First Branch Forecast for April 4, 2022: 4/04 Resolution Not Found

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On the calendar. The Senate and House are in today. The week before recess is often a whirlwind of activity and this week is no exception. In the committees, we have four — four! — House Leg branch appropriations hearings, a ModCom hearing on Continuity of Congress, a House Admin STOCK Act hearing, and … the Congressional Hackathon (RSVP here).

We’re still waiting…

⟶ Where is the House unionization resolution? House Admin held a unionization hearing a few weeks back, Rep. Levin introduced a resolution, leadership pledged their support along with 3/4s of House Dems, so what’s the holdup? Are we waiting for the House Admin Committee to report a resolution? Something else?

⟶ Where are the increased funds for committees? AFAICT, new funding for committees (to address staff pay) have yet to come through. As I understand the process, even after money is appropriated (when the president signed the omnibus on March 15th), the House Admin Committee still has to report out a resolution that allocates the funds to the committees, which must then be passed by the House. (Here’s how that process works at the start of a new Congress.) House Admin hasn’t held a business meeting since mid-March, postponed the STOCK Act hearing to this week, and there’s no indication of a committee poll on this issue, so the Committee has yet to report out a resolution for consideration on the floor and thus the new funds haven’t gone to the committees for them to disburse to staff. Maybe there are other ways for a resolution to come to the floor, but I haven’t seen anything that looks like a funding resolution on Congress.gov.

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First Branch Forecast for March 28, 2022: Statler and Waldorf

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This week. The Senate is in today; the House is in tomorrow. We’ll be watching Tuesday’s much-anticipated Senate Judiciary Cmte FOIA hearing, which we hope covers strengthening the law and asking whether AG Garland’s long overdue FOIA memorandum goes far enough? (No.) The Capitol Police’s budget will be the focus of a first-of-the-season House Leg Branch Approps hearing on Wednesday; you know our views about their management and oversight problems as well as their persistent failures to implement Congress’s transparency directives. Also on Wednesday is a HSGAC business meeting to consider the PLUM Act, which is civil society approved; House floor proxy voting is also set to expire (unless it doesn’t). Expect a Senate vote on the Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to SCOTUS by next Friday; while we’re talking SCOTUS, maybe the Senate will finally move the Supreme Court Ethics Act?

House staff turnover is at a 20-year high, we learned from a LegiStorm analysis released last week that underscores all the reports of staff burnout over the past year. With the insurrection, pandemic, and Congress’s abysmal response to and ill preparation for both crises, House staff left Congress at a 55% greater rate in 2021 than in 2020. The 21% increase in funding levels for personal and committee offices in the FY 2022 approps bill should help the situation… if Members use it to restore pay levels for the more junior staff who need it most. The MRA increase (and the equivalent for House committees — have those funds been allocated yet?) still is insufficient to reach pay parity with Executive branch salaries, a key recommendation from a recent House IG report. The House’s quarterly expenditure reports will reveal whether Members address pay levels for staff.

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First Branch Forecast for March 21, 2022: Not the Supremes

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TOP LINE

This week. The Senate is in; the House is out. This week, much attention will focus on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on SCOTUS nominee Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Last week was packed with Sunshine Week programming — we’ve got recaps below.

Sunlight on secret laws. A bill requiring the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel to publicly disclose its binding legal opinions was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Duckworth and Leahy last week. Demand Progress organized a letter in support of the legislation, noting how OLC’s secrecy threatens Americans rights and Congress’s legislative and oversight roles; luminary Democratic lawyers cataloged these threats in this 2020 statement. The DOJ OLC Transparency Act would bring to light OLC promulgated secret law, mitigate Executive branch overreach, and allow for a congressional response to abuses committed under the aegis of results-oriented OLC opinions. More from us here.

FOIA is the topic of a belated memorandum issued by Attorney General Garland, who on Tuesday instructed agencies reviewing FOIA requests to adopt a presumption of openness, make proactive disclosures, remove barriers to access, and remediate backlogs. All this came after extended requests from civil society and Members of both parties. Does it go far enough? GovExec’s Courtney Bublé summarizes the memo and our own Ginger Quintero-McCall highlights the need for: commitments to “greater resources to FOIA offices, […] supporting legislative reforms including a public interest balancing test, rolling back the harmful Argus Leader Supreme Court ruling, and ensuring transparency of Office of Legal Counsel opinions.” In an essay, Quintero-McCall lays out three ideas for improving FOIA implementation.

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First Branch Forecast for March 7, 2022

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The House and Senate are both in session today. This week Congress will attempt to pass the spending omnibus — which may include emergency supplementals for Ukraine and Covid-19 — before government funding expires Friday. We’re keeping our eyes out for the final Leg branch appropriations numbers, which we hope provide for a significant topline increase and also invest in transparency and capacity within FSGG and elsewhere.

SCOTUS Ethics. A hearing on the need for a code of conduct for Supreme Court justices is scheduled for tomorrow, March 8 at 2PM. It looks like federal judges will soon-ish be required to disclose stock trades over $1,000 on an online searchable database as well as their financial disclosure forms, as S.3059 recently passed the Senate and a companion measure passed the House in December. The SCOTUS is empowered to regulate itself, as if that’s meaningful, so a code of conduct may be a useful pathway to address its, uh, failure to do so thus far.

Bulk Data Task Force. Discuss congressional data this Thursday, March 10, at 2 PM. RSVP here; find the agenda here. This long running working-group, established by Congress and composed of congressional and non-governmental stakeholders, is a great place to talk about improving congressional data inside and outside Congress, including to see a preview of new tech tools in the pipeline. Our recap of the last quarterly meeting is posted here.

In honor of Sunshine week, join a panel discussion on some of the biggest transparency and accountability issues facing our world today next Wednesday, March 16th. RSVP here. Hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, the event will feature remarks from Rep. Quigley, founder of the Congressional Transparency Caucus, and Rep. Kilmer, Chair of the House Select Committee on Modernization. Panelists include Shanna Devine of the House Office of Whistleblower Ombuds, Kate Oh of the ACLU, Danielle Brian of POGO, and Nick Hart of the Data Foundation. Alex Howard will moderate; he is co-director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency and director of the Digital Democracy Project. (I’m the other co-director. :)) More Sunshine week events are listed in the calendar section.

Ethics online. 36 organizations urged ethics and disclosure documents “made publicly available” at the Legislative Resource Center should actually be made publicly available by publishing them online and in a structured data format. The letter, sent to the House Administration Committee on Friday, noted that the LRC has been effectively closed to the public for more than two years. What do they have exactly? Here’s our spreadsheet of what’s available at the LRC and its Senate equivalent, the Senate Office of Public Records.

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First Branch Forecast for February 28, 2022

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Calendar. The Senate is back today; the House is back tonight. We’re watching Wednesday’s House Admin hearing on unionization, the State of the Union is on Tuesday, and Demand Progress is co-hosting a panel discussion on presidential emergency powers on Wednesday (RSVP here) — ICYMI, lawmakers wrote this letter calling for an AUMF before any action by the president to introduce U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or decline to remove any U.S. military personnel currently deployed inside Ukraine from unauthorized hostilities or imminent hostilities.

Congressional unionization is the focus of a House Administration Committee hearing this Wednesday. At the hearing, the committee is likely to consider H.Res.915, which would allow for House staff to unionize. This past week, the OCWR Board endorsed unionization in a letter that said: “The Board has conducted a thorough review and now unanimously endorses the regulations adopted by the 1996 Board and urges Congress to approve these regulations.” Per our spreadsheet, there are 152 co-sponsors of the measure and another 9 Democrats who issued a statement in support of unionization. The Congressional Workers Union has called for swift passage of the measure. For more, see our resources on unionization, Roll Call’s latest on why backers view the resolution as necessary, and LatinoRebels on the Dems who support unions, just (apparently) not in their own offices.

Curious about your rights under the CAA? The OCWR just launched quarterly training webinars to inform staff of their “rights and responsibilities” under the CAA, “including the protections against harassment, discrimination, intimidation, and reprisal.”

Capitol Security (1). A Republican-led coalition of Members of the House called for the House to be “reopened” to tourists in a letter to House SAA Walker last month, which seems unwise to us especially as the letter doesn’t address whether they would support a mask requirement. Meanwhile, BGov is suggesting some industry lobbyists are ramping-up fly-in days and are finding alternatives to meetings in the Capitol complex.

Capitol Security (2). Last week we covered GAO’s report on the Capitol Police, entitled “The Capitol Police Need Clearer Emergency Procedures and a Comprehensive Security Risk Assessment Process,” which should be raising alarms everywhere. With the upcoming SOTU and the arrival of a convoy of truckers protesting Covid restrictions, the National Guard authorized up to 700 members to assist local law enforcement if necessary.

Save the date: if you’re interested in public access to legislative information (and who isn’t?), the next Bulk Data Task Force meeting has been set for March 10th. The meeting is open to the public and to congressional stakeholders. RSVP here; agenda will be posted here.

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First Branch Forecast for February 22, 2022: The twos

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Happy recess. Last week the Senate managed to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government through March 11. Apparently appropriators have reached an agreement on the top line numbers for the appropriations subcommittees, but we don’t know what they are, only the reactions of a few subcommittee chairs. We’re still waiting on the Leg branch number. Get ready for the State of the Union, set for March 1st.

Go to work. Senate Republicans are stonewalling nominees by not showing up to committee proceedings. The arcane and insane Senate rules are understood to require a majority of members to be physically present for a committee to report out a matter — something we warned about as a booby-trap for Senate continuity in the event of an emergency — and the absence of a majority allows for a point of order on the floor, creating yet another veto point for the minority. (When the shoe was on the other foot, committees ignored their own rules requiring minority members to be present.) There is an irony between the mantra of many House Republicans, who say that the House is not working if it’s not in person, and Senate Republicans, who won’t show up (in person) to allow work to be done on the committees. For those with long memories, members refusing to say they were present was an issue in the House in the 19th century that led to an important Supreme Court decision with the hilarious name of United States v. Ballin. (Summary here.)

Three notable hearings took place last week: House Admin’s on the IG’s oversight of the Capitol Police’s handling of January 6th (where I testified), ModCom’s on modernizing district offices; and the Budget committee on abolishing the (superfluous and counterproductive) debt limit. We cover the House Admin and ModCom hearings below; BGOV ($) has a good summary of the Budget hearing; we point you to the majority’s explainer and report on the topic.

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First Branch Forecast for February 14, 2022

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Schedule. The Senate is in this week; the House has a committee workweek. Both are on recess next week. The committee calendar is light, but I’ll be busy. On Thursday the House Admin Committee will be holding a hearing on oversight of the January 6th Capitol Attack — the Capitol Police IG will be testifying, as will I. On Wednesday, the House Modernization Committee will hold a hearing on modernizing district offices.

FY 2022 Approps. A bipartisan, bicameral topline and framework have been reached for the omnibus spending bill and nothing beyond that fact is publicly known (except that we will, alas, see a huge increase on the defense side.) In an odd but hilarious twist of fate, one recent report suggests that earmarks may be making a budget deal harder to reach for some Senate Republicans — on that, we will see. The House-passed stopgap spending package, intended to fund the government through March 11, awaits a Senate vote. The CPCC’s latest explainer, uh, explains why a year-long continuing resolution is a bad idea. We will be closely watching to see the top line numbers for the Legislative branch, which will determine whether grossly underpaid congressional staff get some financial relief.

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First Branch Forecast for February 7, 2022: Legitimate political discourse

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This week. The House is scheduled to be in from Monday to Wednesday, with a light legislative calendar that might get heavier to address the FY 2022 appropriations bill and unionization in the House. After Wednesday, the House is currently scheduled to be out until March 1, with a committee-only work week next week. The Senate is in on Monday, with a week-long recess scheduled for next week, which also is fraught considering the expiration of the CR on the 18th. We didn’t see anything of relevance on the committee calendar.

Remember last week when we wrote about continuity of Congress and the problems that could arise in both chambers, but most acutely in the Senate? Unfortunately Sen. Luján had a stroke last week and reportedly will be out for a while, which not only is a personal tragedy but has serious implications for the ability of the majority to act on the committees in which he serves and to advance measures on the floor.

Union! Prompted by a question from journalist Pablo Manríquez, Speaker Pelosi’s office indicated she’d support allowing House staff to unionize; Senator Schumer indicated the same. As of 1pm on Sunday, we have identified 72 members of the House and 11 members of the Senate who support allowing congressional staff to unionize. We wrote a brief history of unionizing efforts in Congress and I submitted testimony on this topic last year.

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