This week, House Republican leaders laid the procedural groundwork for having the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill (H.R. 3935) on the House floor for amendments and debate during the week of July 17.

The legislation has elements from three House committees. The vast majority of the bill comes from the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which held a two-day markup and approved H.R. 3935 on June 14. The Science, Space, and Technology Committee has partial jurisdiction over FAA aeronautics research, and they approved their own bill confined to those topics (H.R. 3559) on June 15. And the Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over the indispensable two pages of the bill that extends aviation excise taxes and the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which that panel approved as H.R. 3796 on June 7.

The House Rules Committee, acting as the scheduling arm of the majority party leadership in that chamber, stitched those three bills together into one cohesive whole and posted that bill text (formally called Rules Committee Print 118-11) online on July 6. The chairman of Rules then announced that any House member wanting to amend the FAA reauthorization bill has until 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, July 12 to file amendments to the unified bill text with Rules in order to explore the possibility that the amendment might be one of those made in order.

The announcement indicated that any meeting of the Rules Committee will not occur until the week of July 17, which puts House consideration of the bill on the later end of that week.

Meanwhile, there is still no sign of life for the FAA reauthorization bill in the Senate, where what was supposed to be a bipartisan reauthorization bill fell apart minutes after the June 15 markup session of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee was supposed to commence. Proposed amendatory changes to the 1,500-hour pilot training rule, and to long-distance access to Washington Reagan National Airport, caused the markup session to be called off, and there is still no sign of its being rescheduled. (The Commerce panel has a nominations markup and a Coast Guard hearing scheduled this week.)