Bills Introduced – 01-08-16

Only the House has been in session this week and few bills have been introduced. On Friday, for instance, there were only 9 bills introduced. Only one bill this week (introduced yesterday) will be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 4350 To repeal the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. Rep. Amash, Justin [R-MI-3]

This bill was promised well before the ink dried on the FY 2016 spending bill due to the way that the Cybersecurity Act was tacked on without going through the normal conference process. There was substantial bipartisan opposition to the bill for a variety (and frequently conflicting) reason.

This bill has already been printed since it is so short (two sections and only 10 lines of actual text). It has bipartisan support (3 Democrats and 2 Republican co-sponsors), but it is unlikely to make it through the committee review process. The chairs of the two principle committees (Intelligence and Homeland Security) responsible for the bill both supported the language that made its way into the Act so it is unlikely to be considered in either of those committees. The bill has also been referred to the Committees on Oversight and Government Reform, Armed Services, Judiciary, Foreign Affairs, Science, Space, and Technology, and Energy and Commerce.

The only way that this bill could move forward in the House is for a discharge petition to be filed with enough signatures. That is unlikely to happen. Even if the House did consider this bill it would certainly not be considered in the Senate as the Senate Intelligence Committee was the main champion of the language that was finally approved.

This bill is part political grandstanding and part principled stand against the way that the Cybersecurity Act was handled. In either case, we will not hear any more about this bill as it is essentially dead.