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⚡️ Punchbowl News Special Edition: Senate sends debt-limit bill to Biden’s desk

News: The Senate late Thursday night passed bipartisan legislation raising the debt limit through the next election and cutting spending for two years, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk just days before the U.S. government was due to default.

The 63-36 vote puts to an end a saga that has gripped Washington since the start of this Congress and had financial markets on edge over the prospect of a first-ever default.

THE DEAL

What we’ve learned about McCarthy in the debt-limit fight

Kevin McCarthy came into the speakership 145 days ago as an anomaly, of sorts. He entered the job seen as a weak leader, only having secured the gavel after 15 rounds and scores of concessions to his conservative flank.

McCarthy was criticized as being a policy lightweight who never shepherded a major piece of legislation into law.

THE PUNCH UP

Capitol Hill sets sights on diversity data

The House Office of Diversity and Inclusion will launch two key studies next month looking into the diversity of Capitol Hill staff. But the move comes as efforts to hire more people of color face headwinds in a divided government.

Starting in July, the House ODI will examine both staff pay and demographics, according to sources familiar with the office’s work.

THE NEXT BATTLE

Coming attractions: House vs. Senate on a defense supplemental

The deal GOP senators secured to speed up votes on the debt-limit bill is going to be a tough pill to swallow for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

A group of Republican hawks in the Senate won a commitment from leadership that the chamber would consider a supplemental spending bill for the Pentagon at some point this year. Having Congress enact a supplemental is pretty standard practice. But the goal of this effort is to get around what many senators see as a shortfall in defense spending that was capped at $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-limit bill.

THE VAULT

Solutions to speedy bank runs ‘not ready for primetime’

If there was one thing that really stressed out lawmakers following the regional banking crisis in March, it was the speed of the bank failures. The phrase “social media-fueled bank run” has gotten a lot of play in the last few months.

But worrying about something and legislating on it are two very different things. This is going to be a tough problem for Congress to solve.

☀️ Punchbowl News AM: How the Senate sped through the debt-limit bill

In the end, the voting was the easiest part.

The biggest moment so far of the 118th Congress wrapped up lightning-fast by the Senate’s standards and with relatively little drama. And the speedy process was, at least in part, driven by a last-minute GOP push centering on the war in Ukraine.

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