👋🏾 HI, HEY, HELLO! Welcome back to Congress Nerd Daily. I hope today was everything for you. The midterms are in 35 days.
First Things First: The Senate is expected to vote tomorrow on whether to advance two House-passed bills Republicans are casting as tests of Democrats’ willingness to address issues they have used against vulnerable GOP senators on the campaign trail.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.C.) told reporters this morning that Democrats who oppose Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-Ohio) Ratepayer Protection Act or Sen. Pete Ricketts’s Stop Insider Trading Act would make it “pretty hard” to criticize Republicans over data-center electricity costs or lawmakers profiting from information they learn in office.
“They’re raising those issues because they want to distract from their positions,” Thune said, accusing Democrats of trying to “politicize everything going into the election.”
Neither bill is guaranteed the 60 votes needed to advance. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told reporters yesterday that the ratepayer bill falls short because it requires utilities to consider standards ensuring large energy users cover the infrastructure costs they create rather than requiring them to do so.
“We’re lawmakers, not law suggesters,” Schatz said. “If we want to lower people’s costs, we should mandate it.”
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the Ricketts bill a “theatrical farce” because it would allow lawmakers to retain and sell existing stocks, would not cover the president and would include voter-ID provisions Democrats oppose. Both bills have already cleared the House, meaning Senate passage would send them directly to President Donald Trump.
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Senate Democrats plan to demand new restrictions on the Trump administration’s ability to cancel congressionally approved spending as part of any government funding legislation later this year, raising the prospect of another sticking point in the next round of negotiations.
Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told reporters this afternoon that Democrats have repeatedly sought language addressing the administration’s use of rescissions during previous spending negotiations but were rebuffed.
“I have been saying throughout all of our appropriations process, throughout all the CR negotiations, we have to have language in there about rescissions,” Murray said. “I have been told no time and time again, and that will be our demand when we come back on any bill we pass later on this year.”
Her comments come as appropriators are preparing for another round of negotiations to fund the government beyond December—and as senators in both parties consider how Congress can protect spending agreements from being undone after they become law.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters Monday that lawmakers are “already looking at whether there’s language we can put in the next set of appropriations bills that would prohibit” pocket rescissions.
That could put Collins and Murray closer together on the need for new safeguards, even as Democrats argue Republicans rejected similar protections during previous negotiations.
Several Democratic appropriators I spoke with on Monday said the administration’s unwillingness to spend money Congress has approved is already complicating the next funding fight.
