WASHINGTON-The House GOP strategy to reach out to voters this election year by repealing a 4.3 cents gasoline tax hike and underwriting forgone federal revenue by auctioning 35 megahertz of unspecified spectrum highlights tensions that have come to exist between budgeters and lawmakers with telecommunications policy oversight over the golden airwaves.
A bill to roll back the gas tax increase-passed by the House May 21 and awaiting action in the Senate-directs the Federal Communications Commission to sell wireless licenses by March 31, 1998, to offset lost tax dollars, and also extends the agency’s auction authority permanently. The FCC’s auction authority had been set to expire this August.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates nearly $3 billion can be raised by the sale of 35 megahertz of spectrum below the 3 GHz band.
It has been speculated that frequencies earmarked for broadcast news gathering and digital audio radio service would comprise some or all of the 35 megahertz. Cutbacks in the Energy Department’s travel budget, prompted by Republican criticism of agency head Hazel O’Leary, will make up the remainder of lost revenue.
The political deal in play has Clinton agreeing to the gas tax repeal in exchange for GOP support of a minimum wage increase.
Though no sparks flew over the spectrum auction component of the gas tax roll back, the gentlemanly exchange between House Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley (R-Va.) and Rep. Bill Archer (R-Texas), head of the Ways and Means panel, provides a sense of territorial nature of lawmakers.
“Recognizing the need to bring this legislation expeditiously before the House,” Bliley wrote Archer May 15, “the Commerce Committee will not act on its sequential referral of H.R. 3415.”
But, Bliley added, “By agreeing to act on our referral, the Commerce Committee does not waive its jurisdiction over these provisions [dealing with spectrum and Energy Department appropriation]. Furthermore, the Commerce Committee reserves its authority to seek equal conferees on these and any other provisions of the bill that are within the Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction during any House-Senate conference that may be convened on this legislation.”
Archer agreed.
By coincidence or otherwise, the 4.3 cents gas tax hike was included in the same 1993 legislation that also authorized spectrum auctions.
Since then, congressional budgeters and the Clinton administration have taken note of $20 billion raised by the sale of paging, pocket telephone, two-way dispatch radio and interactive TV licenses during the past three years.
In the fiery balanced budget debate in which Republicans and the White House could find little common ground and which ended in a stalemate early this year, there was agreement to auction $15 billion worth of spectrum during the next seven years.
Sparring between budget and telecom policy lawmakers also occurred when outgoing Senate Majority Leader and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole (R-Kan.) held up passage of the telecommunications reform bill to press for TV broadcast auctions.
