Overnight Regulation: Trump pick would swing labor board to GOP | House panel advances bill to slow ozone regs | Funding bill puts restrictions on financial regulators

Welcome to Overnight Regulation, your daily rundown of news from the federal agencies, Capitol Hill, the courts and beyond. It’s Wednesday night, and while there’s no ObamaCare repeal vote this week, the GOP infighting over the bill is just heating up.

 

THE BIG STORY

President Trump announced his intent to fill the last open seat on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with labor-law attorney William Emanuel, putting the board back in Republican control for the first time since 2007.

Emanuel, who represents employers in labor and employment law matters at Littler Mendelson in Los Angeles, would round out the panel, which had two vacancies when Trump took office.

{mosads}Last week, Trump announced his plans to nominate labor lawyer Marvin Kaplan. If confirmed, Kaplan and Emanuel would mean two more Republicans, in addition to Chairman Philip Miscimarra, on the five-member board.

Who likes the pick? Business groups. “It is long past time that these vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board are filled,” Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee and the National Right to Work Foundation said in a statement.

Why? The board issued a series of controversial decisions during the Obama administration that angered business groups. The panel changed the longstanding definition of a joint-employer, allowed unions to organize employees in so-called micro-unions and allowed employees to speed up union elections.

Lydia Wheeler has the story here.

 

ON TAP FOR THURSDAY

A House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will hold an oversight hearing on access to oil and gas development on federal lands at 10 a.m.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law is holding a hearing on “Recent Trends in International Antitrust Enforcement,” at 10 a.m. The hearing comes after European regulators leveled a record fine against Google over its shopping service.

The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. on the principles of housing finance reform.

The Education and the Workforce Committee will mark up legislation to undo a controversial Obama-era National Labor Relations Board rule that sped up union elections.

 

REG ROUNDUP

Finance: A spending bill released Wednesday by the House Appropriations Committee includes major restraints for financial regulatory agencies, reports The Hill’s Sylvan Lane.

The panel’s fiscal 2018 financial services spending bill would give Congress control of major federal financial regulators’ budgets and bar them from implementing certain rules passed in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The restrictions were also included in a financial services bill approved by the House earlier this year, but that legislation faces an uncertain future in the Senate. 

Including the provisions in the spending bill, which is must-pass legislation, increases the odds they could become law.

The measure places the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), National Credit Union Association, Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and regulatory functions of the Federal Reserve under the congressional appropriations process.

Congress already controls the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and IRS. If enacted, the spending bill would give Congress near total control of the federal government’s financial regulatory system.

 

Finance: President Trump has announced that he plans to nominate Chris Campbell, a top aide to the Senate Finance Committee, to a position in the Treasury Department.

According to the White House, Trump intends to nominate Campbell to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions.

Campbell is the majority staff director to Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax, trade and health matters. He previously served as legislative director to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is currently the chairman of the Finance Committee.

The personnel moves come as congressional Republicans are working to repeal and replace ObamaCare and rewrite the tax code — two issues where Hatch has been playing a role.

Read Naomi Jagoda’s story here.

 

Environment: A House committee approved a bill Wednesday slowing the implementation of federal ozone regulations.

The legislation, from Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas), would instruct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to update its limits on ozone pollution every 10 years rather than every 5 years, the current timeline.

The House passed the bill last year but with President Obama in the White House, it stalled before going through the Senate. The measure comes as the Trump EPA says it will reconsider and possibly repeal the ozone standards set by Obama administration regulators in 2015.

The EPA already formally delayed implementation of the 2015 rule, saying it will not make final decisions on which areas of the country are out of compliance with the ozone limits until October 2018.

Supporters of the bill say it would help localities comply with existing ozone standards before federal regulators issue newer, stricter limits on the pollutant.

Devin Henry has the full story.

 

Technology: The top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee wants the Department of Justice and the FBI to look into fake comments being filed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about net neutrality, The Hill’s Ali Breland reports.

“I am deeply concerned that the sheer number of these potentially false comments suggest a coordinated attempt to materially mislead the FCC, and therefore a coordinated attempt to break federal law,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) wrote in a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

Reports have found that potentially hundreds of thousands of false comments have been filed to the FCC both in support of and against net neutrality measures. Some of the comments have impersonated the identities of real people who say that they filed no such comments.

The FCC is currently taking public comments on Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back Obama-era net neutrality rules aimed at maintaining a level playing field for companies on the internet.

Read Ali’s story here.

 

Transportation: A bipartisan pair of senators want to ban cell phone calls on flights.

The legislation, called the Commercial Flight Courtesy Act, would direct the secretary of Transportation to ban phone calls by passengers during commercial flights.

The bill is sponsored by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

Markey said he will try to get the bill added to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that’s currently being considered.

The cellphone bill would make exceptions for aircraft crew members and law enforcement officials and would still allow for text messaging and other uses of mobile devices.

Harper Neidig has the story here.

 

Environment: A House committee voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to advance a bill meant to move along the stalled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

The 49-4 vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday was due largely to a pair of bipartisan amendments that resolved some of the issues that Democrats had with the legislation, including that it didn’t go far enough to allow interim storage and overrode Nevada’s authority too much.

While former President George W. Bush’s administration started the NRC licensing process for Yucca, the Obama administration cut it off, citing Nevada’s objections.

The legislation would set a time limit for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to approve the project and makes a necessary land transfer for the project.

It also allows the Department of Energy (DOE) to permit an interim nuclear waste storage site before Yucca has its licensing process completed.

Timothy Cama has the report here.

 

Criminal justice: Legislation introduced by Senate Democrats aims to push back against Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “tough on crime” policies.

Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) introduced the Reverse Mass Incarceration Act of 2017 to incentivize states through grant funding to decrease their prison populations.

It’s intended to counter the 1994 Crime Bill, otherwise known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

Critics say that law led to a boom in incarceration.

The Booker-Blumenthal bill provides $20 billion in grant funding to be divvied up every three years among eligible states. States would only be considered eligible to apply if the total number of people in correctional or detention facilities in the state decreased by 7 percent or more in that three-year period.

Read Lydia Wheeler’s story here.

 

Travel: Immigration advocates are urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to issue guidance on how the government intends to implement the part of President Trump’s travel ban that the Supreme Court reinstated on Monday.

In a letter Wednesday, Muslim Advocates, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the DHS for guidance in the next 48 hours on how affected individuals can apply for waivers and what qualifies as a “bona fide relationship” with a person or entity in the United States.

While the Supreme Court provided a few examples of how a bona fide relationship could be established — through a close familial relationship, a worker who has accepted an offer of employment from an American company, or a lecturer invited to address an American audience — the groups said they need to know how people can prove that a relationship is “bona fide” and what recourse there is if they are denied by the federal government.

The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated the ban on travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days, but crafted an exemption that allows people with a “bona fide” relationship to enter the country.

Lydia Wheeler has the story here.

 

Technology: The record $2.7 billion fine that the European Union levied against Google on Tuesday is sending shockwaves across the tech industry, highlighting the intense regulatory scrutiny that companies face when doing business across the Atlantic.

The EU’s executive body, the European Commission, imposed the penalty on Google after a seven-year investigation into whether the company was promoting its own comparison-shopping tool over those of its competitors in search results.

Google is also facing two other EU investigations into similar practices on its mobile and advertising services — all of which could have major repercussions for regulators around the world.

“What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” said EU competition policy chief Margrethe Vestager. “It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation.”

Harper Neidig has the story here.

 

ALSO IN THE NEWS

Rick Scott appoints Jonathan Zachem to lead business regulatory agency (Tampa Bay Times)

President Trump is expected to nominate Brendan Carr to fill the final Republican slot at the FCC (Recode)

Gianforte says he’s ready to fight regulation as he takes spot on House natural resources committee (Washington Examiner)

Fed ‘stress tests’ clear all banks to issue payouts to shareholders (Wall Street Journal)

Judge denies Qualcomm motion to dismiss FTC’s competition lawsuit (Wall Street Journal)

Airbnb calls for regulation of homesharing in Ireland (RTE)

 

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