Congress, and by extension K Street, has a busy week ahead as Democratic leaders try to shake a do-nothing tag by passing a series of bills before the month-long August recess.
A weekend breakthrough on a House energy bill appears to have alleviated concerns among enough oil patch Democrats to ensure passage, though it looked unlikely yesterday that an increase in fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles and trucks, a key priority for environmental groups, would be included.
Democrats also were looking to expand children’s health insurance, reverse a Supreme Court decision that imposes a statute of limitations on wage discrimination cases, and add $16 billion over the next decade to federal coffers, principally through new taxes on oil and gas companies.
After weeks of delay, Democrats were poised to adopt a lobbying reform bill that would, for the first time, require public disclosure of campaign contributions that lobbyists bundle for candidates. The measure is likely to attract significant bipartisan support, but would be a crowning achievement for the young majority with freshman members who promised to clean up Washington in response to Jack Abramoff and other congressional scandals.
Some tweaks have been made to the measure in the weeks since the House and Senate passed separate versions. Under the agreement, the House and Senate would pass identical bills, thereby relieving the necessity of a congressional conference, which Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) has thwarted.
The new bill requires semi-annual rather than quarterly reports. Candidates for office would be responsible for filing the information, and would have to do so only for lobbyists who raised at least $15,000 in a period rather than $5,000, which had been the previous floor.
Lobbyists still are required to include their individual donations on lobbying filing forms.
The policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, Meredith McGehee, said her preference would be for quarterly filing and the lower dollar limit. She said she hopes the bundling provision someday is expanded to cover fundraisers beyond registered lobbyists.
But McGehee and other reform advocates said their mantra is the creation of a new database that is “sortable, searchable and downloadable.” If each of those conditions were met, it would represent a big improvement to existing lobbying-campaign finance rules, reformers say.
“This was one of the biggest planks the Democratic caucus ran on to take back the House and Senate,” Craig Holman, who heads Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, said, adding that any significant backpedaling would have hurt the party.
There was significant opposition, however, from committee “bulls” and rank-and-file veterans with close connections to K Street against bundling reforms, Holman said. He credited House and Senate leaders and freshman Democrats for prevailing against the opposition.
An energy bill authored by Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the House Natural Resources Committee chairman, also has divided House Democrats, but a last-minute compromise seems to have assuaged concerns sufficiently to move the measure.
The energy industry, supported by members from energy producing states, had fought provisions that would impose stiff penalties and fines on oil and gas drillers for underpayment of lease royalties, reverse a provision designed to make it easier to build transmission lines, and eliminate a program to direct money to federal offices to speed the processing of drilling permit applications.
The compromise reverses course on the most troublesome components, one oil refiner lobbyist said. While some Blue Dogs are likely to still vote no on the package, more seem likely to vote yes, the source said.
“The effect of this change is to turn what was a fatal bill into something that is merely bad,” the lobbyist quipped.
Oil and gas companies instead may focus on a $16 billion tax package that would repeal a manufacturing tax break that such firms have claimed since 2005 energy legislation. That would raise $11.7 billion.
But the industry is more focused on a tax change relating to foreign income that would raise just less than $4 billion.
A confederation of environmental groups, enjoying newfound influence on Capitol Hill, held a “lobby day” last week in support of both higher fuel-efficiency standards and a renewable portfolio standard that would increase the amount of electricity that comes from sources such as wind and solar power.
While the groups focused on corporate average fuel economy and renewable energy provisions, the assistant director of government relations for the Audubon Society, Justin Tatham, said the underlying bill has a number of useful provisions in it as well, including higher energy efficiency standards and an extension of production tax credits for renewable energy.
“For years and years and years, energy policy has focused on big tax breaks for the oil and gas industry or the coal industry, but as fears grow over global warming this Congress is taking a different approach,” Tatham said.
It still isn’t clear, though, whether the Democratic-controlled House would pass an amendment requiring utilities get 20 percent of their power from renewable energy sources would pass.
The National Association of Manufacturers, in a letter to Capitol Hill yesterday, described itself as “deeply concerned” the renewable mandate would raise energy costs. Supporters cite studies that found consumers would not see their power bills raise appreciably under the bill.
The auto industry continued to lobby against a measure pushed by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) that would raise corporate average fuel economy standards “too far, too fast,” according to a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Charles Territo.
The director of global warming program for the Sierra Club, Dan Becker, said Markey’s measure would cut oil demand and carbon dioxide emissions at twice the rate as a rival bill pushed by Reps. Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.).
It was unclear whether Democratic leaders have time to settle the considerable disagreements within the caucus on the issue.
House Democrats also were poised to pass a measure that would reverse the Supreme Court decision this spring that imposed a statute of limitations on wage discrimination cases.
Last month, House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) called the decision last month a “painful step backward for civil rights in this country.”
But business groups lobbied against the bill. In a letter sent last week, the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 an “ill-considered visceral legislative reaction to an extremely important issue with potentially far-reaching ramifications for millions of American employers and their employees and retirees.”
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