THE DAILY WHIP: TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2015

Daily Leader

For Immediate Release:

2015-01-06T00:00:00

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House Meets At:	First Vote Predicted:	Last Vote Predicted:
12:00 p.m. to Convene the 114^th Congress	12:00 p.m.	5:00 – 6:00 p.m.

***Members are advised that there will be a recorded Quorum Call vote at approximately 12:05 p.m. following the prayer and Pledge of Allegiance. Following that vote, the Election of the Speaker of the House will take place. This election is held by manual roll call vote, with each Member called individually, in alphabetical order, by the Clerk. Following that vote, the Oath of Office will be administered to the Members and Delegates.***

H.Res. 5 – A resolution providing for the House Rules of the 114th Congress (Privileged Resolution – Rep. McCarthy – Rules) (One Hour of Debate). The Rules for the 114^th Congress will be brought up as a privileged resolution with no amendments permitted. The Republican Rules package contains 5 separate sections. Section 1 adopts the Rules of the 113^th Congress with the amendments listed in sections two through four, including: eliminating provisions contained in the Affordable Care Act‎ that ensure the solvency of the Medicare program in the event that spending exceeds targets established in the law, allowing the House Republicans to continue their partisan lawsuit against the President, and continue politicizing a national tragedy by carrying the partisan Select Committee on Benghazi forward at a cost of $3.3 million. The Package would also diminish transparency by reducing the frequency of committee activity reports from two times per Congress to one time per Congress and it would give deposition authority to staff of the Committees on Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Science, Space, and Technology, and Ways and Means. It also restricts the ability of the Delegates and Resident Commissioner to cast votes, or preside, in the Committee of the Whole House and it continues denying current employment protections for House employees who are discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Package provides for a new rule that requires that the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation include an estimate of macroeconomic effects (“Dynamic Scoring”) in cost estimates of major legislation. This gimmick would allow Republicans to hide the cost of their fiscally irresponsible tax cuts that increase the deficit. The package also continues the enforcement of “spending reduction accounts” in Appropriations bills so that if spending cuts are adopted during the Appropriations amendment process and purported to count towards spending reduction, the money cannot be spent elsewhere during consideration of the bill. In addition, the GOP Rules Package increases the time for conference committees to meet without triggering motions to instruct from 20 calendar days and 10 legislative days to 45 calendar days and 25 legislative days.

Finally, Section 5 of the Rules Package provides for the reading of the Constitution on any legislative day through January 16, 2015. Members are advised that the reading is expected to occur in the House on Friday, January 9, 2015. Members are urged to VOTE NO on the Republican Rules Package.

Click here for text of the Republican Rules Package

Suspension (1 bill)

H.R. __– Hire More Heroes Act of 2015 (Rep. Rodney Davis – Ways and Means)

TOMORROW’S OUTLOOK
The GOP Leadership has announced the following schedule for Wednesday, January 7: The House will meet at 12:00 p.m. for legislative business. The House is expected to consider bills under suspension of the Rules.

The Daily Quote
“One of the new Republican Congress’s first legislative priorities — redefining a full-time worker under the Affordable Care Act — is gaining opposition just days before passage from a surprising group: conservatives… Writing this weekend in National Review, Yuval Levin, a conservative popular with House Republicans, said the legislation ‘seems likely to be worse than doing nothing.’ His rationale is that there are many more people who work 40 hours a week than just over 30, and that it would be easier for an employer to cut their hours to 39 a week to avoid offering them insurance than to 29. ‘Putting the cutoff for the employer mandate at 40 hours would likely put far, far more people at risk of having their hours cut than leaving it at 30 hours,’ Levin wrote. ‘That would make for a worse effect on workers and on the economy.’... ‘At a full-time definition of 40 hours per week, there are more than twice as many workers at high risk of hours reductions because they are within five hours of the full-time definition at firms that do not offer health insurance coverage,’ the [George Mason University’s Mercatus Center] study concluded. By pushing those workers onto the federally subsidized health insurance exchanges, the definition change would also increase the federal deficit by $73.7 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The White House last year promised that President Obama would veto the bill, a vow likely to be reissued this week.” - New York Times, 1/5/2015

The Daily Quote

“One of the new Republican Congress’s first legislative priorities — redefining a full-time worker under the Affordable Care Act — is gaining opposition just days before passage from a surprising group: conservatives… Writing this weekend in National Review, Yuval Levin, a conservative popular with House Republicans, said the legislation ‘seems likely to be worse than doing nothing.’ His rationale is that there are many more people who work 40 hours a week than just over 30, and that it would be easier for an employer to cut their hours to 39 a week to avoid offering them insurance than to 29. ‘Putting the cutoff for the employer mandate at 40 hours would likely put far, far more people at risk of having their hours cut than leaving it at 30 hours,’ Levin wrote. ‘That would make for a worse effect on workers and on the economy.’... ‘At a full-time definition of 40 hours per week, there are more than twice as many workers at high risk of hours reductions because they are within five hours of the full-time definition at firms that do not offer health insurance coverage,’ the [George Mason University’s Mercatus Center] study concluded. By pushing those workers onto the federally subsidized health insurance exchanges, the definition change would also increase the federal deficit by $73.7 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The White House last year promised that President Obama would veto the bill, a vow likely to be reissued this week.”

- New York Times, 1/5/2015