THE DAILY WHIP: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2015

Daily Leader

For Immediate Release:

2015-03-18T00:00:00

Contact Info:

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House Meets At:	First Vote Predicted:	Last Vote Predicted:
10:00 a.m.: Morning Hour 12:00 p.m.: Legislative Business Fifteen “One Minutes”	1:30 – 2:00 p.m..	2:00 – 2:30 p.m.

H.R. 1030 – Secret Science Reform Act of 2015 (Rep. Smith (TX) – Science, Space, and Technology) (One Hour of Debate). This bill would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from proposing, finalizing or disseminating any rule, regulation or other "covered action" unless all scientific and technical information relied upon to support that decision is made available to the public in a manner where the research can be independently analyzed and substantially reproduced. While this appears to be a reform that provides greater public transparency in agency rulemaking, these new requirements would force the EPA to ignore any scientific information related to personal health and other confidential data legally protected from disclosure – jeopardizing the agency’s ability to use best-available scientific data and weakening its scientific integrity. Identical legislation passed the House last November. That vote can be found here.

Further, by requiring EPA to maintain detailed descriptions of all materials, data, codes and models used to create rules, as well as instructions on how to access and use them, the agency would be forced to waste limited funds working through burdensome reporting requirements instead of important public health protections.

In the Statement of Administration Policy, the President's senior advisors stated that they would recommend a veto of the bill.

The Rule, which was adopted yesterday, makes in order 2 amendments, debatable for 10 minutes, equally divided between the offeror and an opponent. The amendments are:

Edwards Amendment. Authorizes $250 million for each of fiscal years 2016 through 2019 to EPA to conduct the activities required by the underlying bill.
Kennedy/McGovern/Clark Amendment. Allows the EPA to use all peer-reviewed scientific publications in agency rulemaking.

Bill Text for H.R. 1030:
PDF Version

Background for H.R. 1030:
House Report (HTML Version)
House Report (PDF Version)

TOMORROW’S OUTLOOK
The GOP Leadership has announced the following schedule for Thursday, March 19: The House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for legislative business. The House is expected to consider S.J.Res. 8– Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the National Labor Relations Board relating to representation case procedures (Sen. Alexander – Education and the Workforce) (Subject to a Rule). The House is also expected to begin consideration of H.Res. 132 – Providing for the expenses of certain committees of the House of Representatives in the One Hundred Fourteenth Congress (Rep. Miller (MI) – House Administration) (Subject to a Rule).

The Daily Quote
“The majority-Republican House has produced a budget blueprint that serves no particular purpose except to demonstrate the inadequacy of pure, no-tax-increases GOP policy doctrine. To be sure, the document calls for an essentially balanced budget by 2025... It achieves this, however, entirely by cutting scheduled spending by $5.5 trillion, the largest chunk of which would be a $2 trillion 10-year savings from repealing the Affordable Care Act — which is neither sensible nor politically feasible. Another $900 billion would come from converting Medicaid to a block grant program administered by the states, which also isn’t going to happen under a Democratic president, if ever. Meanwhile, the House GOP would reduce the discretionary budget by $372 billion over the next decade, which results from tightening all non-defense accounts by $759 billion beyond the existing unsustainable sequestration plan and shifting about half those savings to the defense budget. Given the enormous cuts this would imply to the courts, parks, FBI, water projects and a host of other useful and — even in red states — popular programs, the GOP approach wouldn’t be desirable even if it were politically possible. In fact, Republicans themselves are deeply divided over how to prevent further cuts to defense spending under the sequester law, to the point where the budget plan’s GOP authors resorted to a gimmick — tucking in $36 billion of ‘emergency’ defense spending for fiscal 2016… to evade the impact of the sequester.” - Washington Post Editorial Board, 3/17/2015

The Daily Quote

“The majority-Republican House has produced a budget blueprint that serves no particular purpose except to demonstrate the inadequacy of pure, no-tax-increases GOP policy doctrine. To be sure, the document calls for an essentially balanced budget by 2025... It achieves this, however, entirely by cutting scheduled spending by $5.5 trillion, the largest chunk of which would be a $2 trillion 10-year savings from repealing the Affordable Care Act — which is neither sensible nor politically feasible. Another $900 billion would come from converting Medicaid to a block grant program administered by the states, which also isn’t going to happen under a Democratic president, if ever. Meanwhile, the House GOP would reduce the discretionary budget by $372 billion over the next decade, which results from tightening all non-defense accounts by $759 billion beyond the existing unsustainable sequestration plan and shifting about half those savings to the defense budget. Given the enormous cuts this would imply to the courts, parks, FBI, water projects and a host of other useful and — even in red states — popular programs, the GOP approach wouldn’t be desirable even if it were politically possible. In fact, Republicans themselves are deeply divided over how to prevent further cuts to defense spending under the sequester law, to the point where the budget plan’s GOP authors resorted to a gimmick — tucking in $36 billion of ‘emergency’ defense spending for fiscal 2016… to evade the impact of the sequester.”

- Washington Post Editorial Board, 3/17/2015