House, Senate Votes on Spectrum Inventory Appear Imminent

Spectrum inventory legislation is speeding to the finish line in the House and Senate. The Senate may soon pass by unanimous consent a bill (S-649) by Senate Communications Subcommittee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., Senate aides told us Friday. And House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said late Thursday the House plans to vote Wednesday morning on a similar bill (HR-3125) by Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Also up for a House vote that day is a caller ID spoofing bill (HR-1258) by Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., that would ban manipulation of caller ID information.

The Senate nearly “hotlined” the Kerry bill before the recess, but ran out of time and now probably will put it up for unanimous consent this week, said three Senate aides. New language added to the bill wasn’t vetted with Republicans until the last minute and time ran out to add the bill to the unanimous consent queue, said one Senate aide. The bill is now expected to pass with an amendment expanding the national security exemption to quell concerns by the Defense Department, and to add public safety language resembling what’s in the House bill, aides said.

Senate aides don’t expect problems passing the inventory bill by unanimous consent. “There shouldn’t be any objection from the Committee or leadership on either side to it being hotlined, though we'll see if all 100 Senators let it move,” said one aide. “I expect any objections from members, if there are any, will get cleared, but that’s never a certainty.” A lingering issue had been addressing concerns by electric utilities that publicly disclosing certain information may endanger national security, but senators worked that out over recess and it likely will be included in an amendment, said a second aide.

Both the Waxman inventory bill and the Engel caller ID legislation have bipartisan backing and were approved unanimously by the House Commerce Committee (CD March 11 p4). Hoyer said the House would vote on both bills under suspension of the rules, which means they can’t be amended and require a two-thirds vote to pass. The Senate passed caller ID legislation (S-30) earlier this year.

The Waxman bill would require NTIA to inventory of spectrum between 225 MHz and 3.7 GHz, with an option to go up to 10 GHz, while the Kerry bill would require an inventory from 300 MHz to 3.5 GHz. If both versions are passed, there probably will be staff-to-staff negotiations between the House and Senate to work out technical differences between the bills, said the second Senate aide.

The wireless industry is “very pleased that the House is acting to make the spectrum inventory a reality,” CTIA President Steve Largent said Friday. “It is critical to America’s future competitiveness that additional spectrum be made available for wireless broadband services."

Absent from Wednesday’s House floor schedule is a separate spectrum bill (HR-3019) by Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., that had traveled alongside the inventory bill at the subcommittee and committee stages. The Inslee bill would streamline moving federal users off bands to be reviewed by a three-member technical panel reporting to the FCC and NTIA. That bill also had bipartisan support, but at the House Commerce markup, Waxman said more work was needed in several areas, including national security concerns cited by the Obama administration.

The Senate may be a big reason the Inslee bill isn’t up for votes, said an industry lobbyist following the spectrum bills. Nothing like Inslee’s bill has even been introduced in the Senate, and House leaders may not want to spend floor time on an item that may not make it through the Senate this year, the lobbyist said.

Some senators are thinking about writing a bill like Inslee’s, and certain groups have been lobbying for it, but it’s unclear where things stand, said a third Senate aide. The second aide said some offices have talked about “follow-on” legislation to the inventory, but discussion is still in the “preliminary” stages.