First Branch Forecast for August 29, 2022: Letter of Note

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This week, recess continues.

Last week saw two big announcements from the White House: (1) the partial student loan forgiveness program, which incidentally could help 2,000 staffers (or more!) on the hill, and (2) making federally-funded research free and publicly available, which will improve the availability of information for policymaking deliberations.

You didn’t ask us, but congressional student loan repayment assistance should be centrally administered, available to all regardless of the view of a particular member, and not subject to clawback if a staffer moves on.

Pay your interns. On the topic of centrally administered programs — did you like that segue? — check this opinion piece from my colleague Taylor Swift and Pay Our Intern’s Habiba Mohamed that calls for the creation of a House Intern Resource Office.

Mark your calendars. The Library of Congress announced its next virtual public forum on Congress.gov will be held this September 21 from 1:30 to 4:30 PM. To attend you must RSVP online. The Library also has an online feedback form for those who wish to submit comments individually. See you there.

They’re running. Reps. Jamie Raskin, Gerry Connolly, and Steven Lynch have all announced they’re running to succeed Rep. Carolyn Maloney as top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. This committee, which grew out of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, and itself was created from 11 separate House committees that oversaw government spending, is rooted in House committee efforts to oversee federal spending that go back at least to 1814.

Whistleblower powers. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced legislation last week, the Congress Leads by Example Act of 2022 (H.R. 8743), to grant Legislative branch employees greater whistleblower and other antidiscrimination protections for occupational safety and health complaints. The bill would put into effect recommendations from the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights to:

Bring the Legislative branch in line with the legal requirements of private sector employers and the Executive branch;
Provide subpoena authority to OCWR to conduct inspections and investigations into OSHA violations;
Prohibit Legislative branch offices from making adverse employment decisions on the basis of an employee’s wage garnishment or involvement in bankruptcy proceedings; and
Bolster the CAA’s recordkeeping requirements.

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First Branch Forecast for August 1, 2022: Reconciliation

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This week. The House floor is closed until Sept.13 (with committee work starting on Sept. 6); the Senate is in for its last scheduled week until Sept. 6. The Senate will stick around until it passes the “Inflation Reduction Act,” AKA mini-reconciliation, timing depending on Democratic Members not testing positive for COVID; and the House is expected to return to pass that bill during August recess.

In Senate committee news this week: the Judiciary Cmte will hold a hearing on antitrust remedies (but Sen. Schumer still hasn’t scheduled antitrust bills for a floor vote). HSGAC will hold a markup of a few good-government bills. And Senate Rules Cmte will hold a hearing on the Electoral Count Act, following up on the bipartisan proposal to reform the ECA. We note some Members are voicing dissatisfaction with the proposal — as Rep. Raskin told Politico, the effort is “fine and necessary, but not remotely sufficient to meet the magnitude of the threat against democracy now.” (The Jan. 6 panel reportedly plans to release its own slate of recommendations for stopping the stealing of elections this fall, a time when there is the least amount of legislative runway.)

Last week, Senate Democrats published their FY 2023 approps bills. We’ve added the bill text, explanatory statements, and summaries to our tracker (toggle to the Senate tab) and will be working through the bills in the weeks to come. It seems obvious to us that there won’t be a markup process in the Senate, just like last year, and everything will get worked out — if anything gets worked out — behind the scenes. Sen. Leahy says he hopes the release of draft bills encourages good-faith Republican negotiation and emphasized the high stakes of repeating last year’s delays. Senate Republicans published a list of demands for items they consider “non-starters” and threatened a long term CR. It’s clear we’re heading for a short term CR, probably until after the heat of the election. We likely will hear a lot of carping about budget reconciliation as well.

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First Branch Forecast for July 25, 2022: Après moi, le déluge

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This week. In the House, it’s the last week before summer recess. It’s also the Senate’s penultimate week before recess — though we’re seeing calls for both chambers to stay in session. The House will consider a huge semiconductor R&D bill and perhaps public safety legislation concerning firearms. Senate Democratic Appropriators may publish their approps bills. Expect scores of UC and suspension bills.

In committee this week, House Admin will hold two relevant hearings: one on foreign and domestic sources of disinformation and another on the so-called independent state legislature theory. On Thursday, the ModCom will hold a hearing on innovative approaches to fixing Congress. There are also a bunch of red meat hearings.

Last week. The House passed the minibus package of six appropriations bills, but Majority Leader Hoyer told BGov it’s unlikely the other three (CJS, Labor-HHS-Education, and State and Foreign Operations) originally slated to go before recess will be brought to a vote, and of course there’s three more not yet on the docket. Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress, but how we got here highlights problems with how the contempt process works. And ICYMI the ModCom favorably reported 29 new recommendations. More on contempt and ModCom below.

Building digital capacity in Congress. The recently-launched House Digital Service pilot presents an excellent opportunity to streamline and institutionalize congressional tech improvements. The Lincoln Network has a new report out with recommendations for strengthening the HDS. The authors advocate securing strong funding for the program; ensuring oversight over HDS; creating pathways for interacting with civil society; broadening HDS’s mandate; and more.

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First Branch Forecast for June 27, 2022: Apropos everything

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What to expect from Congress this week? The House is holding a committee work week before joining the Senate, which is already out on recess. They will return the week of July 11th. We are writing this newsletter before 5pm on Friday, so you’ll have to check the House committee calendar for upcoming hearings, but we know the upcoming week is filled with Approps bills markups. By the end of the week, the appropriations committee process will be complete on the House side — phew — at least until there’s an agreement on the top line numbers, and we can expect the bills to move on the floor soon. The Senate approps timeline is more difficult to divine, but given that the deadlines for public witness testimony wrap up July 1, we could start seeing subcommittee markup notices in July. Or Senate Dems will simply release their draft bills prior to summer recess while leaders negotiate over the top line numbers. Stay tuned.

We’re not going to address the big news out of the Supreme Court on abortion and guns, or what’s happening with the NDAA, or the gun control law, the January 6th stuff, and most of the items that came out of the appropriations process. It’s simply too much for us to manage, but you can expect some of these items — to the extent they fit within this newsletter’s mission — coming up in the upcoming weeks.

Last week saw several big wins for strengthening the Leg branch. On Tuesday, a host of excellent congressional data modernization improvements were announced at the quarterly meeting of the entity formerly known as the Bulk Data Task Force; significant improvements in funding and operations for the Legislative branch were favorably reported by the full House Appropriations committee; and a significant increase in the wage available to interns was promulgated by the House Admin Committee. The House Defense Approps bill contains language to sunset the two AUMFs from 2001 and 2002 that have been abused ever since. We’ve got more below, along with summaries of two hearings that helped define what still needs to be done to modernize Congress: a House ModCom hearing on Congress and Technology and the Senate’s Leg Branch Approps hearing on the GAO & GPO.

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