WASHINGTON – The House is scheduled to vote today on a bill designed to help Puerto Rico after the House Rules Committee set the table for the bill's consideration during a lengthy hearing that stretched into Wednesday night.
There is one hour of general debate allocated for the bill and 80 minutes for amendments under the Rules Committee rule attached to the legislation. The debate is scheduled to begin at 12:30.
The Rules Committee considered just under 40 amendments that were submitted, paring the total down that are allowed for consideration on the floor to just eight. Most of the amendments not included on the bill, called PROMESA, were partisan or would have undermined or eliminated preexisting sections of the legislation.
The House is expected to pass the legislation, although some legislators still see it as a slippery slope toward future statewide restructuring and some, like Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., view the board as overly burdensome colonialism over the territory.
The bill's fate in the Senate is less certain as Republican senators have expressed a hesitancy to back it in the past and Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, have been vocal opponents more recently. However several top senators have said they are likely to take up and pass the House bill if it makes it out of the chamber by the end of the week, according to several media reports.
PROMESA, the product of extensive negotiations led by the House Natural Resources Committee, seeks to balance competing interests by creating a strong oversight board that would have the power to require balanced budgets and fiscal plans, as well as the ability to file debt restructuring petitions on behalf of the commonwealth and its entities in a federal district court as a last resort if voluntary negotiations do not succeed.
Activity around the bill increased this week as House leadership has been gauging their members' support for the legislation. The Treasury Department and White House have also tried securing votes. Gutierrez, along with Puerto Rican born Reps. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., and Puerto Rico's non-voting member of Congress Pedro Pierluisi, all met with President Obama Wednesday to discuss supporting of the bill.
House leaders, including those from Natural Resources, said the bill may not be ideal, but it is a compromise drawn from the months of negotiations.
The top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., called the legislation "a delicate compromise involving all parties" during his testimony before the Rules Committee on Wednesday night.
The eight amendments that will be up for debate today mainly seek to bolster and clarify portions of the bill. Each amendment will be allotted ten minutes for debate.
Natural Resources Committee chair Rob Bishop, R-Utah, will offer a "manager's amendment" that provides a number of technical and other changes to the legislation.
The amendment, among other things: deletes the opt-in option for other territories; gives the oversight board the opportunity to review territorial laws enacted between May 4, 2016 and the full appointment of the board; and moves up the president's appointment deadline for the board to Sept. 1, 2016 from Sept. 30, 2016. It also lays out an initial funding plan that requires Puerto Rico's governor to transfer the greater of $2 million or an amount determined by the oversight board to a special board account on the date of the board's establishment and on the fifth day of every month thereafter.
Bishop recommended during brief testimony before the Rules Committee that the body "be very judicious" in its approval of amendments for consideration by the House. While he said many amendments may have been good ideas, he cautioned that adding too much to the carefully constructed bill could have affected its ability to move expeditiously and help the commonwealth.
Other amendments up for debate will include one from Serrano and Velazquez that would preserve the ability of a Puerto Rico commission to continue studying the legality of some of the commonwealth's debt issuances and allow the Puerto Rican government to act on that information. That commission recently released a report that said much of the commonwealth's debt may have been issued illegally. If that is true, Puerto Rico may take the stance it does not have to pay that debt.
Another amendment that will be up for debate, sponsored by Reps. Garrett Graves, R-La., and Mike Capuano, D-Mass., would give priority to protecting federal taxpayer assets in Puerto Rico, like mass transportation assets.
Several Democratic lawmakers will offer an amendment to eliminate a provision that could allow Puerto Rican employers to pay workers under 25 years old less than the minimum wage.
Other amendments to be offered include one that will require the Congressional Task Force on Economic Growth in Puerto Rico to report to Congress on ways to reduce child poverty and another that will require the Government Accountability Office to submit a biennial report to Congress on the debt and revenue levels of each territory and the drivers of the debt. Another amendment would set a deadline of 18 months for a required report in the bill that will examine the conditions that led to Puerto Rico's fiscal situation.
Controversial amendments that were not successful included one from Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, which would have prohibited the restructuring of any debt that was incurred before PROMESA is enacted. Puerto Rico is struggling with roughly $70 billion in debt and $46 billion in unfunded pension liabilities while facing a July 1 debt payment of roughly $2 billion that the territory's governor has said cannot be paid. All of that debt would have been exempted from restructuring under King's amendment.
Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., submitted an unsuccessful amendment that would have allowed all of Puerto Rico to be exempted from the minimum wage and Gutierrez failed to get the panel to go for a proposal to ensure full funding of public pensions in the commonwealth.
The bill currently charges the board with determining the hierarchy of debt obligations and encourages it to respect the existing legal framework, which places constitutionally backed general obligation debt above pension liabilities.
Republicans have been concerned that the language would still allow the board to elevate pensions above the GO debt. Rep. John Fleming, R-La., submitted an unsuccessful amendment to require compliance with the legal hierarchy, calling the current word "respect" a "weasel word."
"Bonds that have been issued with the full faith and credit of the Puerto Rico constitution must have first priority," he said during testimony Wednesday. "We owe it to the states and the constituents we represent to keep Puerto Rico's mistakes from spreading to everyone."
In addition to pensions, Gutierrez also unsuccessfully tried to tackle problems he saw with the oversight board's composition while calling the bill an "exclamation point on the colonial power the United States has over Puerto Rico."
One Gutierrez amendment would have allowed Puerto Rico's legislature to appoint four of the seven board members and the territory's governor to appoint one. The bill leaves the appointments up to congressional leadership and the president. It also only requires one member to either have a primary residence or place of work in Puerto Rico.
"No one who is elected by the Puerto Rican people … has any say in the decisions that will affect almost every aspect of the people of Puerto Rico," Gutierrez said about the bill's standards for appointing the board. "If that is not colonialism, I don't know what is."
Other Republican amendments that did not make the final list sought to make clear that no federal funds would be used to pay back Puerto Rico's debt and that holders of at least two-thirds of the outstanding principal amount of bonds would be needed to approve a voluntary restructuring.
Several Democratic and bipartisan amendments that were left out would have extended full federal benefits like Medicaid, Medicare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child Tax Credit to all U.S. territories.
