After a dizzying week in Washington the politics aren’t over yet. Here’s your updated cheat sheet so you can keep track, keep score and keep hope alive. The week that was…
DREAM Act: The U.S. House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act by a vote of 216-198 on Wednesday night. This legislation would provide a path to citizenship for young people brought to the U.S. illegally before they turned 16, provided that they’ve lived in the country for at least five years, have graduated from high school or gotten their GEDs, and have clean police records. That path is attending college or serving in the military for at least two years.
The (in)action is now in the U.S. Senate. (Bills have to pass both the House and Senate to become law, as civics junkies know.) Senate leader Harry Reid has said they’ve had to delay the vote because the Democrats can’t get 60 votes to break the Republican filibuster. (Fun fact: in order to pass bills in the Senate, you need 60 votes, not just 50 because of the filibuster rules that require a 60-vote majority to end debate on a particular bill and bring it up for a vote.)
Are the votes there to make this the law of the land before 2010 runs out? We’ll see.
DADT: Ugh? Efforts to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy failed in the U.S. Senate yesterday. Why, you ask? The filibuster! The vote was 57 to 40 in favor of moving forward with consideration of the big Defense bill (which includes repealing DADT), but as we learned with the DREAM Act (and hundreds of other pieces of legislation), 60 votes is the coin of the realm. The funny thing is: 60 Senators have said they support ending DADT, but not all of them voted for moving forward yesterday. Strange days. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced a separate, free-standing bill that would straight-up end DADT (not as part of the Defense bill), and we’ll see if they can get that bad boy considered, voted on and passed.
If so, the House will take that bill immediately. As Speaker Pelosi Tweeted yesterday:
“@SpeakerPelosi If new Lieberman & Collins #DADT bill passes Senate, an army of allies stands ready to pass standalone repeal in House http://go.usa.gov/1pb”
Tax cuts: The week began with President Obama announcing that he had reached a compromise on the Bush-era tax credits and a whole host of other tax breaks. Of particular interest to us, one of the items included in the compromise package is the American Opportunity Tax Credit for education, a priority for young people which improved the HOPE credit for tuition expenses and increased maximum credit to $2,500 (up from $1,800).
The politics of the tax bill are just blindingly complicated, so we won’t go into it here. The policy fights around this are also very complicated. The White House has an explanation about it in video and chart form.
Want more charts? Click here.
Pell grants: Finally, we’re pushing for Congress to fully fund the Pell Grant program. Congress has set $5,550 as the maximum award level for students, but has not appropriated the money need to make that happen. Without the appropriation of an additional $5.7 billion, the maximum aid award next year will be slashed by $845. We’re concerned because without action we are looking at a more than 15 percent reduction to the program, which would eliminate Pell Grant access for hundreds of thousands of students while millions more will have their awards deeply cut.
The House passed a spending bill that would fully fund the program. As with most everything else, we are waiting to see what the Senate does.
Stay tuned.
