Reworked Puerto Rico bill to debut Wednesday

Reworked legislation to address Puerto Rico’s debt crisis will be unveiled Wednesday.

House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) told Reuters he wanted to make the bill public Wednesday, with the goal of having his panel vote on it a week later.

{mosads}Work on the bill stalled in April, after Bishop had to cancel a previously scheduled markup of the legislation as members aired concerns and questions about the package.

Bishop has consistently maintained that the changes to the bill will be minor and that the overall framework — establishing an outside fiscal control board for the island and giving it debt restructuring powers — will remain intact.

Bishop and House GOP leaders have been aggressively pushing the legislation amid some opposition in and outside the Capitol that it could be seen as a “bailout” of the island.

No federal dollars go to Puerto Rico under the package, but some conservative lawmakers have expressed concerns that allowing the territory to go through court-ordered debt restructuring could set a precedent for other debt-heavy states.

Bishop previously indicated that some of the changes would be aimed at assuaging concerns about the overall legal implications of Puerto Rico’s situation.

The island territory is facing a debt crisis, as years of economic decline have left it without enough revenue to pay back all of the roughly $70 billion it owes. The island defaulted on $422 million of debt payments on May 1 and faces a $2 billion payment in July.

The message from Bishop and other bill advocates has been that the legislation is needed now to ensure Congress does not actually have to bail out the island later.

“What we are seeing in Puerto Rico is if you push it off, the situation gets worse, the debt gets worse, the humanitarian crisis gets worse. If you don’t want a bailout and you put it off long enough, you probably will be forced into a position of being in a bailout, and I’m not going to vote for that,” Bishop told Reuters.