What to know about the House push to expand some Social Security benefits

The House is likely to try again next week to pass a bill related to Social Security that would protect benefits for workers who are also eligible for other pensions. This is despite a surprise move by leaders of the hard-right Freedom Caucus to stop the effort.

It takes only a short time to save what had been a bipartisan effort to pass the bill during the lame-duck period of Congress after the election.

What’s going on is this:

WHAT DOES THE BILL DO?

The bill to get rid of the so-called “government pensions offset” has been getting more support in the House. More than 300 lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have signed on to it.

In different ways, the bill summary says that the government pensions offset “lowers Social Security benefits for spouses, widows, and widowers who also receive government pensions.”

That part of the law would be taken away by the bill, and full Social Security benefits would be given again.

HOW WAS THE BILL ADVANCING?

The bill’s sponsors, Republican Rep. Garrett Graves of Louisiana and Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, used a discharge petition, which doesn’t work very often, to get the bill passed.

They were able to get at least 218 signatures from House members in order to move the bill out of committee and to the floor for a vote.

A lot of people think this move is an insult to House leaders, especially the speaker and majority leader, who set the schedule for the floor.

But Spanberger and Graves didn’t run for office again, so they didn’t have much to lose. Also, Johnson supported the bill before he became speaker.

HOW DID CONSERVATIVES BLOCK IT?

Two leaders of the conservative House Freedom Caucus stepped in while most of Congress was elsewhere, mostly in their home states for Election Day.

Speakers of the House, Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), and Rep. Bob Goode (R-Va.), who used to be chairs of the Freedom Caucus, quickly put part of the bill on hold during a regular pro forma session on Tuesday.

A lot of the time, the Freedom Caucus stops new spending. The bill was thought to add about $196 billion to the federal deficit over ten years by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Graves said that’s how much people are losing out on by not getting their full Social Security benefits back.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

When the conservatives put the bill on the table, they changed the rules for how it would be handled, but not the bill itself.

The bill is still likely to go forward with a House vote, possibly this coming week.

For passage to happen, it will now take a supermajority instead of a simple majority, which is what was planned under the rule that the Freedom Caucus leaders turned down.

WHO WOULD BENEFIT IF THE BILL PASSES?

The summary says that if the bill is passed, it will get rid of the parts that lower Social Security benefits for people who get other benefits, like a pension from the state or local government.

It also says that the bill gets rid of the so-called “windfall elimination provision,” which “tends to lower Social Security benefits for people who also get a pension or disability benefit from an employer that did not withhold Social Security taxes.”

The bill might pass the House, but it’s not clear if it has enough support to pass the Senate. But the large margin in the House suggests that there may be a lot of support.

After that, it would be sent to President Joe Biden’s desk. It says that the changes will take effect for benefits paid after December 2023 if the bill is signed into law.

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