Road Map for Next Legislative Session (1/18/2008)

The House reconvened this week, and the Senate is expected to come back into session after the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. As Congress gets back into its groove, the first item on the agenda is a $145 billion economic stimulus package, which may
include funding for school construction and repair. The bill seems to have bipartisan support in Congress and in the White House, though the particulars of the bill may prove to be contentious. Once the stimulus package is finished, there are a number of other items Congress is likely to consider this year.

No Child Left Behind

On January 28th, the President is scheduled to give his State of the Union address, which often acts as a springboard for most of the year’s legislative priorities. While the President is expected to focus on Iraq, immigration reform, and other recent, hot-button issues, he is also expected to again call for Congress to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, his landmark K-12 education legislation.

As 2008 is the President’s last year in office, and he begins to consider the legacy his administration leaves behind, he will want to try and end on the seemingly positive note of reauthorizing NCLB, a program that he considers his biggest domestic success over the last eight years.

While he will focus on what the law has done over the past few years, he will also warn Congress not to weaken the law that is intended to have all students in the U.S. performing at proficient levels in math and reading by 2014. However, because the law is a divisive issue in Congress, as well as among the 2008 Presidential candidates, politics will most likely push NCLB into the backseat, until after a new Congress and a new President begin their work in 2009.

Higher Education Act

The Senate passed its reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) last summer, but the House has been dragging its feet, bogged down in a number of other legislative efforts. House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-CA) did finally pass a reauthorization bill out of committee towards the end of last year, but the House has not moved forward with the committee’s bill.

Senate leaders, chiefly Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA), are calling for the House to bring its bill to the floor as soon as possible so that the two bills can go to conference. The sense of urgency comes from the fact that as soon as Congress gets bogged down in both fiscal year 2009 (FY09) appropriations and the 2008 Congressional elections, time will run out for the HEA to be reauthorized by the 110th Congress.

Farm Bill

The Senate passed its Farm Bill package in December, finally catching up with the House, which passed its bill earlier in the year. While some negotiations have gone on behind the scenes, the bill has yet to go to conference, keeping farmers, agricultural groups, and school nutrition advocates waiting on the largest agricultural bill in the country. School nutrition advocates are looking forward to the proposed expansion of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable program (FFVP) into all fifty states.

School nutrition coalitions are advocating for the final bill to include the Senate’s expansion, which calls for $225 million for fiscal year 2008, with each state receiving 1% of the total appropriation. The rest will be divided up among the states based on the total number of students eligible for free and reduced price lunches. Advocates are also calling to include the House’s provision that sets aside 5% of each state’s allocation for administrative purposes.

One item that did not make it into the Farm Bill is Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) amendment that would impose national nutrition standards on all public schools in the United States. Sen. Harkin has made it his personal quest to make these standards part of the law, but chose not to bring it into the Farm Bill, which is already in the middle of tough negotiations.

Harkin worries that even if the House and Senate come to terms on the bill, Congress will not be able to work out a deal with the White House regarding differences over the bill. As such, much of what goes on in conference will include both the differences between the House and the Senate as well as worries from the White House, so that the final version of the bill will have the best possible chance to make it through the veto threat already levied against the bill.

Appropriations

The President will release his FY09 budget proposal on February 4, starting the next appropriations cycle. Experts expect last year’s battle to be repeated again this year. The same forty or more education programs that the President has tried to eliminate in past years will be slated for elimination again this year, accompanied by leaner budget estimates.

The President proved last year that with Democrats in control of Congress, he is willing to stand firm on his proposed numbers, and will veto any bills that go too far above and beyond his requests. His willingness to work on the economic stimulus package will further cause him to be tight with his budget outlook for the rest of the year, and he will continue to have enough Republican support in Congress to sustain a veto.

Last year, The President forced appropriators to bring their total level of spending down to his desired levels, after a lot of posturing and grandstanding. If Congress want to avoid that for FY09, they will have to wait until the next president takes over in January 2009, an option that neither party is happy with. Ignoring the fact that the majority cannot guarantee that its party will win the Presidency, there is also a lot of bad publicity that comes with holding off appropriations until the start of the following year.

In 2006, when former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) decided to punt the spending bills until 2007, he was lambasted by both parties in each chamber of Congress. The Democrats may not want to risk the public backlash from delaying appropriations so late for two consecutive years, meaning it is possible that they could give in to the President’s request a little earlier this year. Needless to say, appropriations will, as always, be a tough process this year.

Author: SAS