As we move past Labor Day, little time is left before both chambers leave again for the November elections. The House of Representatives is slated to be in town for only 11 days in September before breaking, and though...more
As we begin a new year and the second session of the 116th Congress, ML Strategies is pleased to share some highlights of where we see action this year on Capitol Hill. Although the impending impeachment trial of President...more
Just past midnight on Dec. 17, lawmakers released an amendment to one of two spending bills released on Dec. 16—H.R. 1865—the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. Most notably, the amendment included an extension...more
Congress returns to D.C. this week for a short three-week sprint to a series of important deadlines on September 30. Chief among them is funding the federal government for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 which begins on October 1,...more
TAX TIDBIT - Five Takeaways and a Falsehood: Test Your Knowledge of the Ways and Means Tax Markup - On Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee marked up and approved the following four bills, largely along...more
In This Issue: - Tax Tidbit - Legislative Lowdown - RegWatch - 1111 Constitution Avenue - At a Glance - Brownstein Bookshelf - Regulation Station ...more
In This Issue - - Tax Tidbit - Legislative Lowdown - RegWatch - 1111 Constitution Avenue - 2020 Vision - At a Glance - Brownstein Bookshelf...more
Washington saw a flurry of bipartisan activity over the last few weeks. Most notably, Republican and Democratic negotiators reached a long-awaited deal on sequestration budget caps. The compromise, announced on February 7 as...more
Congress moved one step closer to avoiding a government shutdown on Feb. 6, voting overwhelmingly (245-182) to pass a short-term, GOP-backed government funding bill (text; section-by-section) that would keep the federal...more
The House of Representatives and Senate returned September 6 from the long August recess that started in mid-July. The House is scheduled to be in session for four weeks and the Senate for five weeks before breaking again for...more
With the House and Senate in recess this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, there are now only a very limited number of scheduled legislative days left for the year – 12 in the House and 15 in the Senate – and there is...more
Funding Crisis Averted & New Leadership in the House: A week ago no one could have predicted that the biggest story in Washington this week would not be the last minute avoidance of a government shutdown by passage of a...more
As in the 9 percent "amusement tax" that the city of Chicago recently extended to online streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, triggering a series of lawsuits alleging that the newly expanded tax was illegally...more
While summer isn’t officially over until September 22, for most here in the nation’s capital the vacations are nearly completed and it is back to work as Congress returns from the long August recess and Labor Day holiday. ...more
First it was three years, now it’s three months. The Senate’s attempt to pass a multiyear highway bill ran off the road this week after House Republicans announced they will adjourn one day early for the month-long August...more
The amount by which Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said he wanted to reduce, or “haircut,” all of the 50-plus tax provisions known as extenders. Warner accurately predicted that his Senate Finance Committee colleagues wanted to keep...more
The number of additional months of funding for transportation projects under a $8 billion bill introduced late last night in the House. Notably — as anyone on Sesame Street could tell you — the number 5 is not the same as the...more
NUMBER OF THE WEEK: 3,415. The number of people who renounced their citizenship in 2014 according to IRS data. This is one of the five highest totals on record since the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance...more
NUMBER OF THE WEEK: 52 percent. The likelihood that tax reform will happen in 2017 or earlier, according to the tax experts that participated in the Tax Council (TTC) and Ernst & Young (EY) Tax Reform Business Barometer in...more
The Senate passed the “Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2014? (H.R. 5771) on Tuesday night just before Congress adjourned for 2014. As Molly Bryson described in her December 5, 2014 post following the House’s passage of the...more
ENERGY AND CLIMATE DEBATE - Energy and environmental issues abounded on the congressional as well as international fronts last week, and they will continue to play a prominent role in the last couple of weeks of 2014....more
ENERGY AND CLIMATE DEBATE - The House and Senate are in session for just a few more days prior to adjourning the 113th Congress. Remaining issues to address during the lame duck include the hybrid omnibus-continuing...more
The clock is running out on the 113th Congress. While the calendar says we are not quite at the two-minute warning, with a truncated September congressional schedule and the campaign season taking up much of the fall, the...more
This week, ML Strategies’s Director of Government Relations, Bryan Stockton, provides an update on the clean energy provisions in the Senate’s tax-extenders package and details scenarios for their extension as the midterm...more
On May 15, 2014, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a procedural measure that would have allowed for that body to consider and vote on S. 2260, the "Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency (EXPIRE) Act," the package...more