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News and updates

News and updates

What We’re Reading, October 2-6

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Here’s a selection of articles we’re reading this week.

Will the 8th go blue? – The recent retirement announcement by seven-term U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert opens Washington’s first truly competitive congressional race since 2010. The 67-year-old Reichert was hardly the most obvious contender to step aside nationwide, especially after a 20-point win in 2016. But with Republican retirements mounting nationwide, Reichert becomes the latest in a series of races putting the GOP on the defensive. The question is: Can Democrats actually take advantage of the opportunity? Read more from Crosscut.

Tax cuts cost how much? – How to pay for policy proposals lawmakers want to enact is an age-old question in Congress that has killed or stalled countless ideas. That question is now a dark cloud hanging over Republicans as they seek to overhaul the tax code. Read more on Roll Call.

Data Retrival Tool: It’s baaaaack! – The IRS and the Department of Education on Sunday restored the data retrieval tool that allows students to automatically import their family income data into their applications for federal student aid. The IRS abruptly suspended the tool in March, citing suspicious activity and potential vulnerability of taxpayer information.  Read more from Inside Higher Education.

Supreme Court Watch – On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a major new case about partisan gerrymandering. The case began just days after the Nov. 8 election, when a federal court struck down a Republican-drawn legislative map in Wisconsin for being too partisan. Because of special rules for some voting rights cases, the Supreme Court is required to hear the case. Read the analysis from the Washington Post.

Gerrymandering, it’s a science –  About as many Democrats live in Wisconsin as Republicans do. But you wouldn’t know it from the Wisconsin State Assembly, where Republicans hold 65 percent of the seats, a bigger majority than Republican legislators enjoy in conservative states like Texas and Kentucky. The United States Supreme Court is trying to understand how that happened. On Tuesday, the justices heard oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford, reviewing a three-judge panel’s determination that Wisconsin’s Republican-drawn district map is so flagrantly gerrymandered that it denies Wisconsinites their full right to vote. Read more from the New York Times.

 

House Passes Budget

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House Republicans passed budget legislation today that sets the stage for an ambitious tax bill that they plan to pass. The House measure includes language that would allow the Senator to pass a tax measure without invoking cloture. The Senate is proceeding on a separate track toward passing its own budget, which will have to be reconciled with the House version in the coming weeks.

The Senate Budget Committee was poised to finish work Thursday on a resolution that is more focused on the tax legislation than the House version.

New Deputy Secretary at HHS

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Eric Hargan was officially confirmed by the Senate on a 57-38 vote yesterday afternoon.

Hargan’s confirmation comes at a crucial time for HHS, which has relied on career staffer Don Wright to lead the agency since Tom Price resigned as secretary on Friday. Secretary Price’s recent exit helped accelerate the consideration of HHS nominees. Hargan will likely serve as acting secretary until Price’s replacement is confirmed. No word on who will take that position.

Hargan has served in several roles at  HHS before between 2003 and 2007, including Acting Deputy Secretary, before leaving government work to serve as a lawyer in Chicago. Hargan also served on the Trump transition team for HHS.

 

Budget? Budget?

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The Senate Budget Committee will take its first steps on a framework for federal spending and tax cuts in FY 2018 this week.

The Senate Budget Committee released its FY 2018 draft resolution on Friday that would establish the path for consideration of revenue, spending, and other fiscal legislation.

Senate Committee will debate overall limits on discretionary spending for the coming fiscal year and 10-year projections, as well as mark up the resolution on Wednesday and Thursday. If adopted, it could become an enforcement tool — through points of order — during the annual appropriations process. House and Senate majority were attempting to use   the FY 2018 budget as a means to further repeal the ACA — the House included language to instruct committees to do so — but all language instructing the Senate Committees to do similar has been stripped. Rather, the Senate focuses on tax reform, signaling a pivot in the Majority’s priorities.

The focal point of the legislation is the draft language instructing the Senate Finance and the House Ways and Means committees to increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. That number gives the tax-writing panels the opportunity to alter the tax code.

The whole Senate will begin its annual Budget consideration process, known as “vote-a-rama,” the week of October 16th.

Meanwhile, the full House plans to vote Thursday on its own budget resolution, which also would advance what would be the most sweeping tax overhaul in more than three decades. That plan would require Congress to cut at least $203 billion from entitlement programs over 10 years. House leadership has suggested the Senate version is more likely to prevail in a final compromise and the language on entitlements is likely to be stripped on the House floor.

There are other notable differences between the House and Senate budgets. For instance, the House budget includes instructions for a tax plan that does not increase the deficit, but the Senate budget would let tax writers add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade. The Senate provides $549 billion for defense spending and $516 billion for nondefense discretionary programs, which are levels in line the the Budget Control Act caps. The House measure provides $621.5 billion for defense programs and $511 billion for nondefense discretionary programs. Since the House provides levels significantly beyond the BCA caps, enacting such a measure would take an act of legislation (and a signature by the President), which is beyond the scope of a typical Congressional budget, a document that only binds Congress and is not signed by the President.

Eventually, the two chambers would have to agree on a budget for Congressional Republicans to use reconciliation.