ENERGY BILL UPDATE

A quick overview of anticipated floor procedure on the energy bill in the next few days

April 27, 2004
12:00 AM
Unless a unanimous consent agreement is reached on a different procedure, this is a general overview of the floor procedure we anticipate in the next two days. Cloture has been filed on the Daschle amendment. It ripens Thursday. The Domenici amendment is the authorizing portion of S. 2095. It does NOT include the tax portion, which has been already attached to the FSC-ETI bill. As most of you know, the authorizing portion of S. 2095 is a leaner version of H.R. 6 with several notable changes: It does not include safe harbor for MTBE or ethanol. The directed spending is stripped out or delayed until the out years. The cost of the authorizing portion has been reduced from $5 billion to a net savings of $1.2 billion over 10 years according to the FY 04 budget resolution baseline. (These numbers will change when the FY 05 budget is adopted.) A detailed list of the changes can be found in the press release section of the energy committee home page. We anticipate filing cloture on the Domenici second-degree amendment tonight. This will also ripen Thursday. The Daschle amendment vote will be first. Republicans expect to defeat cloture on the Daschle amendment. We anticipate this being followed by a cloture vote on the Domenici amendment. If we prevail on cloture, there will be, at some point, an up and down vote on the amendment itself.