Democratic bid to force House vote on disaster funds appears dead

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
July 30, 2014

A Democratic effort to force House leaders to hold a vote on a bipartisan wildfire disaster funding bill appears to have failed.

The discharge petition that Democrats began circulating July 11 to require a vote on H.R. 3992 has garnered 196 Democratic signatures, but none from Republicans. No members have signed since last Friday.

To succeed, the petition would need more than 20 of the bill's 57 Republican sponsors to sign in order to reach a majority of House members.

A leading House Democrat yesterday lashed out at Republicans for rejecting the petition.

"In case the Republican leadership hasn't noticed, the West is going up in flames," said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), a key backer of H.R. 3992, which was introduced by Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) and was included in President Obama's fiscal 2015 budget request.

"The majority's refusal to acknowledge the wildfire funding crisis means that in the next few weeks, the Forest Service may run out of money to fight these fires -- as Congress is away on recess," DeFazio said. He blasted the House for yesterday passing four measures to reform the Endangered Species Act -- measures not expected to move in the Senate.

The Simpson-Schrader wildfire bill would allow the Forest Service and Interior Department to pay for a portion of wildfires using disaster money separate from their appropriated budgets. It is designed to prevent the agencies from running out of wildfire suppression funds and having to borrow from other accounts, as has happened with increasing frequency.

The measure is opposed by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican budget hawks, who argue that it could clear a path to more federal spending and ignores the need to perform more wildfire prevention tasks, such as tree thinnings on federal forests.

The Senate included a version of the measure in its supplemental emergency funding bill, which could receive a vote this week. It was excluded from the House supplemental funding bill.