Senate Adjourns Without Satellite License Renewal
UPDATE -
Senate Adjourns Without Satellite License Renewal
Eventual Bill May Need To Run For 10 Years To Meet Pay-Go Requirements
John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 2/26/2010 4:23:11 PM
The Senate adjourned Friday without voting to extend satellite operators' license to deliver network-affiliated TV station signals to their subscribers.
That means that, unless the Senate is called back into session by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), that license expires midnight Feb. 28.
The Senate failed to approve a package of extensions for various laws with Feb. 28 deadlines, including COBRA and unemployment insurance benefits and the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act after a single Senator took issue with the effect of extending the insurance and unemployment benefits on the deficit.
The House had already passed the extensions by unanimous consent, but Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) held up a similar effort to pass it Thursday night in the Senate, according to several Hill sources.
"As it stands, said one Republican staffer on background, "the Senate is in recess and the bill has not been extended."
The Majority leader could not be reached for comment.
Republican sources said they have had a deal for weeks with all four relevant commmittees (House and Senate Commerce and Judiciary) on a bill, with tougher conditions for Dish's reentry into the distant-signal business, but that leadership would not separate it out from a jobs bill that has yet to be voted on, betting that the extension would pass. Those tougher conditions were apparently what stood in the way of the original bill pass back in December, when a 60-day extension was passed along with the unemployment and COBRA elements that have become the sticking points this time around.
The sources also said the House had some problems with a five-year extension meeting new pay-as-you-go budget rules, but that the Republicans and satekholder were also OK with a 10-year extension, which would have been enough time for the bill to score deficit-neutral.
The tougher Dish conditions include changing the $250,000 per incident penality to a floor of $250,000 and as much as $5 million per incident if the No. 2 DBS provider did not make a good-faith effort to reach all 210 local markets, which was its side of the bargain to allow it to deliver distant signals directly instead of through a third-party per a court order.
"We offered as early as this morning to call up the 10-year framework and go, and that just wasn't done," said the Republican staffer. He said Republicans weren't thrilled with the 10-year extension given that the framework of the bill may need tweaking given developments in the market.
The bill acknowledges that with calls for studies of how the license should apply to fixing so-called split markets, and whether there should be a license at all.
"Waiting 10 years to revisit may not be the best idea, but in talking to all the stakeholders, we got to the point where people said, 'look, if 10 years has to be the period to extend this notwithstanding other people's parochial concerns...to hold the House with the pay-go issue, let's just do it.' No one objected to a 10-year extension among the stakeholder community or among congressional offices as far as I know."
A stand-alone 30-day extension of SHVERA (now called STELA, or the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act), could have run into pay-go problems as well. Even that brief extension would create $2 million in accounting charges that would have to be offset, according to sources. Packaging it with other extensions would allow the entire bill to be deficit neutral, even if individual elements were not.
UPDATE -
Senate Adjourns Without Satellite License Renewal
Eventual Bill May Need To Run For 10 Years To Meet Pay-Go Requirements
John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 2/26/2010 4:23:11 PM
The Senate adjourned Friday without voting to extend satellite operators' license to deliver network-affiliated TV station signals to their subscribers.
That means that, unless the Senate is called back into session by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), that license expires midnight Feb. 28.
The Senate failed to approve a package of extensions for various laws with Feb. 28 deadlines, including COBRA and unemployment insurance benefits and the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act after a single Senator took issue with the effect of extending the insurance and unemployment benefits on the deficit.
The House had already passed the extensions by unanimous consent, but Senator Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) held up a similar effort to pass it Thursday night in the Senate, according to several Hill sources.
"As it stands, said one Republican staffer on background, "the Senate is in recess and the bill has not been extended."
The Majority leader could not be reached for comment.
Republican sources said they have had a deal for weeks with all four relevant commmittees (House and Senate Commerce and Judiciary) on a bill, with tougher conditions for Dish's reentry into the distant-signal business, but that leadership would not separate it out from a jobs bill that has yet to be voted on, betting that the extension would pass. Those tougher conditions were apparently what stood in the way of the original bill pass back in December, when a 60-day extension was passed along with the unemployment and COBRA elements that have become the sticking points this time around.
The sources also said the House had some problems with a five-year extension meeting new pay-as-you-go budget rules, but that the Republicans and satekholder were also OK with a 10-year extension, which would have been enough time for the bill to score deficit-neutral.
The tougher Dish conditions include changing the $250,000 per incident penality to a floor of $250,000 and as much as $5 million per incident if the No. 2 DBS provider did not make a good-faith effort to reach all 210 local markets, which was its side of the bargain to allow it to deliver distant signals directly instead of through a third-party per a court order.
"We offered as early as this morning to call up the 10-year framework and go, and that just wasn't done," said the Republican staffer. He said Republicans weren't thrilled with the 10-year extension given that the framework of the bill may need tweaking given developments in the market.
The bill acknowledges that with calls for studies of how the license should apply to fixing so-called split markets, and whether there should be a license at all.
"Waiting 10 years to revisit may not be the best idea, but in talking to all the stakeholders, we got to the point where people said, 'look, if 10 years has to be the period to extend this notwithstanding other people's parochial concerns...to hold the House with the pay-go issue, let's just do it.' No one objected to a 10-year extension among the stakeholder community or among congressional offices as far as I know."
A stand-alone 30-day extension of SHVERA (now called STELA, or the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act), could have run into pay-go problems as well. Even that brief extension would create $2 million in accounting charges that would have to be offset, according to sources. Packaging it with other extensions would allow the entire bill to be deficit neutral, even if individual elements were not.
I can claim a "senior moment" even though I'm middle aged. But I thought you are still a young whipper snapper so what's your excuse?
