WEP And GPO Tactics Raise Concerns Among Republican Legislators

     From The Hill:

A group of House Republicans is making a rare move that would force a vote on a bill to reform aspects of Social Security, stirring unrest in the conference.

The bill at the heart of the push, also dubbed the Social Security Fairness Act, seeks to do away with the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), a proposal that backers on both sides of the aisle argue is long overdue.

The bill enjoys support from more than 100 House Republicans, and almost four dozen have cosigned the effort to use what’s known as a discharge petition to force consideration of the bill — and the strategy is rubbing some in the conference the wrong way.

“In a well-run Congress, no legislator signs a discharge petition if you’re a majority. That is a rule that is never broken,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told The Hill. “And the fact that 47 of my colleagues signed a discharge petition shows that we have an utter lack of discipline.” ...

Republicans say the matter was a topic of debate in a conference meeting earlier this week. ...

    Regardless of the House vote, it's very unlikely that this legislation will be voted on in the Senate.

...

WEP And GPO Bill Advances In House

      From Federal News Network:

Legislation to repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset is nearing the finish line in the House.

Just over a week after it was filed, a discharge petition for the Social Security Fairness Act has reached the 218-signature threshold needed to force the bill to a floor vote.

Thirteen House lawmakers added their signatures to the petition on Thursday, after Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Garret Graves (R-Pa.) gathered advocates outside the Capitol building to urge their colleagues to push their legislation forward. …

Don’t get excited. This has no hope of passage in the Senate in this Congress.

Congressional Hearing On GPO/WEP

     The House Social Security Subcommittee held a hearing on Tuesday on the Government Pension Offset/Windfall Elimination Provision in the Social Security Act that deal with cases in which a person is eligible for both Social Security benefits and a pension based upon earnings not covered by FICA. Two of the four witnesses called for modification of the formulas used to determine the offset and another called for its elimination. As things stand now, it's highly unlikely that anything will be done about this.

House Social Security Subcommittee Field Hearing

     With no advance notice that I'm aware of the House Social Security Subcommittee held a "field hearing" yesterday in Baton Rouge on the effects of the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which reduce Social Security benefits due to the receipt of pensions from work not covered by the FICA tax. Apparently, Louisiana doesn't cover state and local workers under Social Security so this comes up a lot in that state. It's obvious from the opening statements that the Republican leadership of the Subcommittee think these provisions are unfair, which they may well be.

    The merits of the WEP and GPO can be argued but isn't there more than a little hypocrisy in the Republican Party's endless calls to "save Social Security" by increasing the retirement age and subjecting Social Security benefits to means testing at the same time they're acting as if they want to increase Social Security benefits? Isn't it also a sign that they're never going to vote to increase the retirement age or means test Social Security? Those plans will always be highly unpopular.

WEP And GPO Elimination Bill Faces Obstacles

     From the Monroe (LA) News-Star:

A bill to eliminate the Social Security penalty for workers with government pensions and their spouses hit a snag in the U.S. House this week, forcing Louisiana U.S. Reps. Garret Graves and Julia Letlow into a last-ditch effort to keep it alive.

Graves and Letlow, both Republicans and co-authors of the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 82) by Illinois Democrat Rodney Davis, thought they'd secured enough support in August to force a vote on the House floor, but they blamed a procedural maneuver from Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi for stalling the vote.

Davis, Graves and Letlow have scheduled a press conference Thursday morning to announce an effort to secure 218 colleagues' signatures on a petition to trigger a floor vote, but time is running out for the current Congress, which will likely meet only a handful of days before and after the mid-term elections.

"Only when we were on the cusp of forcing a floor vote did Democratic leadership take action to ... essentially bog it down in a backlog," Letlow, of Start, said during a House floor speech Wednesday. ...

WEP And GPO Elimination Bill Makes Progress In House

      From Federal News Network:

… The Social Security Fairness Act, introduced by Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and sponsored by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) now has more than 290 co-sponsors, more than enough to force a House floor vote.

The bipartisan legislation would eliminate two provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act that reduce or eliminate the Social Security benefits of more than 2 million retirees.

One is the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), which reduces the Social Security benefits of local, state and federal retirees who worked in Social Security-covered employment — i.e. private-sector jobs — and also received a government annuity from their non-Social Security-covered government employment.

The other provision is the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which reduces the Social Security benefits of spouses, widows and widowers with pensions from a federal, state or local government job. …

     Spoiler alert: This stands little or no chance of passing the Senate in this Congress.