Legislative obstacles are nothing new to US Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alas.). The 49th State's senior senator, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has encountered many in her career. But getting the US House of Representatives to agree to a conference on the broad energy policy reforms she and ranking minority member Maria A. Cantwell (D-Wash.) introduced in 2015 and the Senate approved in April is proving difficult.
Time is running short. A congressional recess begins on July 4 and continues through Sept. 5. Fall elections increase the odds that work on resolving differences between the Senate and House bills won't be finished this year.
"Today's naming of conferees by the House is an important milestone in our efforts to craft a broad, bipartisan bill-and a critical step forward to reconciling differences between the House and Senate bills," she said on May 26. "I'm confident the conference process will lead to a good bill that finally allows our energy and resource policies to build upon changes that have occurred over the past decade."
By June 14, as she wrapped up a committee hearing on energy economic issues, Murkowski said it was growing imperative for the joint committee to start meeting soon, especially since both the House and Senate have to be in session for it to do so. "There are some keen differences between the House bill and the Senate bill, and we've got our work cut out for us," she said.
Six days later, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said in a joint statement that their primary goal is to get a bill that US President Barack Obama will sign into law.
"We remain committed to working in a bicameral, bipartisan manner and remain hopeful we can set aside our differences and move ahead with a formal conference between the two chambers," they indicated-without saying exactly when.
Tried to avoid controversy
As they developed the original bill, Murkowski and Cantwell tried to make it noncontroversial by concentrating on correcting policies rendered obsolete by time. Murkowski reluctantly accepted authorizing the first crude oil sale from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a nonemergency situation to win votes in the Senate. House members added several controversial provisions that led to a vote largely along party lines.
House and Senate committees crowded hearings on more troublesome issues, from the Renewable Fuel Standard to the US Environmental Protection Agency's ground-level ozone limits, into June's final 2 weeks. That may have distracted federal lawmakers so they didn't try harder to move ahead with the broader energy bill's joint conference.
