Congress in July: Highways, education and Iran
WASHINGTON — Congress returns Tuesday for a four-week legislative sprint to confront a number of domestic and foreign policy matters before lawmakers adjourn for the annual August break.
A much-anticipated and long-delayed transportation bill will take top billing with a July 31 deadline on how to keep funding flowing to the nation's highways and other popular infrastructure projects.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee recently approved a six-year highway bill, but how to pay for it remains a significant hurdle. Many lawmakers, mostly Democrats, want to pay for it in part by raising the gas tax, which has remained at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. But that's a non-starter for the GOP-controlled Congress. There is also a bipartisan effort afoot to raise revenues by raising taxes on profits U.S. companies earn overseas.
The highway bill is also expected to become a vehicle for an ongoing fight over whether to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the nation's official export credit agency, whose charter expired July 1. Conservatives want to end the bank, but it enjoys the support of a supermajority in the Senate. Supporters are expected to attach an amendment retroactively reauthorizing the bank and send it to the House where opponents will try to strip it out of the bill.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have pushed for the Ex-Im bank to be reauthorized.
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"As soon as we get back, the Republican leadership in both the Senate and the House (should) put this on the floor and I am confident it would pass both houses," House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said before the July Fourth break.
On other domestic fronts, both the House and Senate are scheduled to take up a six-year reauthorization of the federal education law overseeing elementary and secondary education. The Senate has a bipartisan proposal authored by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., is hoping to advance his companion measure in the House after an earlier effort in February was abandoned when conservatives said his bill did not go far enough to remove the federal government's role in setting state's education policy. The legislation, a rewrite of President Bush's No Child Left Behind education law, is under close scrutiny from conservatives who came to see NCLB as intrusive and burdensome.
The Senate may also try again to take up legislation overhauling the nation's cybersecurity laws after an attempt to add it to a defense bill last month failed.
Congress may be thrust into the ongoing international talks to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions if the six world powers negotiating the deal strike a final agreement this month. This spring, led by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., Congress voted to give itself a role in reviewing — and possibly rejecting — any final Iran deal. Corker recently told USA TODAY's Capital Download that it was a "strong possibility" Congress could try to defeat it if lawmakers believe it's a bad deal for the U.S.
Then, of course, there are the 12 annual spending bills that fund the federal government. The House is nearing completion of its work, but Senate Democrats are blocking appropriations bills from moving in the Senate in order to force larger budget talks to set new spending levels for defense and domestic programs. The White House has threatened to veto spending bills at the current levels, while Republicans want to maintain austere spending levels set in a 2011 budget law. The disagreement could push Congress and the White House toward another shutdown confrontation, likely in September.
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