House back: Goodbye drama, hello committees

Unless Texas secedes or is invaded by pirates
this week, Congress is set to finally downshift into a more reasonable gear
from now until Memorial Day.

The House especially, which has taken the lead in reacting to a flurry of
emergencies since even last September, is about to finally get some relief from
the new-crisis-a-week pace that the chamber has worked under almost without
fail since gathering for the start of the 111th Congress in January.

{mosads}Between rushing to pass an economic stimulus bill, working quickly on key
holdover priorities that always met the Bush veto pen or died in the Senate –
including an expansion of the children’s health insurance program and two
gender pay equity bills – or dropping everything to deal with emerging crises,
such as the $150 million in executive bonuses paid out to American
International Group, the House has been in overdrive.

The furious pace has been due to a combination of factors, some of which were
planned for, and some of which were not.

But the end result has been three-and-a-half months, almost uninterrupted,
where every week counted for something big.

A number of senior aides and even veteran lawmakers said they could not
remember a January-to-April stretch, especially with a new Congress, that moved
so quickly and with such intensity.

Luckily for them things are about to slow down into something more closely
resembling normal.

The House floor schedule for this coming week includes 22 suspension bills and
only one piece of legislation subject to significant debate: the National Water
Research and Development Initiative Act of 2009.

And, in fact, the House is not in session on Monday or Friday – something that
has occurred only a handful of times so far this year.

Leadership aides are anticipating more than a few subsequent weeks of similar
weight.

It’s not that Congress is done with its work or done putting out fires, but
the House has finally reached a point where the heaving lifting is moving from
the floor back to the legislative committees and subcommittees – where work on
major bills was done only sporadically up until now.

With the budgets passed in both chambers, negotiators are set to be named this
week and get to work on ironing out the differences between the House and the
Senate fiscal 2010 budget bills.

Aides, though, are bracing for a budget conference that could potentially go
weeks; a sign that the differences between the House and Senate budgets go far
deeper than the differences in the top line figures, and could extend far down
into basic structural parts such as reconciliation language.

{mosads}While the negotiators work, various committees will get to or continue their
work on Obama’s big ticket items that still need more time to cook.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has vowed to
get a climate change bill onto the floor before the Memorial Day recess, will
likely need all of that time to work out a policy and political strategy for
the controversial carbon tax provisions likely in the bill.

Meanwhile, the three committees with jurisdiction over health care – Education
and Labor, Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce – will likely begin building
the legislation in their various subcommittees and committees in pieces.

It’s not yet clear though, how much work will have to wait until the issue of
reconciliation – which would allow the policy that follows what’s outlined in
the budget to pass the Senate on a bare majority, as opposed to a 60-vote
supermajority – is settled for good.

The House budget provided for reconciliation for health care legislation, but
the Senate’s did not.  Neither budget provided for reconciliation for
energy policy.

While the climate change bill is set to take up most of June, aides are looking
toward July as the month that is monopolized by an eventual health care bill.

What is to dominate the House floor schedule between now and then is not
certain.

House leaders would finally like to move the delayed D.C. vote legislation, but
an agreement has not been reached between its main sponsors – including
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and District Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton
(D-D.C.) – and gun-friendly lawmakers who have been eyeing the legislation as a
means to repeal the District of Columbia’s strict gun laws.