House, Senate Moving Cybersecurity Bills Upon Return
Congress is close to passing cybersecurity legislation, House and Senate aides told the State of the Net conference Tuesday. The Senate, returning from recess next week, is “narrowing in” on a cybersecurity bill to bring to the floor in three to four weeks, said Tommy Ross, aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Meanwhile, House committees are marking up individual bills to be combined later, House aides said.
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Reid is circulating language on several proposals and collecting feedback, Ross said. A single bill collecting winning proposals should be introduced in “the next week or so,” he said. It won’t address every cybersecurity issue but will “cover a pretty broad waterfront,” he said. Reid seeks a “legitimate, open debate” on the Senate floor, Ross said. He predicted a lengthy debate over amendments to add, edit and subtract language from the bill. Ross said the Senate’s proposals as well as the level of debate and senators’ basic knowledge “are far advanced from where we were last year,” Ross said.
Meanwhile in the House, the Homeland Security Committee plans a Feb. 1 Cybersecurity Subcommittee markup of the bill by subcommittee Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., said committee aide Kevin Gronberg. A full committee markup will follow soon afterward, he said. The Intelligence Committee already has marked up its own bill focusing on intelligence issues. Markups of bills in other committees are likely to follow the Homeland Security markup over the next couple months, said Jason Cervenak, aide to House Judiciary Internet Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. The process for combining all the bills once they reach the floor remains unclear, Gronberg and Cervenak said.
Reid hopes to avoid political fights and seeks wide, bipartisan agreement over the bill that comes to the Senate floor, Ross said. “What we bring up will be our best effort at achieving a consensus position.” However, he conceded that it’s nearly impossible to bring up a bill that has no detractors. Politicization is a “risk” but is something “we're trying very hard to avoid,” he said.
Passing a bill will not end the conversation on cybersecurity, Gronberg predicted. Congress won’t get to every issue in the bill this year, and there always will be new ones cropping up, he said.