House Passes Bill Lifting Per-Country Visa Quotas

By Andrea Salazar

By a 389-15 vote, the House passed legislation Tuesday night removing per-country quotas on employment-based visas for high-skilled immigrants.

As it stands now, any given foreign nation has access to no more than 7 percent of the visas the United States issues. Supporters say this bill would help manufacturers by removing that cap and making visas available to high-skilled immigrants around the world.

The bill now goes to the Senate where Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who chairs an immigration subcommittee within the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised the passage of the bill as “a harbinger for progress on other immigration issues.”

“This will remove outdated constraints that prevent us from attracting the kind of innovators who can create job growth in America,” Schumer said. “We will move the bill as quickly as possible in the Senate, where we expect it to find overwhelming support.”

House Passes Week-Long Spending Bill

The House approved a Senate-passed spending measure Thursday to prevent a government shutdown. 

The bill, which only funds the government through next Thursday, was passed via unanimous consent, a procedure that does not require members to be present. 

The House is scheduled to return to Washington next week when members will take up a second Senate-passed spending measure that will fund the government through mid-November. 

The threat of a shutdown stemmed from controversy over how much funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency would receive. However, after FEMA announced it did not need the billions in funding Democrats were calling for, Republicans dropped the provision that included DOE spending cuts. 

Click Here to read more… 

Senate To Tackle DISCLOSE Act Today

Later today, the Senate will hold a cloture vote to proceeed to consideration of the Van Hollen-Schumer DISCLOSE Act. The bill would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 via a series of reforms, including establishing additional disclosure requirements in terms of spending on elections.

The bill was contrived as a response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC in January of this year, in which the high court basically blocked a federal limit on corporate political spending.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama urged the Senate to pass the bill before adjourning for the August congressional recess…

Sen. Chuck Schumer Hopes To Pass Disclose Act Tuesday

The Democrats in the Senate will try to push a campaign finance reform bill forward this week. The Disclose Act is already passed in the House and if it goes through it would force special interest groups to reveal top donors in campaign advertisements. Republicans in the Senate are expected to block the legislation from moving forward, however, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the key author of the Disclose Act, stated during a conference call Monday that the Democrats are working very hard on getting a Republican to vote for the bill. Schumer hopes that the Senate will vote for the new legislation Tuesday.