Republican clash

House rejects Senate air safety bill amid Republican clash

The legislation’s future is now uncertain after a bipartisan push to clear it.

By Sam Ogozalek and Chris Marquette

The House on Tuesday rejected the ROTOR Act, delivering a stinging blow to the Senate’s bipartisan air safety legislation and leaving its future uncertain.

Lawmakers narrowly voted down the bill from Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state, 264-133. A two-thirds majority was required to clear the legislation under a fast-track procedure. More than 130 Republicans voted against it.

“We came within a couple of votes,” Cruz told reporters. “An overwhelming majority of the House voted for ROTOR, and I believe we’re going to pass it.” In a later statement, he called it a “temporary delay.”

The Senate OK’d the bill, S. 2503, unanimously in December. But it stalled in the House amid opposition from Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.), who recently introduced his own bipartisan bill aimed at addressing the January 2025 disaster near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which killed 67 people.

Victims’ families said in a statement they were “devastated” by Tuesday’s outcome and called for a new vote on the ROTOR Act.

In recent weeks, the cross-chamber fight intensified, ultimately culminating in the rare floor defeat for a bill that was being considered under a process typically reserved for non-controversial legislation.

It’s a major win for Graves, though it’s sure to heighten the House-Senate feud. In an interview afterward, Graves told POLITICO that he would mark up his competing bill, the ALERT Act, “as soon as possible.”

“Still got work to do. I don’t look at it as tanking the bill, I just look at it as now we’ll get some House” input, Graves said of the vote.

What’s next for the ROTOR Act is unclear. The legislation is backed by victims’ families, labor groups and the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy. The Defense Department previously said it supported the bill, but on Monday reversed course and in a statement said “enactment would create significant unresolved budgetary burdens and operational security risks affecting national defense activities.”

During negotiations over a government funding package last month, Speaker Mike Johnson promised Cruz a House vote on his legislation, upsetting Graves and Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who on Thursday unveiled their bill, the ALERT Act, seeking to respond to the air disaster.

Despite Graves and Rogers saying on the House floor Monday they opposed the ROTOR Act, POLITICO reported they were not actively whipping their Republican colleagues to vote against the legislation. But House GOP leaders privately told their members they could let the bill fail in order to address issues with it. Cruz was on the House floor Tuesday and had a lengthy discussion with Johnson.

An aide to Graves, Jimmy Ballard, early Tuesday highlighted DOD’s backtracking on the ROTOR Act to House Republican legislative directors, according to a person familiar with the matter, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Asked about this, a spokesperson for Republicans on Graves’ committee told POLITICO, “There were new concerns raised about the ROTOR Act that legislative staff ought to be aware of.”

Graves, Rogers, Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise all voted “no” Tuesday. The ranking members of Graves’ and Rogers’ committees, Washington state Reps. Rick Larsen and Adam Smith, respectively, voted “yes,” as did the House aviation subcommittee chair, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas).

The Senate measure would mandate that planes and helicopters in busy airspace nationwide be equipped with an advanced location-receiving technology known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In, or ADS-B In. Graves, a pilot, previously took issue with this proposed requirement, arguing it would be a burden on small-scale flights known as general aviation, which he has boosted for years.

Relatives of those killed in the crash dinged the Graves-Rogers proposal, H.R. 7613, last week. They argued that a key component of the House legislation, related to equipping aircraft with technology aimed at preventing midair collisions, is less stringent than what the ROTOR Act envisions.

A preliminary NTSB staff analysis that the safety board shared with Congress, reviewed by POLITICO, said this part of the ALERT Act does not carry out the independent agency’s recent ADS-B In recommendation, which it issued at the end of its probe into the disaster. “In fact,” the document says, the NTSB’s investigative team believes this section of the House bill “would seriously harm our efforts to implement ADS-B In at [the] FAA.”

During a media availability before the vote, Homendy told reporters that the Transportation and Armed Services committees didn’t run the ALERT Act text by her before unveiling it.

Twenty-six Democrats and nine Republicans didn’t vote Tuesday.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a ROTOR Act supporter, told POLITICO he was heartbroken.

“It was unnecessary to ... lose all those Republicans,” he said. Beyer noted that among the Democratic absences, some of the lawmakers were from New England, which a historic blizzard hit earlier this week.

“On a normal day,” he said, the bill “would have passed.”

Ahead of the vote, Graves in a statement said that if the ROTOR Act failed, he would mark up the ALERT Act as soon as next week and work with the Senate.

When POLITICO asked Graves how Cruz reacted when the House chair told him he would oppose his bill, Graves said Cruz was respectful of his decision.

“Look, Ted and I are friends, so this isn’t going to get in the way of that,” Graves said.

In their statement, victims’ families argued that the legislation “was not defeated on its merits. It was defeated by eleventh hour objections built on misleading technical claims the NTSB’s own investigators have publicly refuted, and a last minute Pentagon reversal of its explicit December endorsement, timed so there was no opportunity to correct the record before the vote.”

They called on House leadership to hold another vote on the ROTOR Act, this time with only a simple majority needed to clear it, adding, “We are not done.”