Sen. Linda Lopez, an Albuquerque Democrat and rules committee chairwoman, said the proposal was designed to keep current congressional districts mostly intact and to honor the requests of New Mexico’s tribes and pueblos, which will remain scattered among all three districts.

Brian Sanderoff, a redistricting consultant for the Legislature, described the proposal to lawmakers as “status quo oriented.”

All Democrats in both committees voted in favor of the proposal, and all but one Republican (in the Judiciary Committee) voted against it.

Republicans are objecting to the plan because it increases Democratic strength in the already blue-leaning 1st District, which encompasses Albuquerque and the surrounding metropolitan area. Democrats also hold sway over the northern 3rd District, containing Sante Fe and much of the state’s Native American population, while the GOP controls the southern 2nd District.

Another objection to the plan is that it divides Roosevelt County, currently in the 3rd District, by shifting rural parts of the county into the 2nd District. However, the plan would unify Santa Fe County and Valencia County in the 3rd and 2nd Districts, respectively.

Four bills related to Gov. Susana Martinez’s biggest priorities haven’t even been printed.

They’ve all been sent to a committee of the House of Representatives that will determine whether they should be taken up, even though each subject was on the proclamation that called lawmakers into special session Tuesday.

One of the bills would overturn a 2003 law that allows undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The others would merge state agencies, prop up the state’s unemployment fund and give local authorities the power to ban fireworks.

By comparison, most other bills introduced in the House so far have been printed and directed to committees for hearings.

Luján denied the accusation. One controversial part of the governor’s agenda, a bill ending social promotion, has been introduced already.

The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), has been added to the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1) to fund the federal government through September.

If the resolution goes into law, the 95-year-old health care provider will lose funding from the federal government, all of which goes to family planning and reproductive services under Title X, and none of which goes to funding abortions.

It will also eliminate the entire Title X program, which was founded in 1970 and is the only federal grant program dedicated solely to providing individuals with comprehensive family planning and preventive health services, particularly to low-income families, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs. Preventative health services include breast and cervical cancer screenings, HIV prevention education, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling.

In fiscal year 2010, Congress appropriated approximately $317 million for family planning activities supported under Title X, 90 percent of which was used for clinical family planning services, according to the OPA. In 2008, 4,500 community-based clinics (including health departments, university health centers, faith-based organizations, public and private nonprofit agencies, and tribal organizations) received grants from Title X that went to approximately 5 million people, the OPA said. In roughly 75 percent of U.S. counties, at least one clinic receives Title X funds.

On its website all week, Planned Parenthood posted a message urging supporters to call their representatives to vote against attempts to end Title X funding.

A statement from the organization:

Anti-choice leaders in Congress are forcing a vote on the most dangerous legislative assault on women’s health and Planned Parenthood in our 95-year history. This bill would eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood health centers — including funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and more.

The consequences of this bill are clear — and they would be devastating. More women would have unintended pregnancies. Cancer would develop, undiagnosed, in countless women. There is no doubt: cutting off millions of women from care they have no other way to afford places them at risk of sickness and death.

There are 85 local Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide, which operate more than 820 health centers, according to its website, which also indicates that more than 1.2 million youths and adults participate in Planned Parenthood educational programs every year.

As Pence told Politico earlier this week: “If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions. As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”

Today, the fourth day, the house has been debating the 359-page spending bill. About 600 amendments have been filed on the spending bill.

Once the resolution is passed it will be sent to the Senate for consideration during the week of Feb. 28 and has been given a March 4 deadline.

Michigan Republican candidate Dan Benishek promotes the "4Rs" in a campaign ad. (Benishek for Congress)

Dan Benishek, a Republican favored to win the congressional seat in Michigan’s First District, has loads of ideas for reducing the federal deficit. “The Department of Energy was created in the 1970s to make us energy independent, and look at us now,” he said. “So what is its purpose, then?” He also sees potential savings in American military bases in Germany. “We’ve had troops in Germany for the last 60 years. Are the Germans contributing to the price of those troops? I don’t know all the answers but I know we need to look at all that.”

[GOP1] Republicans are expected to gain around 50 seats in Congress in next month’s midterm elections, largely running on a platform of deficit reduction. But interviews with a number of Republican candidates who are likely to join the House of Representatives in January reveal that while they have a wealth of creative ideas to cut federal spending, their plans are often lacking in details or far too limited to bring about the level of deficit reduction the candidates are calling for so forcefully on the campaign trail.

“Consolidate Commerce, Agriculture and Interior into one agency with elimination of duplicate services,” suggested Trey Gowdy, a Republican likely to win South Carolina’s Fourth District seat, in an email relayed by his campaign manager.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — we can find 30 billion worth of cuts there,” said Steve Chabot, who is favored to win back his old congressional seat in Ohio’s First District. “We also shouldn’t hire those 16,000 new IRS agents required under the new health care bill.”

“I support increased competition in the educational system by giving tax credits to families that send their children to private or choose to home school,” Marlin Stutzman, who is favored to win in Indiana’s Third District, suggests on his website as a solution to the “federal government’s mind-set of spending its way out of trouble.”

“Operational audits,” added Benishek. “A lot of departments aren’t doing their jobs efficiently, and in private companies, you’d audit their procedures. For instance, Fed Ex — they monitor their procedures all the time. We do audits but we don’t do the same kind as in the private sector.”

But some experts say that the areas in which these candidates are advocating cuts — mainly non-defense discretionary spending in the federal agencies — are precisely the places where cuts are the most difficult to find and the least meaningful in terms of deficit reduction.

The problem with the plans that focus on consolidating federal agencies and making them more efficient, said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, is they distract from real debates about the role of government. “The idea that we can simply rearrange things and reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies is engaging a lot of wasted energy.”

In addition, most candidates advocate taking spending back to 2007-8 levels, which, though politically expedient because it conjures up the pre-Obama era, don’t represent as significant a reduction in the deficit as candidates are claiming. “They’re trying to say, ‘Let’s go back to pre-stimulus levels,’” said DeHaven. “Unfortunately, that’s going back to the decade when Congress shot spending though the roof. And they’re only talking about non-defense discretionary spending, which is a very small portion of federal spending.”

And the approximately $100 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary spending that Republicans are proposing represents a “big piece of a rather small pie,” says DeHaven, meaning they’d be especially difficult to find. As a result, many Republican House candidates, while eager to tackle the federal deficit, were reluctant to list specifics about their plans to do so and offered few details when pressed.

“Bill supports reducing overall [non-defense discretionary] spending to 2007/2008 levels and ensuring it remains one percent below inflation until the budget is balanced” was all that a spokesman for Bill Flores, a Republican favored to win the House seat in Texas’ 17th District, was willing to offer via email in response to a query about which aspects of the budget Flores would most like to see cut.

“Just look at the website — all the issues are up there,” said a spokesman for Steve Stivers, who is likely to win in Ohio’s 15th District. “You can easily see what Steve Stivers is all about.” (Stivers’ website pledges to “work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stop this reckless behavior. I will work to pass a line item veto law, cut discretionary spending and stop adding to our national debt.”)

A few GOP hopefuls said that spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which together now represent approximately 40 percent of the federal budget and are expected to continue growing as the population ages — would have to be scrutinized, but they offered many caveats about their plans for doing so.

“We do need to look at entitlements, realizing of course that there are a lot of people who rely on our current system,” said the campaign manager for Tom Reed, who is favored to win the open House seat in New York’s 29th District. “So a promise made must be a promise kept, but for future generations we need to look at what levels they’ll be at down the road.”

“I’m in favor of personal [savings] accounts,” said Benishek, “but [I want to] guarantee that they don’t lose any money.”

Steve Griffin, who is leading the House race in Arkansas’ Second District, proposes reforming entitlement spending on his campaign website but also opposes privatizing social security or raising the age at which one qualifies for benefits. (He did not respond to repeated requests for more details about his plan.)

Facing serious criticism from Democrats on the issue of privatizing social security, most GOP candidates, however, have steered clear of the issue of entitlements and focused on one-time budget cuts and other popular GOP talking points about repealing Obama-enacted legislation like the stimulus and health care.

“I don’t think it’s realistic to believe that Congress is going to make those cuts to Social Security,” said Chabot of Ohio. “It’s not going to happen, so to act like it’s going to happen is just going to scare seniors, which is what Democrats do in every election.”

The biggest cut that Chabot proposes would be to withhold the remainder of the Obama administration’s stimulus package, which the candidate estimates would represent a one-time savings of approximately $250 billion. In addition, he’d like to repeal the health care reform bill, which many Republicans argue will add to the deficit, despite a Congressional Budget Office estimate that the act will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion over the next ten years.

“I don’t like the savings that they found in there,” Chabot said. “They went after the Medicare Advantage plan that’s been proven to work and be popular among seniors. To cut that is a big mistake, and I don’t buy that they’re going to make these cuts anyway.”

For all their worries about spending and deficits, GOP candidates argue for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, even though Congressional Budget Office estimates predict that a permanent tax extension will force the nation to borrow an additional $3.9 trillion over the next decade. The candidates argue that an extension would stimulate the economy, and that higher incomes would help offset the lost government revenues.

“The problem isn’t that we’re under-taxed,” said Chabot. “The problem is that we overspend. When you reduce taxes, most of that revenue will come back through the resulting growth in the economy. It happened under a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and a Republican, Ronald Reagan.”

As far as a possible deal with the ethics committee, Reuters reports that an aide to Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said that there are “still some sticking points,” but negotiators for Rangel and the bipartisan ethics panel are now “close.” It’s unclear whether the meeting delay and the ongoing negotiations are in any way related.

According to Pelosi:

And next week, our efforts will continue with a package of legislation that strengthens safety standards, reforms the Minerals Management Service, and removes the cap on economic damages paid to residents and small businesses by oil companies after oil spills.

Here are the details on the bills that passed today, from a House Science and Technology Committee statement:

H.R. 2693, the Oil Pollution Research and Development Reauthorization Act, authored by Representative Lynn Woolsey, ensures the ongoing development of new technologies and methods to prevent, recover, and respond to oil spills.  The bill also provides for robust oversight and accountability of the interagency research and development program.  Furthermore, this legislation sets up a more efficient federal management structure. More specifically, the bill updates and improves upon the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

And the second bill:

H.R. 5716, The Safer Oil and Natural Gas Drilling Technology Research and Development Act will make oil and gas drilling safer by supporting research and development of technologies and practices for worker and environmental safety, as well as accident prevention and mitigation.  More specifically, the bill amends Section 999 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which authorized the Secretary of Energy to establish an Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Onshore Natural Gas and Other Petroleum Resources research and development program.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the House Democratic leadership opted to pass a budget enforcement resolution rather than a full budget. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department announced that the country’s deficit had hit the $1 trillion mark just nine months into the fiscal year. Fear of the deficit had already led Congress to kill or delay an administration-backed jobs bill, a federal extension of unemployment benefits, a war funding bill and federal funding for Medicaid. Now, the 13-digit monster has claimed its latest victim: a full budget for the coming fiscal year.

[Congress1] Recognizing that Democrats would be reluctant to record “yes” votes for a budget that would augment the deficit, the House leadership opted to deem as passed a “budget enforcement resolution” instead, just before the July 4 recess. While the distinction between an enforcement resolution and a full budget is largely technical, there is one crucial difference: Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year — a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

Under the arcane rules of the Senate, budget reconciliation can only be used if it was written into the budget rules passed the previous year. With no full budget, there can be no reconciliation. As a consequence, Democrats lose a valuable tool for passing budget-related items on a majority-rules vote. Stimulus and jobs measures, if they combined short-term spending with longer-term deficit reduction, would have qualified for reconciliation.

Some policy advisers and members of Congress pushing for a such a measure — and recognizing that it could not make it past a Republican filibuster — viewed reconciliation as a last hope. “What we want to do is end up with legislation that is going to create a substantial number of jobs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters. “We don’t have 60 votes to do that. We could do that through majority rule, 51 votes.”

But a desire among Democrats to avoid voting on a deficit-increasing budget won out over the need to preserve reconciliation in creating the budget enforcement resolution. “Members looked at the budget and said, ‘We might need more deficit spending,’” said Jim Horney, the director of federal fiscal policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “And anything you do to try to reduce those deficits would necessarily include policies that might not be popular — tax increases, cuts in major programs.” The House leadership judged the enforcement resolution as less of a political risk for moderate Democrats who will face difficult re-election campaigns in the fall.

It wasn’t either chamber’s first choice. Throughout the spring, both House and Senate leaders promised that a full budget was coming down the pipeline. “The plan is to work to bring a budget resolution to the floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters in April. And Sen. Kent Conrad managed to pass a budget through the Senate Budget Committee, a major step in getting a budget to the floor.

But behind closed doors, the budget process caused considerable tensions — both between the House and Senate and between more and less liberal members of each chamber. In one of the few on-the-record comments made about the process, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) told Fox News: “There is some real tension within our caucus. … But it is still an item of open discussion. … I, for one, feel better about putting [a budget] out for everybody to see — but that’s a little above my pay grade.”

Off the record, Senate and House staffers have pointed fingers at one another as to who is to blame for the lack of a full budget. The Senate is the chamber that cannot get enough votes to pass anything, House staffers say, and the House should not be required to do the Senate’s work. The House did not even put together an actual budget — unlike the Senate Budget Committee — Senate staffers retort. The House side proffers that it did not pass a budget because the Senate said it could not get 51 members to stand up and vote for a deficit-increasing measure.

Ultimately, reconciliation and the broader budget both died due to a lack of conviction on the part of Democrats about the need to spend more. Democrats knew in advance that they absolutely wanted the reconciliation option available for health care, and so they kept it on the table in last year’s budget. But they never committed to more stimulus, jobs funding or other types of bills for fiscal year 2011.

“Even if they had gotten a full budget, there was no agreement that they would want to have reconciliation instructions for any big, significant legislation,” Horney said, noting that Democrats had promised not to move cap-and-trade or a carbon tax via reconciliation. “There was just no consensus among Democrats about what to do here.”

The budget enforcement resolution passed the House quietly, attached to a war spending bill. Nevertheless, the maneuver ginned up considerable criticism. “There is not a big functional difference between [a budget and a budget enforcement resolution], but there is a big symbolic difference,” said Maya MacGuineas, the head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Having Congress neglect to create a budget for political reasons is disturbing, to say the least, this year. In terms of the symbolism, for the credit markets, it is a strike against us, if Congress will not talk about where responsible cuts are going to come from. And in terms of partisan politics, it is fuel for the fire, too.”

And Republicans have been happy to fan the flames. “Facing a record deficit and a tidal wave of debt, House Democrats decided it was politically inconvenient to put forward a budget and account for their fiscal recklessness,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said on the House floor. “With no priorities and no restraints, the spending, taxing and borrowing will continue unchecked for the coming fiscal year. The so-called ‘budget enforcement resolution’ enforces no budget, but instead provides a green light for the appropriators to continue spending, exacerbating our looming fiscal crisis.”

So despite their efforts to avoid deficit-related criticisms, Democrats are being hammered for deficits and for obfuscation. And in the process, they’ve made it almost impossible to imagine a meaningful jobs bill passing next year.

This is the last email you’ll get from us before the NRCC closes the books on the 2nd Quarter of the 2010 Election Year.

So please make an immediate Emergency Contribution of at least $39 – one dollar for every Democrat-held seat we need to win to elect a new Republican Majority.

That’s one dollar for every vote needed to stop the jobs-killing agenda of President Obama and Speaker Pelosi – an investment in our fight to cut government spending, get control of the debt, repeal ObamaCare, and help small business create new jobs.

Thirty-nine seats isn’t a hundred, but it’s a serious gain, and far closer to most projections. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics projects a 32-seat GOP gain, which is in line with earlier projections from Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg. At this point, Democrats appear better than even money to hold the House; unemployment is high, but it looks like they’ve passed their nadir. Indeed, according to a new Gallup poll, Democratic Party identification remains a few points above Republican Party identification. Granted, that doesn’t tell us much about voter preferences, but it does suggest that Democrats aren’t in the terrible shape they seemed to be in earlier this year.

It seems the NRA is satisfied — here’s a statement it just sent out:

STATEMENT FROM THE NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION ON H.R. 5175, THE DISCLOSE ACT

The National Rifle Association believes that any restrictions on the political speech of Americans are unconstitutional.

In the past, through the courts and in Congress, the NRA has opposed any effort to restrict the rights of its four million members to speak and have their voices heard on behalf of gun owners nationwide.

The NRA’s opposition to restrictions on political speech includes its May 26, 2010 letter to Members of Congress expressing strong concerns about H.R. 5175, the DISCLOSE Act. As it stood at the time of that letter, the measure would have undermined or obliterated virtually all of the NRA’s right to free political speech and, therefore, jeopardized the Second Amendment rights of every law-abiding American.

The most potent defense of the Second Amendment requires the most adamant exercise of the First Amendment. The NRA stands absolutely obligated to its members to ensure maximum access to the First Amendment, in order to protect and preserve the freedom of the Second Amendment.

The NRA must preserve its ability to speak. It cannot risk a strategy that would deny its rights, for the Second Amendment cannot be defended without them.

Thus, the NRA’s first obligation must be to its members and to its most ardent defense of firearms freedom for America’s lawful gun owners.

On June 14, 2010, Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives pledged that H.R. 5175 would be amended to exempt groups like the NRA, that meet certain criteria, from its onerous restrictions on political speech. As a result, and as long as that remains the case, the NRA will not be involved in final consideration of the House bill.

The NRA cannot defend the Second Amendment from the attacks we face in the local, state, federal, international and judicial arenas without the ability to speak.  We will not allow ourselves to be silenced while the national news media, politicians and others are allowed to attack us freely.

The NRA will continue to fight for its right to speak out in defense of the Second Amendment. Any efforts to silence the political speech of NRA members will, as has been the case in the past, be met with strong opposition.

“The NRA will not be involved in final consideration of the House bill,” it can be inferred, is the organization’s way of saying that it won’t unleash its war chest and lobbying force against the bill as long as it remains exempt from the disclosure provision.

A still from a TV ad by the NRA during the 2008 presidential campaign (YouTube)

As House Democratic leaders raced to round up votes before the Memorial Day recess for a pivotal economic aid bill, trimming it by more than $70 billion to avoid a revolt by members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, the party made another concession on its agenda to far less fanfare. Last Thursday afternoon, hours before the House Rules Committee was set to take up a measure aimed at mitigating the fallout from Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of campaign cash — the meeting was scrapped.

[Congress1] Democratic aides depicted the delay as a consequence of a packed legislative calendar, predicting that the money-in-politics bill would come to the House floor after the recess. But some government watchdogs backing the majority’s effort saw a more dire sign in the Rules Committee postponement: that behind-the-scenes lobbying by some of Washington’s biggest campaign spenders, on both the left and the right, had spooked enough Democrats to make the legislation impossible to pass in its current form.

“I’m extremely concerned about what’s going to happen with this bill,” said Craig Holman, the longtime campaign-finance lobbyist at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “It’s taken months to produce a bill that was reasonably good because a number of forces were whittling this one down. … Now, suddenly, it’s been pulled again.”

Upon hearing of the Rules Committee cancellation, Holman said, “I thought, ‘Oh, no. The NRA [National Rifle Association] succeeded.’”

The post-Citizens United bill, dubbed the DISCLOSE Act by its sponsors, sets a series of new disclosure rules to shed light on the sources of campaign commercials, issue mailers and other election-season speech. Corporations, unions and politically active non-profit groups would be required to report donors who finance such political activity above certain thresholds, and the company that primarily pays for TV or radio campaign ads would have to add a disclaimer message recorded by its CEO.

Lloyd Leonard, director of advocacy at the League of Women Voters, acknowledge the grim political reality the bill faced last week. “If you have the votes, vote; and if you don’t have the votes, talk,” he said. “Obviously, proponents of the DISCLOSE Act didn’t have the votes to move ahead, or not all the details had been worked out.”

Generally speaking, the principle of disclosure has broad support on the Hill and from the Supreme Court. While the justices voted 5-4 in favor of letting corporations go beyond political action committees (PACs) to pay for electioneering ads out of their general treasuries, they released a separate but less well-known 8-1 ruling in the Citizens United case that affirmed the constitutionality of campaign-finance disclosure requirements.

But the prospect of donor disclosure has proven unpalatable to the NRA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee, all of which fired off blistering critiques late last week in a bid to push the DISCLOSE measure from the House calendar. In a May 27 letter to lawmakers, the NRA charged that the legislation would force it “to turn our membership and donor lists over to the government” and decried the bill’s “byzantine disclosure requirements that have the obvious effect of intimidating speech.”

And conservative groups have not stood alone in chafing at the current scope of the bill’s new restrictions. As Holman put it, “Traditional Democratic allies provided the NRA with a great deal of credibility in this negotiation than they wouldn’t otherwise have.” Liberal-leaning advocacy groups reportedly expressing concerns with elements of the proposal include the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) and the Sierra Club. Though the AFJ’s president warned that Citizens United would likely unshackle far more campaign cash from the corporate world than from non-profits, the group still advised other eligible tax-exempt organizations to “take advantage of” the unlimited election-year playing field set by the high court.

Abby Levine, the AFJ’s deputy director of advocacy, underscored in an interview that her group is “in favor of meaningful disclosure.”

“The question then becomes, what is meaningful?” she added. “We want the relevant information without casting too wide a net.”

Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest union federation, has so far declined to endorse the DISCLOSE bill and vowed only to “carefully review this complex legislation.” That reticence has not stopped the Chamber and other conservative critics of the bill from accusing its authors of handing a victory to unions by cracking down harder on corporate political activity.

“The Chamber has done a really good job of scaring people, saying this is somehow going to help unions, and when you look at the bill, it’s clear that it’s not,” said a spokesman for one union closely following the bill.

The broad array of potential stumbling blocks raised by individual non-profits — many of which are well positioned to punish or reward lawmakers for their votes by directing ads during the coming midterm elections — underscores the delicacy of talks now going on among Democrats and affected groups. “The thing about this bill is that there is disclosure that wasn’t required before of all entities” in the politically active tax-exempt world, said U.S. Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) democracy advocate Lisa Gilbert. “These are things people aren’t accustomed to doing.”

Could the NRA or other groups succeed in watering down the bill enough to alienate the watchdog groups that now support it? Leonard, of the League of Women Voters, pointed to a proposed amendment from Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) as a possible deal-breaker for his group. The Shuler amendment [PDF] would exempt any 501(c)4 non-profit that finances election ads using only individual donations, as opposed to corporate money, from the bill’s disclosure and coordination rules.

Bridgett Frey, spokeswoman for the bill’s chief House sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), said via email that her boss would examine specific amendments after the details of the bill are finalized. “Throughout this process, Congressman Van Hollen has met with any group or organization that has had questions or concerns about the DISCLOSE Act, and he continues to do so. He is open to accommodating reasonable concerns, but is committed to a bill that ensures transparency and protects our democratic process.”

The office of House Administration Committee Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.), which sent the bill to the Rules Committee last month, also indicated that negotiations over the bill would continue during this week’s recess.

“There’s no hard and fast line at which point disclosure would be weakened to the point at which it would become irrelevant,” Brady spokesman Kyle Anderson said via email. “We’ve gone to great lengths to address concerns expressed by both House Republicans and the groups and organizations that raised them. That process is ongoing.”

The process, however, cannot go on for too long without the new campaign-finance rules having a diminished effect on this November’s midterms. The DISCLOSE bill includes language implementing its new rules within 30 days of passage, sidestepping the need for prolonged regulatory debate at the Federal Election Commission, but Senate Democrats have already vowed to approve their version by July 4 to set up a final vote before the month-long August recess.

“If they don’t make it by July Fourth,” Holman said, “the bill will lose a great deal of momentum.”

The Chamber, for its part, is already betting on Democrats to lose — if not in the House, then in the Senate. The first hint of the DISCLOSE bill’s fate could come as soon as next week, when Democrats are likely to know more about the time frame for a House floor vote.