Legislative Debate

The House is expected to begin today's session at 10 a.m., but will recess at 12:30 p.m. for a prayer service. Discussion of a resolution expressing the sense of the House about the weekend shooting in Tucson, Ariz., is also expected.

The House today put forward a new version of that resolution, which was updated to note that retired Army Col. Bill Badger was also wounded in the shooting.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Tuesday morning that fraud against taxpayers and patent reform will be among his top priorities in the committee this year. In remarks today in Washington, Leahy said he would hold a hearing on Jan. 26 to discuss fraud, and said the hearing would specifically address efforts by the Department of Justice to recover billions of dollars in tax revenue. One goal of the hearing, he said, is to ensure there are enough resources to maintain these recovery efforts.

Patent reform is another top issue, and Leahy said new House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) agrees that patent reform is needed. Leahy said he would reintroduce a Patent Reform Act this year, and that work done on this issue in the past several years would likely inform the contents of a bill this year.

Ending the health insurance industry's exemption from antitrust law is another issue Leahy said he wants to tackle this year. The Vermont Democrat said there is "no place" in U.S. law for this exemption. He also said he wants to improve the U.S. visa system for seasonal agricultural workers (the so-called H-2A program) and the EB-5 visa program, which allows investors to travel to the U.S. and invest in U.S. companies.

Elsewhere, Leahy said he wants to update electronic privacy laws to ensure enforcement and privacy concerns are balanced in light of new technological developments, and pass legislation requiring a study on the effectiveness of the Freedom of Information Act. He also reiterated his call for bipartisan efforts to ensure the government fills the many outstanding judicial vacancies that he said are slowing down the judicial process.

Updated at 3:20 p.m.

Sen. John Kerry advised Republicans not to cut the size of government too much, or risk impeding U.S. productivity.

House Republicans have released a new report indicating they will continue to hammer away at last year's healthcare law by arguing it imposes hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes in order to pay for health programs and that the combination of taxes and new health mandates on companies will cripple U.S. job growth.

Republicans later this month are expected to pass H.R. 2, which would repeal the healthcare law, and H.R. 9, which instructs four key committees to come up with new healthcare proposals. A House report that accompanies H.R. 9 offers more detailed guidance for how the Committees on Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, and Ways and Means should proceed.

The report's top mission for committees is to promote job creation. It cites a Heritage Foundation finding that the current healthcare law will increase taxes by $503 billion by 2019, which many Republicans believe will hurt U.S. job growth. The report also notes an estimate from the National Federation of Independent Business that the employer mandate in the healthcare law could destroy as many as 1 million jobs, most at small companies.

Late last week, Republicans welcomed a related finding from the Congressional Budget Office that the law will increase taxes by $770 billion by 2021 and spend $540 billion in that same period on healthcare programs. While Democrats argue these numbers result in a $230 billion surplus for the bill, Republicans say this surplus is achieved by raising taxes and spending money on a program that business says will stunt job growth, which is why Republicans have taken to calling last year's law the "job-killing healthcare law."

"Even if one accepts the flawed premise of the smoke-and-mirrors the Democrats used to claim their massive government takeover of health care would reduce the deficit, there is no denying that repealing this law will cut spending and prevent tax hikes," House Budget Committee spokesman Conor Sweeney said in an e-mail.

The House report also asks committees to focus on language that lowers the cost of healthcare. Here again, Republicans find the healthcare law lacking, and the report cites a CBO estimate that premiums on individual plans will rise 10 to 13 percent under the law.

The report also asks committees to focus on measures that allow people to keep their current healthcare plans. It says the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expects 1.2 million seniors to leave Medicare Advantage or the Medicare drug plan and that 7.4 million seniors will lose or be denied access to Medicare Advantage under current law.

The report asks committees to focus on several other priorities, including expanding access to insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, medical tort reform, adding incentives to encourage personal responsibility for coverage, prohibit taxpayer funded abortions and ensuring that measures do not "accelerate the insolvency of entitlement programs."

Rep. Corrine Brown said citing the Constitution in each bill, under a new GOP rule, comes with a price tag.

A House Foreign Affairs hearing originally scheduled for this Wednesday has been postponed in light of the shooting Saturday of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

The hearing was titled, "The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action." Foreign Affairs was the only House committee that had a hearing scheduled for this week, and the hearing is now expected to take place sometime later this month. Below is a list of witnesses who were scheduled to attend:

Brett Schaefer, Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom

Robert Appleton, former chairman of the United Nations's Procurement Task Force

Claudia Rosett, journalist in residence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) plans to introduce legislation later this month that would repeal controversial language in last year's healthcare law requiring companies to report goods and services transactions valued over $600 to the IRS. In a statement last week, Johanns said he would introduce his bill on Jan. 25, the first day Senate bills can be introduced in the new Congress.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said last week that he would co-sponsor the legislation.

Congress was close to repealing the language last year, but efforts stalled in the Senate when Democrats proposed eliminating the language without any way of making up the roughly $19 billion in revenue that would be lost to the government through the repeal. A Republican version offered by Johanns that included a "pay-for" actually received more votes in the Senate, but neither his version nor one offered by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) received enough votes.

However, there is clear bipartisan support in both the House and Senate for repealing the so-called "1099 language," named for the 1099 form that businesses would have to file with the IRS. In the vote last November, senators were asked to suspend Senate rules in order to attach repeal language to a food safety bill, a move that required support from two-thirds of the Senate. Neither bill received two-thirds of the vote, but the Johanns language won 61 votes, as all 40 Republicans and 21 Democrats supported it.

President Obama also said last year that he supports repeal of the language, which is due to take effect in 2012.

In the House, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) introduced 1099 repeal language as H.R. 144.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) released a revised schedule for the coming week, which includes consideration of a resolution related to the Arizona shooting over the weekend. Republicans had originally planned on taking up legislation repealing the healthcare law this week, but those plans are now postponed.

The full schedule as released by Cantor is below:

MONDAY, JAN. 10

On Monday, the House is not in session.

TUESDAY, JAN. 11

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 2:00 p.m. in pro forma session. No votes are expected.

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 12

On Wednesday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. No votes are expected.

H.Res. __ - Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives with respect to the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona (Subject to a Unanimous Consent Agreement)

THURSDAY, JAN. 13

On Thursday, the House is not in session.

FRIDAY, JAN. 14

On Friday, the House is not in session.

The Congressional Budget Office this afternoon released more details on the budgetary effects of repealing the healthcare law. In his director's blog, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said the office believes repealing the law would reduce revenues by $770 billion through 2021 and reduce spending by $540 billion in that same time period.

The result is the same $230 billion deficit that CBO estimated Thursday. But identifying the $540 billion in reduced spending might make it easier for Republicans to argue that repealing the law is an attempt to cut government spending and reduce the tax burden. Republicans have generally argued that the healthcare law means more spending and higher taxes to pay for that spending.

Elmendorf's full blog posting from today is below:

Additional Information on CBO’s Preliminary Analysis of H.R. 2

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) have not yet developed a detailed estimate of the budgetary impact of H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, which would repeal the major health care legislation enacted in March 2010. Yesterday, we released a preliminary analysis of that legislation indicating that, over the 2012-2021 period, the effect of enacting H.R. 2 on the federal budget as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in deficits in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections for that period.

We have been asked to provide the revenue and direct spending components of that total. Extrapolating the estimated budgetary effects of the original health care legislation and accounting for the effects of subsequent legislation, CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections.

Four Democrats ended up voting for the healthcare rule, which calls for a vote to repeal the healthcare law next Wednesday. Reps. Dan Boren (Okla.), Larry Kissell (N.C.), Mike McIntyre (N.C.), and Mike Ross (Ark.) supported the rule. It was approved by a 236-181 vote.

Two House members voted "present": Reps. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.). Both of those were members who were not sworn in Jan. 5, an oversight Republicans corrected earlier today by passing H.R. 26.

Twenty-seven Democrats voted in favor of that resolution to fix the swearing in problem: Jason Altmire (Pa.), John Barrow (Ga.), Boren, Robert Brady (Pa.), Dennis Cardoza (Calif.), Kathy Castor (Fla.), Ben Chandler (Ky.), Jim Costa (Calif.), Jerry Costello (Ill.), Mark Critz (Pa.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Chaka Fattah (Pa.), Al Green (Texas), Jim Himes (Conn.), Tim Holden (Pa.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (Texas), Daniel Lipinski (Ill.), Mike Michaud (Maine), Chris Murphy (Conn.), Collin Peterson (Minn.), Jared Polis (Colo.), Ross, Steve Rothman (N.J.), Allyson Schwartz (Pa.), Heath Shuler (N.C.) and Mel Watt (N.C.).

Sessions and Fitzpatrick also voted "present" when this resolution was taken up.