House Dems launch bid to force vote on bipartisan disaster funding bill

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
July 11. 2014

House Democrats this morning announced a plan to force House leaders to bring a bipartisan wildfire funding bill to the floor for a vote.

The procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition is likely a long shot, given that it would require roughly 20 Republicans to vote against their party's leadership. But it reflects growing frustration among Democrats and some Western Republicans at the chamber's inaction on H.R. 3992, a bill to overhaul how the Forest Service funds wildfires.

The bill by Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) would allow a portion of wildfires to be quelled using disaster funding outside the Forest Service's discretionary budget, thereby preventing the agency from having to transfer funding from other forest stewardship and recreation accounts as it has done in most years over the past decade.

The bill, which mirrors a proposal in President Obama's fiscal 2015 budget, has 104 co-sponsors evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, many of them from forested Western states.

The petition was announced this morning outside the Capitol by Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), along with Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, and Reps. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) and Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.).

"We have the rarest of rare things here: a bicameral, bipartisan bill that's supported by the president of the United States," DeFazio said earlier this week on the House floor. "No hearings have been held."

The bill was assigned to both the Natural Resources and Budget committees, where it is opposed by both chairmen, and to the Agriculture Committee.

A discharge petition needs signatures from an absolute majority of House members, which is 218. Democrats have tried but failed to use the maneuver to force votes to end the government shutdown, to raise the minimum wage and to overhaul the nation's immigration system.

Backers of the wildfire petition argue that all they need is for every Democrat and about 20 of the Republican co-sponsors of H.R. 3992 to sign.

But it's unclear how many Republicans will sign. Doing so would essentially pull the rug out from under Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has opposed the bill over fiscal concerns, and Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), who favors Senate action on a House-passed forestry package that would greatly accelerate the pace of logging on federal lands and, according to backers of that bill, help thin wildfire-prone forests.

In a pre-emptive move, Ryan yesterday sent a letter to colleagues warning that the Simpson-Schrader bill would increase spending and deficits above the levels he negotiated with Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) in a budget law enacted late last year.

The Congressional Budget Office said the bill would not increase federal spending outright but could make it easier for Congress to exceed spending limits set by the Budget Control Act in future years.

Bill backers say the same amount of money will be spent to fight wildfires regardless of the bill's fate. The bill would simply ensure the Forest Service’s money is spent more efficiently, they argue.

But Ryan wants wildfire funding to remain within the agency’s discretionary budgets.

"The question is not whether wildfire suppression is a priority. It clearly is," Ryan wrote. "The question is whether we will fund this priority within the current discretionary-spending caps or whether we should effectively break those bipartisan caps by providing funding for wildfire suppression on top of those caps."

Mallory Micetich, a spokeswoman for Hastings, agreed that wildfire funding "is broken and needs to be responsibly fixed."

But she argued that the underlying problem is a lack of timber harvests on federal lands that makes them more susceptible to wildfires. Hastings is prodding the Senate to pass his logging bill, H.R. 1526.

"It's unacceptable that nine months after the House passed this bill we are still waiting on the Senate to act," she said, adding that Hastings along with 28 other Republicans will be sending a letter today to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) urging him to oppose any Senate proposals that fall short of a national logging solution.