Vehicles for Higher Education Act Rewrite Narrow as Congress Develops More Aid Packages
Kevin Kosar, vice president of research partnerships at the R Street Institute and co-founder of the Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group, said the House and Senate are “not close to figuring out how to operate fully” in this environment.
“When you look at folks who have run both chambers, they are very used to politics and governing being conducted in a person-to-person fashion, and that’s been taken away,” Kosar said. “Trying to map all the complexity of how negotiations work, how oversight, the moving of legislation when everybody is split apart, I think it’s proven rather confounding.”
The health scare serves as a reminder that Congress still has a lot of work to do when it comes to modernizing operations, which Kosar said could spur institutional change.
“I certainly think that Congress is going to update, upgrade operations, in various ways to enable it to operate remotely,” Kosar said. “We had a good example of why this should have been done right after the 9/11 attacks, but Congress didn’t really muster the energy to do it. So now we’ve got smacked in the mouth a second time.”
The House is trying to implement remote voting and could aim to return sometime during the month of May to work out additional relief efforts, but those schedules are up in the air.
As all priorities shift to COVID-19 relief, committee chairmen will still want to find a way to convene. While it will be challenging to hold regular markups to hash out legislative debate, Kosar said leadership will adhere to a new sort of protocol.
“I think what we are probably going to see is the development of ‘non-hearing’ hearing. They’ll look like hearings, but they may not be fully treated as such,” Kosar said. “But you will have both Democrats and Republicans present. They will be questioning individuals. And there’ll be kind of wobbling along trying to operate in this environment and hoping that the web connections don’t go down for any of them.”
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“The calendar is inevitably contracted, and you throw COVID on top, which has driven both chambers away for weeks, and the calendar gets smaller,” Kosar said.
Standalone items — like bipartisan legislation that could be a part of an HEA rewrite — might face obstacles in reaching the floor due to time constraints, but Kosar said the appropriations process could be another venue for extraneous policy riders.
“If we can push $2 trillion off the door in one single piece of legislation, there’s real possibilities that a whole lot of stuff that is in the docket … could get done,” Kosar said.
It’s unclear, however, how many more aid packages Congress will consider this term.
“It’s probably going to be a little more tricky to move legislation forward, but all it takes is another spike in COVID cases, COVID deaths, or even more economic calamity to possibly change the minds and to spur additional action,” Kosar said.
