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The Texas electricity regulator meets Wednesday for the first time since a devastating winter storm fueled a financial crisis in its power market, amid calls to slash billions of dollars from costs facing businesses and consumers, Reuters reported. The storm temporarily knocked out up to half the state’s generating plants last month, triggering outages that killed dozens and pushing up power prices to 10 times the normal rate. About $47 billion in higher costs is threatening the companies that sell, transmit or generate electricity in the state. Consumers will see higher prices as the costs are passed along. Power marketers that sell electricity want the state’s Public Utility Commission to reduce, suspend or rescind fees for ancillary services such as standby power that they are required to pay, though in some cases the services were not provided during the blackout. According to one power marketer, those fees ballooned from $37,000 to $19 million for the week of the storm. The Independent PUC adviser Carrie Bivens this week recommended cuts that could shave about $2 billion from service fees, though she provided no estimate of the total.

The House approved President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue plan in a 219 to 212 vote early Saturday morning, sending the measure to the Senate as Democrats race to pass it into law before boosted unemployment payments expire next month, <em>Politico</em> reported. All but two Democrats supported the sprawling coronavirus relief package, with zero Republicans backing it — a major step toward enacting the White House’s first major legislative priority amid dueling public health and economic crises. Days after the U.S. marked 500,000 deaths to the virus, the Democrats’ COVID aid bill would send $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of Americans, boost unemployment payments and increase the child tax credit. It would also provide billions of dollars in aid to small businesses, states and efforts to test for and vaccinate against the coronavirus. But House GOP leaders, who kept their members in line against the bill, have argued the price tag is too high, with programs that are unrelated to fighting the virus. If passed, the package will be one of the largest ever approved by Congress, and the fifth major piece of legislation approved since the pandemic began. The Senate will take up the measure this week, where top Democrats will be forced to grapple with a major setback to Biden’s plan — their push to include a long-sought minimum wage increase has officially run afoul of the Senate’s arcane budget rules. For now though, the House package still includes that federal minimum wage hike to $15 an hour, assuring minimal drama in the lower chamber, and forcing Senate Republicans to formally nix it.

Senior Democrats are abandoning a backup plan to increase the minimum wage through a corporate tax penalty, after encountering numerous practical and political challenges in drafting their proposal over the weekend, the Washington Post reported. On Thursday, the Senate parliamentarian said that the $15-an-hour minimum wage included in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan was inadmissible under the rules Democrats are using to pass the bill through the Senate. After that decision, Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said they would instead seek to add tax penalties on large corporations that fail to pay $15 an hour — an idea viewed as less likely to be struck down by the parliamentarian and still helpful to some minimum-wage workers. But now senior Democrats — including Wyden and Sanders — are walking away from that backup effort, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions. Economists and tax experts have said that the tax outlined by Sanders and Wyden could be easily avoided and difficult to implement, with large corporations able to reclassify workers as contractors to avoid potential penalties.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, yesterday introduced the COVID-19 Bankruptcy Relief Extension Act, bipartisan legislation to temporarily extend COVID-19 bankruptcy relief provisions enacted as part of the March 2020 CARES Act and December 2020 omnibus appropriations bill. The bill would extend for an additional year CARES Act bankruptcy provisions that are set to expire on March 27, 2021. Click here to read the full press release on the legislations provisions.

Get the insight, analysis and statistics you need on the Small Business Reorganization Act and subchapter V elections by visiting ABI’s SBRA Resources website.

The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case filed against Navient Corp.’s student-loan servicing arm dismissed the involuntary petition, saying there was no evidence the student-loan giant isn’t paying its debts, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Three individuals who allege that Navient improperly collected on their student debt even after they discharged it through their own personal bankruptcies had filed an involuntary chapter 11 petition against Navient Solutions LLC earlier this month. Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York ruled yesterday that since the debts are part of the individuals’ claims that are still being disputed, with some subject to ongoing litigation, the borrowers had no basis to assert that Navient had failed to refund the alleged overpayments. “The proper place for that litigation to proceed is in the courts grappling with those issues, and not by jumping the queue with this involuntary petition,” Judge Glenn said.

Navient Solutions, the student loan servicing arm of Navient Corp, is asking a New York bankruptcy judge to throw out an involuntary chapter 11 petition brought by three student loan borrowers, saying the case is frivolous, Reuters reported. Navient, represented by Kirkland & Ellis, filed its motion to dismiss the case on Wednesday, a week after the three borrowers filed their petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The borrowers, represented by Smith Law Group, say they are owed a combined $45,683.64 in "overpayments" they say Navient illegally collected. "Nothing about the filing is based on reality, facts, or evidence," Navient said in the filing. Austin Smith, representing the borrowers, rejected Navient's characterization of the petition. A hearing on the motion to dismiss is set for Feb. 25 before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn. Navient said in Wednesday's filing that the borrowers are would-be class members in pending litigation surrounding student loan debts in other courts and that their lawyer, Smith, is using the involuntary petition as an attempt to gain leverage. The company called the involuntary filing "the latest salvo in Counsel's long-running, highly public crusade against Navient and the broader student loan servicing industry." The borrowers say Navient is insolvent, citing $87.4 billion in assets and $85 billion in liabilities, plus $4 billion the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking in damages in a 2017 lawsuit accusing the company of interest rate manipulations. They also note in the petition that the federal government says Navient owes it $22 million in overcharges over the course of a decade. But Navient says that the debts the petition references are contingent and disputed. In its motion to dismiss, the company touted its financials, saying that by the end of 2020 it had a cash balance of $1.2 billion and had eliminated $1.1 billion in senior unsecured debt.