The Archive

THE SPEAKER

Johnson sees ‘cognitive decline’ in Biden, open to impeachment

Speaker Mike Johnson gave his first national interview on Thursday night. And the Louisiana Republican made more news than he probably meant to.

Johnson agreed with Fox News host Sean Hannity’s suggestion that President Joe Biden had suffered “cognitive decline,” a surprising comment given that the speaker had just met the president for the first time Thursday.

Johnson also sounded open to moving ahead with the Biden impeachment inquiry.

And the new speaker made clear he wants to separate any new money for Ukraine from aid to Israel, a position that puts him on a collision course with Biden, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and pro-Ukraine Republicans.

This will be among the big challenges for Johnson. He’s now a national figure, the highest-ranking Republican in the country. Everything he says will be parsed throughout Washington and even internationally. So there will be some adjustment for him.

Here’s the Hannity-Johnson exchange on Biden’s mental condition:

Johnson may not see it as a personal insult, but we’re pretty sure the White House will.

On Ukraine, Johnson was asked about splitting off $61 billion in new aid for Ukraine sought by Biden from the $14 billion requested for Israel. Johnson backs that approach — a huge problem for pro-Ukraine lawmakers — but he gave a nuanced answer worth exploring.

“I told the staff at the White House today that our consensus among House Republicans is we need to bifurcate those issues,” Johnson declared of Ukraine and Israel funding.

Johnson said Reps. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and other GOP lawmakers have drafted a document with “12 critical questions for the White House to answer as a condition for additional support” for Ukraine. Johnson gave this document to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who is “studying it.”

Johnson even considering Ukraine aid is something of a victory for the White House.

Johnson, though, said House Republicans would move a $14 billion standalone bill for Israel. They’ll cut spending somewhere else to offset the cost of this package, another change.

And finally on impeachment, Johnson — a former member of the Judiciary Committee — made it sound like he believed that Biden had accepted bribes from foreign sources doing business with Hunter and James Biden, the president’s son and brother.

“Because if, in fact, all the evidence leads to where we believe that it will, that’s very likely impeachable offenses,” Johnson said.

— John Bresnahan

THE SENATE

Republicans cool to new push to circumvent Tuberville blockade

Senate Republicans say they’re eager to end Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) months-long blockade of military promotions. But they’re not quite ready to embrace a new proposal aimed at speeding up the confirmation process.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and several Democrats are preparing to send a resolution to the Senate Rules Committee that would temporarily allow multiple promotions to be voted on at the same time, we scooped Wednesday. This would alleviate the need to vote on each individually, which would take months of floor time.

But interviews with more than a dozen GOP senators — even those who oppose Tuberville’s moves — revealed a reluctance to support anything that could be seen as setting a new precedent that weakens individual senators’ power.

“The Senate doesn’t just run on rules, it runs on precedents as well,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), the Rules Committee’s top Republican, told us. “This would allow a majority to decide, at any time, that a member’s privileges could be overruled by a one-time exemption. I think that’s dangerous.”

The war in Israel has upped the pressure for the Senate to act on the 300-plus promotions Tuberville has been blocking, including two Joint Chiefs of Staff vacancies and a dozen U.S. Central Command positions. (Joint Chiefs and combatant commander nominees would still require individual votes under Sinema’s plan.)

We first reported that Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) is expected to soon force votes on the two Joint Chiefs positions — another sign Republicans are getting restless.

But Sullivan and several other Republicans said they worry the Sinema plan, which would require GOP support on the floor, could set the stage for the so-called “nuclear option” — abolishing the Senate’s filibuster. Others suggested Democrats were forcing a choice between a temporary fix and going nuclear.

Sullivan was cool to Sinema’s resolution but said he wants to find a way to swiftly approve more than just the upper-level promotions.

“As we get into very dangerous times… the urgency of that global fix, in my view, is really important,” Sullivan told us. “We’ve just got to get compromise on both sides.”

Yet Tuberville’s unwillingness to bend has forced Republicans into a politically uncomfortable position.

Tuberville warned it would be political “suicide” for Republicans to back the Democratic resolution because “the number one thing that Republicans, most of us, stand for is [being] pro-life.” His blockade is a protest of the Pentagon’s abortion policy.

“The only power we have in the minority… is holds — to get the other group’s attention,” he added. “So they’re going to burn down the Senate rules for this without negotiation?”

On the other hand, Sinema’s involvement could give credibility to the effort, given that she previously helped Republicans preserve the Senate’s filibuster.

That’s why some GOP leaders aren’t dismissing this out of hand or whipping against it, preferring to stay on the sidelines for now. Senate Minority Whip John Thune, who is close with Sinema, told us her proposal is “one of a number of things that are being talked about to try and break the logjam.”

Republicans have acknowledged the Pentagon’s concerns that the blockade is harming military readiness. Others, like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, say they oppose Tuberville’s tactic because it’s punishing non-political military officers for decisions of political appointees.

“I agree with Kyrsten that we’ve got to come up with a solution,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a member of leadership. “We’ve got to start moving promotions. It’s a good-faith effort, I just think it’s going to require broader support.”

— Andrew Desiderio

What Speaker Johnson means for financial policy

Plenty of senators have been googling “Mike Johnson” since he ascended to the speaker’s office this week. Bank lobbyists have been doing the same.

The 51-year-old Republican from Louisiana is a mystery to the financial world’s most influential advocates. More than one lobbyist we asked described Johnson as a “black box.”

“General sentiment in our world is that he is a totally unknown figure,” one official working for a top bank trade group said.

That being said, Johnson’s no stranger to their campaign contributions. The American Bankers Association, for instance, has donated to Johnson’s congressional campaigns since his first run in 2016 and in every election since.

Some lobbyists told us the real story of Johnson’s speakership is less about his new job than the position that Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) no longer has. Being speaker pro tem for the past three weeks took McHenry away from the House Financial Services Committee, where he serves as chair.

Wall Street was excited at the prospect that McHenry could be elected speaker pro tem into January or beyond. But bankers will certainly be happy to have him back on the committee as well.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, McHenry made it clear he was excited to get back to the Financial Services panel. “I’ve got a stack of policies that I want to get into end-of-year packages,” the North Carolina Republican said.

But let’s be clear: Johnson does have preferences that could ripple through banking policy.

The most obvious example is cannabis banking. Johnson voted against the SAFE Banking Act in 2019 when it passed the House for the first time. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was one of nearly a hundred Republicans who voted for it, which made advocates bullish about eventually getting a vote on the floor. Johnson’s ascendance seems to make that outcome less likely.

Then there’s flood insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program is a $20-billion fiscal mess that Congress has put off fixing for decades. Few states have as much of an interest in the NFIP as Johnson’s home base, the flood-prone state of Louisiana.

However, an interest in flood insurance from the speaker of the House doesn’t necessarily mean the policy is any more likely to get reformed. In fact, it might mean the opposite. Coastal state lawmakers like Majority Leader Steve Scalise have resisted efforts to raise homeowners’ flood insurance rates for years.

— Brendan Pedersen and John Bresnahan

THE FUTURE OF…

ICYMI: The race to influence cybersecurity policy as concerns grow

We wrapped up our series, The Future of Cybersecurity, on Tuesday. Our final segment, The Megaphone, highlighted efforts by Big Tech, states and others to influence cybersecurity policy.

Those efforts include aggressive lobbying by mega companies like Meta and Oracle, expensive television and online advertising and states drafting a framework to address their cybersecurity concerns.

We dedicated this Cybersecurity Awareness Month to covering the issue given how pervasive cybersecurity concerns are in everyday people’s lives, business operations, national security and more.

The Senate is taking the lead in crafting legislative solutions, driven in part by the urgency to protect the 2024 elections. There are also growing concerns about the safety of children online and the need to address the promises and perils of artificial intelligence.

As we wrote earlier this month, any substantial action on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence will require a host of different players to at least agree broadly on the policy parameters.

Read the full series here and listen to the podcasts too.

— Elvina Nawaguna

SANCTION WATCH

It’s finally happening. A group of New York Republicans are moving to kick Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) out of Congress. And this time they expect to actually vote on their expulsion resolution, instead of voting to table the motion.

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.) introduced the measure on Wednesday, flanked by New York GOP Reps. Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Marc Molinaro.

Democrats moved to expel Santos in May, but Republicans — including the New Yorkers who filed the expulsion resolution Thursday — voted to refer the resolution to the Ethics panel instead.

But the DCCC is still trying to ding the group of endangered House Republicans over the issue, despite the latest news. In a new social media video, the House Democratic campaign arm is slamming the New York GOP contingent for voting to refer the matter to Ethics in May.

The House Ethics Committee is currently investigating Santos at the same time as the federal criminal case plays out. Several Republicans have said Congress should wait for Santos to be convicted or for the Ethics investigation to finish before taking action against the freshman lawmaker.

— Max Cohen