Today, the House of Representatives passed the flagship U.S. competitiveness and innovation bill, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (full text and summary), by a vote of 262 to 150.   The House Science & Technology (S&T) Committee press release is here and a full breakdown of the vote is here, including 245 Democrats and 17 Republicans in favor, 0 Democrats and 150 Republicans opposed.

The passage comes after the legislation was blocked twice within the past two weeks on the House floor, triggering significant alarm among the science and technology community.  The first incident on May 13th involved a “Motion to Recommit” attached to an anti-pornography amendment, introduced by S&T Committee Ranking Member Ralph Hall (R-TX), which forced many members to vote to send the bill back to committee.  The second incident on May 19th occurred when the bill failed to reach the two-thirds majority required under procedures that were used, despite the inclusion of the anti-pornography amendment and a cut in the authorization level by nearly 50 percent.

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Today, the U.S. House of Representatives failed in its second attempt to pass the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, a flagship bill for U.S. competitiveness containing broad support for science and technology innovation, including funding authorization for energy innovation and education programs.

The bill, which was re-introduced on the floor again today after getting derailed last week, was blocked by a minority of House Republican members despite the uncontroversial and bipartisan nature of the legislation. It was brought forward for a vote under the House’s suspension process, which forbids further amendments but requires a two-thirds majority, which the bill failed to meet on a vote of 261-148 (full breakdown available here).

The second failure comes despite major cuts to the authorization level to alleviate budget concerns – down from a five-year, $85.6 billion authorization to three-years and $48 billion – and inclusion of the anti-pornography amendment that derailed the effort last week.  “I understand the concern of many of my colleagues about the overall size of a five year authorization, and this reduction is my sincere attempt at compromising on an issue that is very important to me,” stated Representative Bart Gordon (D-TN). “The bill before us today includes an overall funding reduction of almost 50 percent from H.R. 5116, as introduced.”

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The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 — a flagship proposal for U.S. innovation and competitiveness containing critical funding authorization for ARPA-E, Energy Innovation Hubs, clean energy STEM education, science R&D budgets, and more — was blocked on the House floor yesterday due to political point-scoring over a small and unrelated pornography issue.

“Six newly proposed programs encouraging science research and technological innovation are casualties of Thursday’s House fight over porn,” reports The Hill.  According to Science Insider, “members voted 292 to 126 to block passage of a 5-year authorization bill that would have provided healthy increases in the research and education budgets of the NSF and research programs at the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce.  Instead, a bipartisan majority voted for a 3-year freeze on the budgets for those agencies; it also cut all funding for DOE’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.”

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