The powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee is busy preparing for a legislative trifecta. On the docket for the coming months are a mega climate change cap and trade bill, health care reform, and food safety reform. The tentative schedule set by Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) calls for subcommittee and full committee consideration of climate change in May and health care reform in June. A half-finished working draft of the cap and trade bill has been in circulation for several weeks. No health care bill has been laid on the table as yet.
Even that much would normally seem overly ambitious. But interspersed between those two mammoth efforts, the Chair also intends to introduce his food safety bill in May, hold hearings, and then in June schedule mark-ups in subcommittee followed by full committee. His intent would be to have the bill out of committee and ready for floor action by the July 4 recess.
As we have previously reported, the bulk of the Chairman's mark will be based primarily on the food sections of H.R. 759, the food and drug safety bill introduced by Representatives Dingell (D-MI), Stupak (D-MI), and Pallone (D-NJ).
Separately, the House Agriculture Committee intends to begin a series of food safety hearings, with a building expectation that individual committee members or perhaps the committee as a whole may want to weigh in on food safety legislation in some fashion before the Energy and Commerce bill reaches the floor of the House. Agriculture Committee member Jim Costa (D-CA), along with seven of his committee colleagues, has introduced the so-called SAFE Feast Act, HR 1332.
The Energy and Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over the Food and Drug Administration, whereas the Agriculture Committee has jurisdiction over USDA. Both agencies control different parts of the food safety regulatory regime.
They also note that the Senate is going with a slower, wait-and-see approach and their actions will likely depend on what the House does first.
