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July 13, 2023
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THE TOP
Happy Thursday morning.
House Republican leaders are now betting they can come up with 218 GOP votes for the FY2024 defense authorization bill after essentially ending any hope of a bipartisan deal with Democrats.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is giving the House Freedom Caucus and other conservative hardliners what they’ve demanded all week — dozens of “culture war” amendment votes on the $886 billion NDAA package. Conservatives threatened to derail the defense-authorization bill unless they got these votes.
The House will take up these amendments today in what promises to be a long and bitterly partisan slugfest. McCarthy wants to vote on final passage for the NDAA bill by Friday.
You can see the list of NDAA amendments here.
These GOP amendments run the gamut of conservative talking points. They cover everything from the Pentagon’s abortion policy, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives, Covid-19 vaccines, critical race theory and transgender-related medical services. Ukraine, China and Taiwan are also key amendment topics.
If some or all of these poison-pill provisions are added to the defense authorization legislation — which Congress has enacted every year since the early 1960s — then Democrats will oppose the measure. The House Armed Services Committee initially passed the bill by an overwhelming 58-1 vote on June 22.
The most high-profile amendment is authored by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas). Jackson’s proposal would bar the Pentagon “from paying for or reimbursing expenses relating to abortion services.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has been holding up dozens of military promotions for months in a bid to force the Pentagon to rescind the abortion policy.
There are several amendments designed to block or reduce military aid to Ukraine. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) will get a vote on her proposal to cut $300 million in Ukraine funding.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has an amendment to prohibit DoD-run schools “from purchasing and having pornographic and radical gender ideology books in their libraries.” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) wants to block the removal of Confederate names from military bases. And Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) is seeking to prevent the Pentagon from implementing Biden’s climate change executive orders.
The House Rules Committee met late Wednesday night to pass the rule covering this second tranche of controversial amendments. During that session, Republicans defeated numerous Democratic attempts to add their own amendments to the approved list. Of the 80 amendments cleared for potential floor votes, just four were from Democrats.
Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) also said there was a “side agreement” that the House would move forward in September with repealing a number of outstanding resolutions authorizing the use of military force (AUMFs). This includes the AUMF passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. This will be replaced by another resolution, Cole indicated.
Democrats blasted McCarthy and GOP leaders for — in their view — allowing a small faction of conservatives to essentially control what’s going on in the House.
“This is a very sad night,” complained Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.), top Democrat on the Rules Committee. “It’s outrageous that a small minority of MAGA extremists is dictating how we’ll proceed. This is not how this place should work.”
McGovern was particularly upset that a bipartisan proposal banning the United States from providing cluster munitions to other countries has been revised to only banning them from being given to Ukraine. Biden just agreed to send these weapons to Ukraine for its summer counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Adding these conservative provisions to the bill will make cutting a deal with the Senate and White House much more difficult. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to file a motion today to proceed to that chamber’s version of the NDAA bill beginning next week. Schumer is looking to pass the bill before the August recess.
Now let’s turn our attention to the FY2024 spending bills. The fight over these 12 appropriations bills is going to make the NDAA flap look like child’s play.
By today, House Republicans will have unveiled all 12 of their proposed FY2024 spending bills, including the critical Labor-HHS and Commerce-Justice-Science packages. Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) has scheduled full committee markups for eight of the bills. GOP leaders hope to bring one or two bills to the floor before the August recess.
Yet because these bills are set at the FY2022 spending level — not the level agreed to in the Fiscal Responsibility Act — and Defense, Homeland Security and veterans’ programs were spared or even bumped up, House GOP appropriators have made tens of billions of dollars of cuts to social spending programs. Democrats are outraged by this decision and warn it will backfire.
“I am fearful … that we are on a trajectory, at best, for continuing resolutions. And at worst, a government shutdown,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the ranking Appropriations Democrat, warned during a Wednesday markup.
Across the Capitol, Schumer’s decision to move forward on the NDAA means no appropriations bills on the floor before the August recess.
But Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the committee’s top Republican, hope to finish markups on all 12 bills by July 27.
Senate Appropriations will mark up three bills today — Legislative Branch, Commerce-Justice-Science, and Financial Services and General Government. On July 20, Transportation-HUD, Energy and Water and State-Foreign Operations will be taken up, according to multiple sources. And on July 27, the committee will mark up Defense, Labor-HHS, Homeland Security and Interior.
— John Bresnahan
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NATO SUMMIT 2023
Biden unveils security guarantee for Ukraine. Will Congress fund it?
VILNIUS, Lithuania — A Congress that is bitterly divided over defense spending and paralyzed over a typically bipartisan defense authorization process will soon be asked to fund President Joe Biden’s newly announced long-term security commitment for Ukraine.
Senators who traveled here for the annual NATO summit projected optimism that Congress will ultimately come to an agreement to back the G7-led military assistance program that serves as a precursor to Kyiv’s NATO membership. But back in Washington, there are new signs that this could become complicated — and ultimately fall short.
It was a jarring split-screen with Biden’s vow in a speech here that the new initiative will boost Ukraine’s defenses “across land, air and sea,” and that the U.S. commitment to Ukraine “will not weaken.” This is something Biden can’t guarantee, of course.
“There’s a solid majority in support of Ukraine” in Congress, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview here. “The question is whether there are people who will use the congressional process in order to tie things up, block budgets, or block nominees.”
In some ways, that’s already happening. Some House conservatives are using their leverage over the defense authorization bill to force a vote on scaling back U.S. aid for Ukraine. They also want to add provisions to the bill that would evaporate Democratic support for what has historically been an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort.
On top of that, the top two Republicans in Congress are on opposite sides of the debate over whether to boost defense spending through a supplemental funding bill. And the leading GOP presidential candidate is slamming defense hawks who want Biden to send more advanced weapons to Ukraine.
Despite this, Biden reassured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday that the American people “are supportive because they know it’s about you, but it’s about more than you.” That is, European and U.S. national security are closely intertwined.
Biden expanded on this during a speech in Vilnius Wednesday night: “The idea that the United States can prosper without a secure Europe is not reasonable.”
The summit also provided an opening for lawmakers to push NATO allies to meet — and exceed — the 2% defense-spending-to-GDP ratio outlined in the alliance’s charter. Less than a quarter of NATO’s 31 members currently meet that threshold. The Senate delegation brought this up in all of their nearly dozen bilateral meetings with foreign leaders.
And there were several fierce vindications of NATO from top Republicans.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has backed calls for NATO members to boost their defense spending, lauded European nations that have responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a hike in security spending.
McConnell noted that the U.S. ranks 13th when it comes to Ukraine assistance as a percentage of GDP, saying “some nations are digging even deeper into their own arsenals and making a much greater relative investment of support.” This is a clear pushback to those on the right who argue that the United States is being ripped off by NATO allies by pouring tens of billions into the Ukraine fight.
McConnell also insisted that Americans overwhelmingly back the ongoing U.S. efforts to do the same — a message that was echoed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who co-led the congressional delegation here.
“I reject the narrative… that this is all in peril because of some partisan divide. I simply don’t see it,” Tillis told us. “I think there are members asking legitimate questions [about burden-sharing].”
Tillis, one of NATO’s strongest defenders in the GOP, aligned himself with McConnell once again when he pushed back against the idea that other nations haven’t carried their weight. Tillis noted that the sole use of NATO’s Article 5, the idea that an attack on one is an attack on all, was at the benefit of the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It’ll be up to lawmakers like Tillis and McConnell to make these arguments back home, though that’s becoming much more difficult as former President Donald Trump escalates his attacks on U.S. support for Ukraine and his allies in Congress advance efforts to end that aid.
It’s also worth remembering that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Ukraine war drags on through the 2024 election, and the bipartisan promises of military support for “as long as it takes” could become hollow if Trump becomes the GOP nominee and, ultimately, returns to the White House.
— Andrew Desiderio
SENATE STAFF DIVERSITY REPORT
Senate Democratic staff diversity on the rise
The number of Senate Democratic staffers who identify as non-white has increased this year but Democrats still have a lot of work to do to diversify committee staff, according to the latest report out this morning.
The number of Latino staffers, in particular, has significantly increased in recent years, jumping 67% since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer first implemented the annual report in 2017. About 15% of Senate Democratic staffers identify as Latino while 13% identify as Black, according to the survey.
The number of LGBTQ staffers has also increased since that question was included on the survey in 2019. Sixteen percent of current staffers identify as LGBTQ.
Overall, 10% of staffers identify as Asian American/Pacific Islander, 3% of staffers identify as Middle East/North African and 2% of staffers identify as Native American, Alaskan or Hawaiian.
Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Cory Booker (N.J.), Alex Padilla (Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) all have 60% or more of their staff who identify as non-White. Another 13 offices report 50% or more minority staffers, with several others close to that threshold.
Some offices, meanwhile, still lack staff diversity. For Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Angus King (I-Maine), only between 12-15% of their staffers identify as non-white.
On the committee side, more than a quarter of the 19 panels surveyed reported having no Black Democratic staffers, including the Veterans Affairs and Energy panels. The Senate Rules Committee has no Democratic Latino staffers.
You can read the full report here.
Senate Republicans don’t release diversity data for their staff.
— Heather Caygle
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Democrats embrace free markets against GOP’s anti-ESG blitz
Move over, anti-ESG month. Democrats are mounting a counteroffensive — an anti-anti-ESG push under the banner of a hip new thing called “capitalism.”
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee have spent years decrying the influence of social responsibility and environmental sustainability efforts anywhere in the financial system. They’ve got a lot of hearings lined up to that effect this week, and we wrote about their first one Wednesday.
Democrats aren’t letting Republicans control the narrative unopposed, however. They’re hammering the GOP for the party’s typical ambivalence toward climate change, for one.
But progressives — led by Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Sean Casten (D-Ill.) — are also spending a lot of time talking about the importance of free markets and free enterprise. They’re sounding a lot like the Republicans of yesteryear in the process.
Several Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee flogged the “party of Reagan” for mobilizing against ESG, emissions disclosures and more when broad swaths of private investors have demonstrated keen interest in what a changing climate will do to the economy.
“The party of Ronald Reagan, the party of Milton Friedman, is afraid to defend capitalism,” Casten said during the hearing. “You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
The show didn’t stop there. Following the hearing, the Sustainable Investment Caucus convened a press conference on the House Triangle with signs urging lawmakers to protect “America’s freedom to invest.”
There, they deployed former Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison (D), who now serves as the state’s attorney general. After serving as Democrats’ one witness during the morning’s hearing, Ellison told the press conference:
Republicans, of course, disagree. They say the Biden administration’s approach to financial regulation and climate, particularly as led by Chair Gary Gensler and the Securities and Exchange Commission, is fundamentally bad for business.
“If ESG is capitalism, why do we need the government to interfere in the free market?” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) asked during the hearing Wednesday. “That’s what the SEC is doing.”
The SEC’s climate rule does have its share of issues, to be clear. The 500-page proposal to require public companies to calculate several types of their carbon emissions was issued well over a year ago, and finalization has been delayed until roughly sometime this fall.
Even a post-hearing press conference wasn’t enough for Waters and Casten on Wednesday. Just hours later, Waters convened a ESG roundtable with Brooke Lierman, Maryland’s comptroller; Shiva Rajgopal, a Columbia Business School professor; Ben Cushing, campaign director at the Sierra Club; and Bhakti Mirchandani, a managing director at Trinity Church Wall Street.
It’s important to remember that lawmakers’ plans to limit ESG — or entrench it, depending on your persuasion — aren’t going anywhere with split control of Congress. But state legislatures have been plenty active on their own when it comes to supporting or attacking ESG.
When it comes to the fight this month, we think state lawmakers of both parties will take at least some inspiration from their federal counterparts — for better and worse.
— Brendan Pedersen
THE CAMPAIGN
Congressional Leadership Fund and the American Action Network raised a combined $35 million in the first half of 2023, $13.4 million than their off-year tally at the same stage in 2021.
The two outside groups, affiliated with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are the biggest spenders in House Republican politics. Of course, CLF and AAN raised massive amounts last cycle yet fell short of the anticipated “red wave.”
CLF hauled in $19.1 million during the first half of 2023 and has $17.85 million on hand.
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) raised over $1.1 million in the second quarter of 2023. Steel has raised over $2.3 million in the first six months of the cycle. It’s another big haul for a Republican in a district President Joe Biden won in 2020.
Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), another Biden-seat Republican, raised over $815,000 in Q2 and has over $1.6 million on hand.
Frontline Democratic Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.) raised $515,000 in the second quarter and has over $770,000 on hand.
— Max Cohen
CONGRESSIONAL WOMEN’S SOFTBALL GAME
Press defeats members in Congressional Women’s Softball Game
The press team got their revenge on the members of Congress Wednesday night, defeating the lawmakers 15-9 after losing last year’s game in heartbreaking fashion.
Our very own outfielder Mica Soellner went 2-3 with two infield singles for the Bad News Babes.
The charity game raised funds and awareness for young breast cancer survivors. Punchbowl News was proud to be a sponsor of the annual charity game, which supports the Young Survival Coalition.
Climate protesters demanding the end of fossil fuels forced play to be stopped for roughly 10 minutes early on in the game.
— Max Cohen
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