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The
Hill…
Congress looking at last week of
work before elections
By
Peter Schroeder
House
and Senate lawmakers will be back in town next week for what
will be their last period of work before the campaign season enters its
final stretch,
and they will spend their brief time on Capitol Hill attending to some
loose
ends.
The
highest-profile event next week will be in the Senate, as
lawmakers are expected to pass a six-month continuing resolution that
will keep
the government funded until late March. Despite 70 Republican
defections, House
members easily passed the bill on Thursday, and the Senate is expected
to
follow suit. The Senate could also pass a bill that would help provide
job
training to veterans before wrapping up work next week.
On
Thursday, Congress’s two tax-writing committees will join
forces as they continue to debate the issue of broad tax reform. The
Senate
Finance and House Ways and Means committees plan to hold a joint
hearing that
will focus on how capital gains on investments should be treated in any
future
tax overhaul. A number of academics will be on hand to offer their take.
That
same day, the House Financial Services Committee will save a
seat for Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial
Protection
Bureau. Cordray will deliver the semiannual report on the new watchdog,
which
was created as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and has been
up and
running for a little more than a year. Since its inception, the bureau
has been
a common target of Republicans, who argue the bureau could bury
businesses in
onerous regulations and have pushed efforts to bring it under stricter
oversight. Meanwhile, Democrats have defended the bureau as providing
essential
protections in the wake of the financial meltdown. Expect more partisan
sparring with Cordray playing defense at his appearance, which comes
one week
after a similar visit to the Senate Banking Committee.
Also
on Thursday, a Senate Banking subcommittee will convene to
discuss the proliferation of computerized trading in financial markets.
Sen.
Jack Reed (D-R.I.) will chair the hearing, which comes as many are
raising
concerns about what threats automated trading might pose to markets.
The
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), will spend Thursday discussing how
multinational
corporations could be shifting U.S. profits offshore to avoid tax
obligations,
and will hear from government and industry experts on the matter.
Check
out other stories, including GOP
Lawmakers want Romney to stay fuzzy on his tax reform plan, at The Hill
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/249471-gop-lawmakers-want-romney-to-stay-fuzzy-on-tax-reform
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