December 1, 2003

After Months of Wrangling, Energy Bill Dies for Year

In Spending Dispute, Congress Must Return in December

Tribal Taxes

Weekly Report on the Web

 

AFTER MONTHS OF WRANGLING, ENERGY BILL DIES FOR YEAR

In an unexpected conclusion to months of debate, back-room negotiations, and “deals” being made, the big Energy Bill is dead for this year and possibly for this entire Congress. The Senate’s failure by 2 votes to break a filibuster (reported last week) appears to have been the “end of the line” for now.

Negotiations continued after the failure of the cloture vote (to end the filibuster), with the hope of making enough changes to the bill to attract at least 2 additional Senators. But every solution offered to bring on those additional votes ended up winning some votes but also losing some votes; no combination could be found to bring the total to 60. The last key “compromise” being negotiated – dropping the MTBE liability protection from the bill – was ultimately nixed by Rep. DeLay (R-TX) as unacceptable to the House.

Technically, the Senate has merely postponed another vote on cloture until January, which means the bill could still be resurrected at that time. But veteran observers don’t hold out a lot of hope for enactment at that time – it’s the beginning of an election year, and few major policy issues are ever resolved in Congress in an election year.

One immediate implication of the failure of the Energy Bill this year is that California’s MTBE ban will go into effect without the abolition of the oxygenate mandate for MTBE, meaning that starting January 1, all gasoline in the federal RFG portions of the state will effectively have to be blended with ethanol. New York and Connecticut face the same situation, but they would have faced it even if the Energy Bill had passed.    

IN SPENDING DISPUTE, CONGRESS MUST RETURN IN DECEMBER

Before going home for Thanksgiving, Congress had completed action on only 6 of the 13 Appropriations Bills for the fiscal year that started October 1. The remaining 7 were rolled into a huge “Omnibus” spending bill, which it had been hoped would be passed before Thanksgiving. However, there were significant changes made to that bill in closed negotiations with the White House that angered many Senators, who effectively blocked immediate action. The House also ran out of time to act on the bill. So both the House and Senate will come back into session next week – the House on Monday, Dec. 8, and the Senate on Tuesday, Dec. 9 – to vote on the Omnibus bill. It is quite possible that the Omnibus bill could suffer the same fate as the Energy Bill – fail in the Senate. There is no danger of a government shutdown even if that happens – the government is now operating under a Continuing Resolution (CR) that funds agencies at last year’s levels through Jan. 31 of next year.

Key issues in the dispute revolve around “riders” that had been attached to the original separate spending bills that had passed both the House and Senate, but which the President had threatened to veto. Those riders were stripped out of the final package that is to be voted on by the House and Senate. It is somewhat unusual, but not totally unprecedented, for a conference committee to remove a provision that had been agreed to by both the House and Senate.

One key rider that was stripped out of the bill at the White House’s insistence was a provision barring the Labor Department from finalizing its proposed new overtime rules. SIGMA supports the overtime rules, so the removal of the rider is a positive development from our policy perspective. Another key rider removed from the bill, also at White House insistence, would have blocked the FCC from going forward with changes in media ownership rules that would allow networks to increase their market shares beyond the current 35% rule, and would allow a company to own newspapers and television stations in the same market.

If the Omnibus bill is not approved by both the House and Senate next week, there is still a possibility of action in January. However, the House is not planning to come into session until January 20, leaving only a few days before current spending authority runs out. More likely is a long-term CR, running for the balance of the year, that would deny many agencies their planned spending increases – a prospect many Senators and Congressmen might find less palatable than a less-than-perfect Omnibus bill. 

TRIBAL TAXES

SIGMA joined with PMAA, NACS, and the Virginia Petroleum, Convenience, and Grocery Assn. (VPCGA) in meeting with Sen. Allen (R-VA) over his bill to grant Federal tribal status to six new tribes in that state. The message from the groups: Sen. Allen should include language in his bill that would require the tribes to collect and remit state excise taxes on products sold to non-tribal members.

WEEKLY REPORT ON THE WEB

Are you aware of all of the enhanced features of SIGMA Weekly Report here on our website that we can’t make available in the e-mailed or faxed versions? Here are some of them:

•  The current edition of SIGMA Weekly Report is the top item on the home page, with a link not only to the full report, but links separately to each story in the report!

•  BACK issues of SIGMA Weekly Report, going back to May of 2001, are also maintained on the website. On the blue tab on the left of the home page, click on the second item (Weekly Report) to bring up a listing of reports. Click on a specific date to see what stories were in that week’s report. Click on “View Report” to bring up that edition. For more recent editions, there are the same hotlinks to individual stories that are available for the current report.

•  This website is also “word searchable”, which means you can effectively look up topics that were mentioned in SIGMA Weekly Report any time since May 2001! Again, on the blue tab on the left of the home page, click on the last item (Search) and type in the key word(s) you want to search for. Note that there are some imperfections in the search program; nevertheless, it is still a quite useful tool!

•  Within individual Weekly Reports, there are frequently hot links to other websites for background information. These are generally the same links that were in the e-mailed version of SIGMA Weekly Report, although sometimes more extensive links have been added later.

We encourage you to take full advantage of the reference capabilities this technology gives you! 

SIGMA Weekly Report December 1, 2003 © Copyright SIGMA