After Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, the author of a bill to update U.S. nuclear waste laws and clear the way for the Energy Department to build the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the state said he is in no rush to get the measure to the floor.
“In light of the tragedy, there’s no desire to move quickly,” Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) told Politico Tuesday after votes in the House. A House aide confirmed the comments Wednesday.
All but one of Nevada’s four representatives, and both of its senators, strongly oppose Yucca Mountain. The Silver State’s only GOP congressman opposes disposing of nuclear waste in the Nye County, Nev., facility, but wants DOE to do nuclear research there.
Shimkus’ bill, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, has bipartisan support. At deadline Wednesday it had attracted 109 co-sponsors, including 21 Democrats. The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the measure by an overwhelming vote on June 28.
That cleared the way for a floor vote, which a House source said earlier this summer might happen this month. Yet as of Wednesday, the E&C Committee had not published a report to accompany the bill to the floor, and the Congressional Budget Office had not scored the legislation.
A spokesperson for the House Rules Committee, which would write the rules for debating and amending the legislation on the floor, said the panel had not yet scheduled any hearing for the matter.
According to a source familiar with behind-the-scenes negotiations about the bill, Shimkus wants to allow Nevada representatives the chance to make amendments on the House floor. That would appear to rule out passing the legislation under a suspension of the rules: a streamlined process that prohibits floor amendments and limits debate to 40 minutes but requires two-thirds of the House to vote for a bill to pass it.
As an academic exercise, Shimkus would need to convince 30 more Democrats to vote for the measure to reach the supermajority threshold required to pass the bill under suspension of the rules — provided all 109 co-sponsors announced so far, plus every other Republican in the House besides Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev), vote yes.
That would leave a base of 170 Democrats to court, after subtracting existing co-sponsors and the three Democratic Nevada representatives who oppose the bill.
