands in some instances. Further, it was unclear that the bill had the votes to pass if the amendment was not included.

The bill was first considered but not finished before the July 4th Recess. It is unclear how the bill will or can move forward.