Battle Over SSC in House Heating Up

In an action certain to enrage House opponents of the Superconducting Super Collider, House Speaker Thomas Foley is expected today to reject a request by collider opponents that they be represented on an upcoming House-Senate conference committee. This paves the way for an intensive battle on the House floor over H.R. 2445, the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill.

On August 9, House SSC opponents Jim Slattery (D-Kansas) and Sherwood Boehlert (R-New York) and 115 of their colleagues delivered a letter to Speaker Foley requesting that members opposed to the collider be named to the House-Senate conference committee on H.R. 2445 (see FYI #110.) A conference committee is one of the final steps in the legislative process, and is used to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of a bill. In the case of H.R. 2445, there is a major difference in the two versions regarding the SSC: the House voted 280-150 to terminate it, while the Senate voted 57-42 for $640 million to fully it.

Conference committee members are drawn from the committee of jurisdiction, in this case the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees. This is welcome news for SSC supporters, since Chairman Tom Bevill (D-Alabama) and the eight other House conferees all support the SSC. It does not take a crystal ball to predict what will probably happen in the conference when they consider the SSC; last year under the same circumstances the final DOE bill (or more properly, the conference report) contained SSC funding.

Hence the drive by SSC opponents to gain seats on the conference, a move which Foley has apparently rejected. Yesterday, chairman Bevill was quoted, “Adding a couple of conferees [SSC opponents] wouldn’t do anything except set a very bad precedent. I understand the speaker [Foley] is not going to do that...They will be the regular conferees.” Another House member agreed that Foley is rejecting this approach because of precedent.

“We will make every effort to defeat any conference report, continuing resolution or other measure that includes funding for the Super Collider,” warned the August letter to Foley. Rep. Boehlert repeated this again yesterday, saying “I think there will be an all-out battle to defeat the conference report.”

House appropriators are in a tough situation. On one hand, if they agree to SSC funding in the conference report, they risk the entire bill being rejected. They obviously remember that 280 of their colleagues voted to terminate the SSC in June. It is anyone’s best guess how many of these 280 members feel intensively enough about the collider to vote against the entire $22 billion bill (218 votes are needed by either side.) On the other hand, yesterday Bevill said “strategies are being worked on to make sure everybody has an opportunity to express their view with a vote” on the collider. This could be done by making SSC funding “an item of disagreement” in the conference report, to be acted on separately by a House vote. Doing so isolates the SSC vote, and there is little to suggest that many, if any, of those 280 votes have changed. It would be the House appropriators who would agree to this strategy, even though they all support the collider. If this is the strategy that is chosen, and if the House again rejects the SSC, the conference committee will have to try again to craft a version of the bill that can pass both the House and Senate.

When this will all occur is uncertain. A call to the House appropriations subcommittee today found that “if we go to conference,” it will not be this week. If the conference committee is held next week, House rules require a three day wait after the committee concludes its business before the entire House can consider the conference report. So the House floor vote is unlikely to be next week. That puts the House vote off until the week of October 18. The clock is ticking: on October 21 funding runs out for the Department of Energy.

There is a very recent indication of the House’s mood on conference reports changed to agree with the Senate’s position. Earlier this year, the House voted to terminate the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor project in H.R. 2491, the VA, HUD and Independent Agencies Appropriations bill. Yesterday, the House voted on the conference report on this bill, which contained ASRM funding. It massively rejected the report by a vote of 305-123, sending the report back to conference.