Skip to content
News and updates

Category: Seen in DC

Welcome to the 115th Congress

Posted on

Happy New Year and Happy Swearing In Day! Congress is back today to usher in the 115th Congress and the inauguration is in 17 days.

First things first. 

Both the full House and new members of the Senate were sworn in today initiating the 115th Congress. With the Republican party in charge of both chambers and President-elect Donald Trump in the White House, an ambitious agenda is in the works, which includes repealing Obamacare and rolling back regulations. 

Those effort starts this week as the Senate is expected to start working on passing a budget that contains instructions for gutting Obamacare this week, with the House following up as soon as next week. That resolution includes instructions to repeal large parts of Obamacare through reconciliation. The measure would instruct relevant committees to write legislation that could undo provisions of the law. Republicans are framing this measure as an Obamacare transition solution, but nothing will actually happens to the ACA yet.

The process in the Senate will take several days of debate and there will be a “vote-a-rama,” a process that often takes several hours over the course of a day and night. The budget resolution and the reconciliation measure repealing the health care law avoids the normal Senate requirement of 60 votes to consider legislation. Any subsequent bills addressing replacement provisions for the health care coverage law will require new budget resolution maneuvering or the cooperation from some Senate Democrats. The legislative process for enacting health care coverage replacement legislation could take several years.

Republican leaders are setting up reserve funds in an otherwise bare-bones FY 2017 budget resolution as a way to allow savings from repealing the health care law to be applied to replacement legislation.

The House will vote shortly after on the budget resolution and that vote could happen by the time Trump is inaugurated. It is worth noting that the budget resolution is not law, but binding and instructing on the House and Senate Committees. 

Rollback Regulations

Trump is expected to roll back nearly every major labor regulation enacted under President Barack Obama. Executive orders will be the easiest to reverse or cancel; that simply takes executive action. On the list could be an order that required prospective federal contractors to disclose previous labor law violations when bidding on large contracts. 

The Department of Labor’s appeal of a federal injunction against the rule will almost certainly be dropped once Trump takes charge of the Justice Department. Another regulation to watch is the fiduciary rule, which requires broker dealers to consider only the client’s best interest when providing retirement advice. Trump may face difficulty squelching the rule before it takes effect in April, but his Labor Department can broaden exemptions and thereby weaken its effect substantially.

Also up for review are visas for guest worker programs. Bipartisan support exists already to scrutinize these programs because of highly publicized instances in recent years of mistreatment of guest workers, displacement of native-born workers, or both. Indeed, Democrats may push harder than Republicans to clean this Augean stable, given the reliance of Trump’s own various businesses on guest-worker visas. The Washington Post counts, 500 since 2013.

Trump’s first big decision on immigration will be what to do about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which grants deportation relief to more than 752,000 people brought to the US at a young age. Trump promised during the campaign to end the program, which was created by an Obama executive order. But in December, Trump said “we’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud.”

Looking Forward

As the Trump Administration takes office later this month, lawmakers are also gearing up for new fights. Efforts to undo many of the Obama Administration’s education policies, such as its teacher preparation regulations or rules aimed at cracking down on for-profit colleges, will likely prove contentious. Lawmakers will also likely clash over efforts to repeal the Obama Administration’s regulations under the Every Student Succeeds Act or scale back the power of the Office for Civil Rights.

Additionally, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the chairs of the congressional education committees, both plan to turn their attention to overhauling the Higher Education Act, which was last comprehensively reauthorized in 2008.

Decisions over the details for the Trump proposed infrastructure bill, including how to finance it, will probably come after Elaine Chao makes her way through the confirmation process. Trump’s pick for Transportation secretary is unlikely to face much resistance in the Senate.

Multiple Senate Committees will begin public vetting and hearings of dozens of Trump Administration political appointees, from Secretaries, deputies and administrators, all needing Senate confirmation. Hearings have already begun to be scheduled for next week. 

But what will happen next? Stay Tuned. The Office of Federal Relations will continue to update.

CR Passes, Happy Holidays!

Posted on

In a late Friday night vote, the Senate passed the Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government through April 28, 2017 by a vote of 62-34. The House passed the measure earlier in the week, and with the Senate’s passage, a government shutdown has been averted.

There was much uncertainty thrown into the CR at the last minute with Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) trying to halt the measure due to the lack of a full year’s extension of retired coal miners’ health benefits. Manchin was threatening to filibuster or convince 40 Senate Democrats to vote against cloture on the measure. That effort failed and the Senate passed cloture on Thursday. That vote added a new wrinkle in that cloture guarantees 30 hours of debate on legislation, and if the Senate Democrats were to exhaust the full 30 hours, then the Senate vote would not occur until 1 am on Saturday, December 10th, a full hour after the CR had expired.

Rather than risk that scenario, the Senate  ended debate earlier, proceeded with, and passed the measure at 11 pm on Friday. It should be noted that the House recessed Thursday, and most House Members were back in the district, with little intention of returning, on Friday.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign the CR. 

The stopgap measure, which took immediate effect, extends current funding levels for most federal agencies and abides by an annual cap on discretionary spending of $1.07 trillion for FY2017. It also provides extra money for military operations, flood relief, medical research and the effort to repair the lead-contaminated water system of Flint, MI.

With that, the House and Senate are expected to recess Sine Die in the coming week. They will convene in the 115th Congress.

Foxx to be Chair of House Education and Workforce Cmte, Trump’s Ed Landing Team

Posted on

With approval of the full Republican conference, the House Republican Steering Committee has selected Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) as the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the 115th Congress.  She grew up in Appalachia without power and running water and began working as a weaver at age 12 to help support her family. These experiences convinced her that it’s an individual’s hard work, and not federal programs, that lead to success.

As the 73-year-old GOP lawmaker and former community college president, Foxx has been a staunch critic of the Obama Administation’s Department of Education efforts. 

She is a strong supporter of school choice and supports the president-elect’s $20 billion school choice plan emphasizing vouchers. Specifically, she wants to examine the billions doled out annually under Title 1 — a Great Society program that boosts funding to schools catering to poor students. The money is now considered a possible funding source for Trump’s school choice plan. Other items on her agenda: 

  • reexamine the role of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which conservatives revile for its focus on issues such as campus sexual assault and bathroom access for transgender students;

  • reverse a Democratic Congress’ decision to have the Education Department, not banks, issue student loans; and 

  • reverse regulations targeting for-profit colleges.

—

Mike Pence’s former general counsel has joined the landing team at the Education Department. Attorney Thomas Wheeler was named to the team Thursday. He served as general counsel for Pence during his time as Indiana governor, according to a 2013 press release from the Republican National Lawyers Association that announced him as a member of its board of governors. Wheeler also has extensive experience representing schools on legal issues, including civil rights-related cases, according to the web site for his law firm in Indianapolis, Frost Brown Todd, LLC.

New Member Orientation and the Perils of Lame Duck

Posted on

After a bruising election, House and Senate are both back in session today to figure out how (and what) to move forward in the Lame Duck. The overall priority will be to find a way to fund the government into next year. Also on the agenda are a series of bills including the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), 21st Century Cures – a major funding measure for health care research, as well as the Water Resources Development bill. 

Congress will be in session for a week before recessing for the Thanksgiving break. New Members in both the House and Senate will be in town for orientation. Also up this week are party leadership elections in both the House and Senate. While Speaker Ryan appeared endangered prior to the election, the Republican leadership in the Senate and House is expected to be the same. The more interesting party to watch in leadership elections this week might be the Democrats in the House. They badly underperformed on Election Day, and allies of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, have been busy trying to limit unrest over her continuing tenure. While, Pelosi is expected to remain leader, she needs to address rank-and-file frustration with life in the minority.

Show Me the Money
How will Congress approach funding? A stopgap through next spring has long been advocated by House conservatives. Prior to the election, an omnibus or series of smaller “minibus” packages was expected. Now with the House, Senate, and Administration all soon to be in Republican control, Republicans seem more inclined to pass a CR into the Spring of 2017 or even a full year CR, potentially with fully funding select FY 2017 measures already through the Appropriations Committee, than prior to the election. Exactly which measures that could be included for full year funding are still being discussed. It seems that House Republican leaders are leaning toward a CR, while Senate leaders appear to prefer a spending deal to wind up the FY 2017 this year.

Regardless, Congress still has to deal with the current President, and what he will sign, in the near term.
A CR until the spring would allow the new Administration to put its own stamp on spending within the first 100 days. That said, it will put another “must do” on the new Trump Agenda, which already has to shape FY 2018 spending as well as face an early (and highly unpopular with conservatives) vote on raising the debt limit, and will further complicate the Trump agenda of what to do with Obamacare, tax reform, immigration reform, infrastructure measure and more. 

That situation was complicated late last week by the $11.6 billion war supplemental the Obama Administration sent to Congress. It includes $5.8 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funding for the Pentagon and another $5.8 billion in OCO money for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. That funding could go a long way to bridging the $18 billion defense funding gap between House leaders and the White House.

Other Items

The NDAA, which is Congress’s annual need-to-pass defense fiscal policy bill, is currently being held up over a dispute over an endangered bird and LGTB rights is holding up the legislation. The White House has threatened to veto the annual bill if, among many other objections, it includes language that would allow federal contractors to discriminate against employees based on their sexual orientation. It is not clear yet if lawmakers will reach a compromise over the legislation before the end of the year.

Congressman Upton’s priority, 21st Century Cures, has also long been a possibility for the Lame Duck, but now its fate this Congress seems unclear.

The House and Senate passed widely different versions of WRDA in September, with the upper chamber’s bill being much broader. And while the House measure would authorize spending to help Flint, Mich. tackle its lead contamination crisis, the Senate’s bill would appropriate actual funding.