This week, Congress will come back to Washington for a few weeks of work before the traditional August recess. There are many issues on the table, from budgets to scandals, but there are political footballs for the members of the 113th Congress.
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First, Immigration reform. The Senate’s bill, passed in June, will not see real “light of day.” Immediately after the vote in the Senate, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a close friend of Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, said he was going “right over” to talk about the options with his friend in the House.
Chambliss is a “de facto” representative of the Republican Senators who voted against the Senate bill. He has many concerns about the bill. The main one is regarding agriculture policy within the bill. Agriculture businesses need access to workers and a process that easily makes that process legal and efficient for them to use.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is working with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) representing the 14 Republican Senators voting for the Senate bill.
Republicans control the house and they’ve got to be on board.
There will be a conference committee if the House passes something and there will be negotiation during that conference. I know, with all the crazy maneuvering of the last 5 years, we so rarely go to conference that there are those who have forgotten the importance of them. I’m not one of them.
The House should pass a border-only bill. If they do that, then they have all the cards to negotiate in the conference committee and the conferees will compromise on some of the Senate component. There will be hype around many other factors for negotiation, but this is the key: border-only to start.
The second volatile issue has to do with student loans. Let’s be clear, these broken-down negotiations have nothing to do with students getting a fair rate for the money they borrow for education. The interest from student loans is a cash cow being used to fund other things, one of them is the Affordable Care Act, lovingly referred to as “Obamacare.”
Don’t let your legislator off the hook on this one. It was a mistake to take student loans out of the private sector. The market should determine rates and when the loans should be paid back.
You are going to hear noise when the Congress gets back this week. They will distract and deflect to other issues that will seem important, and many of them are. But how they handle these two issues, immigration and student loans, will tell what kind of Congress they will be until the 2014 midterm.
Will they do the right thing? Will they use the power they have as the part of government that most represents the people? Those are the questions on the table for the rest of the working days of this congress for this year. Let’s get to work.
Martha Zoller is the editor-in-chief of ZPolitics and co-host of Zoller and Bryant’s Georgia’s Morning News.