Five acts of bipartisanship this week

From reining in Big Tech to easing student loan debt.

Jul 26, 2024

Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) giving their first-ever joint interview this week. (Fox News)

Good morning! If it’s Friday, it’s time to look at what your representatives in Washington actually got done this week:

1. Child online safety

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has quietly been building bipartisan support all year, receiving endorsements from 71 out of 100 senators — an impressive achievement for a major piece of legislation.

It is now poised to pass the Senate next week, after having been advanced (along with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0) in an 86-1 vote on Thursday.

KOSA and COPPA 2.0 are the first major bills regulating Big Tech to advance in the Senate in decades, since the dawn of social media.

If enacted, KOSA would create a legal “duty of care,” requiring social media platforms to take steps to mitigate specific harms to minors, including suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation. The bill would also require that social media sites turn on their strongest privacy settings for minors by default and give parents increased ability to monitor their kids’ social media activity.

COPPA 2.0, an update to a 1998 law, would prohibit internet companies from collecting personal information on users under 16 without their consent and ban the use of targeted advertising towards children and teens.

The measures, particularly KOSA, are not without their critics on both sides of the aisle. Civil liberties advocates, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) — who was the lone “no” vote on Thursday — have raised free speech concerns, while LGBT activists have expressed fears that the bill could lead to transgender content being targeted.

Still, even if the final vote racks up more “no” votes next week, the measures are still on a “glide path to final passage,” as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Thursday. And, after years of discussions about bipartisan legislation to rein in Big Tech and protect children, their passage will be a big moment on the Hill.

“One thing is certain,” said KOSA co-sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), referring to the parents of children who died by suicide who lobbied lawmakers for the bill. “Moms on a mission have always proven to be an unstoppable force.”

Related: The Senate also unanimously voted this week to pass the DEFIANCE Act, which would give victims of sexually explicit deepfakes the ability to sue the people who create, share, and receive them.

2. Congressional stock trading

Two weeks ago, I noted the introduction of the Ending Trading and Holdings In Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, a bipartisan bill to ban members of Congress from buying and selling stocks.

The measure is moving fast: this week, it was approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a bipartisan 8-4 vote, making it the first congressional stock trading ban ever to pass a House or Senate committee.

According to The New York Times, 35% of members of Congress reported that they or an immediate family member traded a stock or other financial asset between 2019 and 2021 — and 18% reported trades tied to potential conflicts of interest, in that the lawmakers sat on committees that could give them insight into companies they were buying or selling shares of.

The ETHICS Act would remove the possibility of such conflicts of interest, as members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and their spouses and dependent children would all be prohibited from buying stocks and their investments. (The ban would go into effect 90 days after enactment for the officeholders themselves, and in March 2027 for their family members.)

In addition to covering future investments, the bill would also require the officeholders to divest from all covered investments starting in 2027.

The measure is widely popular, receiving 86% support in a 2023 poll. Per Axios, the bill’s authors are pushing for a full Senate vote on the bill before the November election.

3. Permitting reform

“Permitting reform” is an issue that has come up again and again in the past few years — but what does it mean exactly? Basically, it refers to speeding up the process that energy projects must go through to receive approval from the government before they start.

Such efforts have broad bipartisan approval: in a recent Ipsos poll, 81% of Republicans, 82% of Independents, and 88% of Democrats said they support accelerating the federal permitting process for energy infrastructure projects. Crucially, both clean energy and fossil fuel companies have also pushed for permitting reform — since, as different as the firms might be, they all need permits, and right now, it takes a long time to get them. Oftentimes, it takes years to traverse through the permitting process before starting a new project (and that’s just on the federal level — usually there’s state and local processes to go through, too).

There’s a pretty obvious opening here for a bipartisan deal: Republicans want to make it easier to initiate more fossil fuel projects; Democrats want to pave the way for more clean energy infrastructure. Among the latter group, one issue that gets talked about a lot is the importance of building long-distance power lines (known as transmission lines) for combatting climate change. According to one estimate, reaching the Biden administration’s clean electricity goals will require more than doubling the number of America’s transmission lines, which carry electricity from rural wind and solar farms to big cities.

But here, via Bloomberg, is the laborious process one must go through to build this critical infrastructure (emphasis added):

To build a long-distance transmission line, developers must get permission from an alphabet soup of federal, state, local and tribal agencies, plus win over any private landowners. The initial step, getting the U.S. Department of Energy to designate a broad corridor for the line, can take up to two years. Then the DOE performs an environmental assessment, which usually takes four or five years. Getting state authorities on board and starting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval process eats up two more years. At that point FERC begins yet another environmental review, which can take yet another four or five years.

After more than a year of negotiations, Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) unveiled the Energy Permitting Reform Act this week. Their compromise legislation would accelerate the permitting process for both fossil fuel and clean energy projects, embracing an “all-of-the-above” energy approach (which received 82% support in the aforementioned Ipsos survey). Among other steps, the measure would streamline environmental reviews for renewable energy projects, eliminate duplicative permit requirements for oil and gas projects, and establish a 150-day statute of limitations for legal challenges to any energy project.

With respect to transmission lines specifically, it would make the process of building interstate transmission lines easier, creating standards on par with those for building a natural gas pipeline.

Manchin and Barrasso are the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, so expect the bill to move quickly there (a vote is already scheduled for next week) — although action beyond that will likely have to wait for after the election.

4. Investigating the Trump shooting

Since the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, the official response from Congress has been notably bipartisan.

The House Oversight Committee is usually one of the most divisive panels on the Hill, but its chair and ranking member, Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), came together to call for Secret Service Kimberly Cheatle’s resignation. (She resigned the next day.) Comer and Raskin, who are normally seen feuding in committee hearings, even gave a rare joint interview about it.

Several bipartisan bills have been introduced since the shooting, including the PROTECT Act from Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), which would subject future Secret Service directors to Senate confirmation, and the Enhanced Presidential Security Act from Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY), which would boost Secret Service protection for presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates.

Most notably, the House voted 416-0 this week in favor of a resolution setting up a bipartisan task force to investigate the shooting and related security failures. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) negotiated the details of the task force, which will be made up of six Republicans and five Democrats.

5. Student loan debt

Here’s an issue that is not normally coded as bipartisan, but that we saw some notable cross-party action on this week.

For background: about 43 million Americans — 13% of the country — have outstanding federal student loan debt, according to the census. Until 2020, companies could offer tax-free tuition assistance to help pay for employees to get new degrees — but any contributions they made to help employees pay down student debt from previous degrees was considered taxable income.

That changed under the CARES Act, the 2020 bipartisan Covid relief package, which allowed companies to offer employees an annual tax-free benefit of up to $5,250 to help pay off their student loans. The program was then renewed by the 2021 spending package for five years. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 17% of large employers said in 2021 that they were offering the new benefit; another 31% said they were planning to roll it out.

This week, Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) — the original sponsors of the 2020 and 2021 efforts — introduced the Employer Participation in Repayment Act, which would extend the program past its current 2026 expiration date and make it permanent Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) and Scott Peters (D-CA) introduced a companion measure in the house.

Why this matters

Sometimes readers write in and ask me why I focus so much on bipartisan legislation. And the answer is: nine times out of ten, bipartisan legislation is how things get done in Washington.

A lot of the issues in today’s newsletter are great examples. To take permitting reform, the Biden administration has tried to implement rules to speed permitting for transmission lines — but there’s only so much they can do without Congress. Quite famously, the administration has also tried to take action to ease student loan debt — and have run headfirst into the courts each time.

For something more permanent to happen on student loans, it will have to go through Congress — and that means passing the Republican-led House and overcoming the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate. And that means the starting product must be bipartisan. That means each side won’t get the exact bill they want, like the compromise permitting reform package that gives something to fossil fuel and clean energy companies, or the student loan bill that takes a generally Democratic idea (easing student loan debt) but empowers the private sector to do it instead of the public sector (following a more traditionally Republican formula).

These proposals might not be as sweeping as the ones one party or the other might write by themselves — but they are ones that get passed. Which is why I think it’s important to tell you about them, which I try to do most Fridays when Congress is in session.

As always, if you find the information helpful, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my ability to share it with you:

More news to know

The day ahead

Biden: The president will receive a briefing on AI from White House staff and then depart for Camp David, where he will spend the weekend.
Harris: The VP has nothing on her schedule.
Trump: The GOP presidential candidate will headline the Believers’ Summit, a right-wing religious gathering, and meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago.
Congress: The Senate is off until Monday. The House is off until September 9.