The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

A tale of two banking chairs

Staking out Hegseth

Reconciliation, CEOs and taxes – oh my!

From lawmaker to advocate, a father pleads with Capitol Hill for action

THE TOP

A tale of two banking chairs

Welcome to The Readback, our weekend digest featuring the best of Punchbowl News this week – a quick roundup of all our scoops, analysis and Capitol Hill insight you won’t find anywhere else. We’ve also included a few of our favorite outside reads from the week.

Vault takeover: If you care about the U.S. economy, this was a big week for you and the congressional committees tasked with shaping its future. Change is afoot.

The news of the week rests with Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), who was chosen to lead the House Financial Services Committee and succeed outgoing Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). That outcome was somewhat surprising but also, from a 30,000 foot level, totally predictable.

It would be a mistake to lose track of the major change coming from the other side of the Capitol, too. Under Republican control, the Senate Banking Committee will be led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). We wrote about what will make Scott different from past GOP chairs in the Vault Quarterly which, like The Readback, is free!

Scott and Hill will make quite the pair going into the 119th Congress. Their styles are drastically different as lawmakers go – potentially opposites! We’re not convinced that’s a bad thing.

Hill is a former banker with decades of experience. His knowledge of the financial system is practically unparalleled among rank-and-file GOP members. His expertise was the foundation of his pitch.

Scott, on the other hand, is a true creature of politics who loves to fundraise and campaign. He’s a would-have-been preacher who stumbled into politics, the story goes.

Where Hill’s policy preferences have been formed and sharpened over decades, Scott is flexible, collaborative and deferential to his Banking colleagues. Scott is also far more aligned with President-elect Donald Trump, forming an important bridge between Congress and the White House.

Both lawmakers have also gotten significant legislative wins over the years. Scott has shown a capacity for dealmaking, including the ongoing effort to restrict outbound investment in China. Hill played a crucial role in the passage of the REPO Act, a part of the U.S. strategy to help finance Ukraine’s war with Russia.

What’s coming next will be different, though, and a much greater challenge. The crypto industry is anxious for legislation that will give them a firmer foothold in the regulated U.S. financial system. Both Scott and Hill have signaled an interest in that, but it will be a huge endeavor.

Let’s be clear: To get stuff done in Congress, you need political chops and policy chops. Even that isn’t often enough to muscle through legislation through both chambers. But if Hill and Scott can find a complimentary rhythm in the 119th Congress, we could see real change come to the U.S. financial system.

What I’m reading: The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson profiled Argentine President Javier Milei. It’s been more than a year since Milei was elected on a platform of taking a sometimes literal chainsaw to the country’s beleaguered economy, which has struggled under astronomical inflation and a sovereign debt crisis.

Come for the dispatch from an anarcho-capitalist state in the making. Stay for Milton, Robert, Lucas and Murray, the quartet of cloned dogs named after famous economists. (Just don’t ask about Conan the Mastiff.)

– Brendan Pedersen

Listen to The Readback Podcast! Enjoying a behind the scenes look at how the biggest stories of the week came to be? Punchbowl News’ Max Cohen takes you even further behind the scenes in our newest podcast: The Readback. Listen now!

Staking out Hegseth

This week, the place to be for Senate reporters was lurking outside of Republican offices. Tucked away in the sprawling Capitol complex, a hive of cameras, journalists and security guards followed the every move of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees.

At the outset of the week, our main focus was on Pete Hegseth, Trump’s selection to lead the Defense Department. Hegseth’s nomination had been marred by allegations of sexual assault, alcohol abuse and financial mismanagement. Hegseth denied any wrongdoing, but the negative coverage made GOP allies nervous.

Hegseth mounted an aggressive campaign to save his nomination, starting with scheduling face-to-face meetings with the senators most likely to sink his bid: Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

On Monday, I staked out — the reporter term for waiting for hours in a hallway — the second meeting between Hegseth and Ernst. During the first meeting between the two last Thursday, Ernst snuck out of a door that was down the hallway from where most reporters had been stationed.

The evasive maneuver fooled much of the press corps, allowing the Iowa Republican and prominent Hegseth skeptic to get into an elevator without anyone asking her a question. The media sprinted down the stairs to catch up with Ernst as she walked through the Russell basement. But all she said to us was that she had a “frank and thorough” conversation.

Flash forward to Monday, and I was fortunate when I remembered Ernst’s earlier maneuver. I stood outside the door she left from last week, and sure enough, Ernst emerged from that exit after a lengthy meeting with Hegseth. I was the first reporter to ask her to clarify her statement, which was emailed to the press minutes before, that she would support Hegseth through the nomination process.

Did this mean a yes vote on the floor, I wondered? Ernst cautiously referred me back to her statement.

But the positive signs from Ernst signalled a wider “vibe shift” in favor of Hegseth from Senate GOP moderates.

Collins praised Hegseth for taking the time to engage in a “good and substantive” discussion. Murkowski initially dodged the media, but later told reporters it was “a good exchange.”

Contrast this reception to the immediate opposition aimed at former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), and it’s clear Hegseth is no longer dead in the water. A likely fractious public hearing still awaits. But Republicans are increasingly confident about his chances, a significant reversal from just last week.

What I’m reading/watching/listening to: I’m a little late to this, but I just started reading Ron Chernow’s comprehensive biography of Alexander Hamilton. I am obsessed with the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical and digging into the history is a blast.

– Max Cohen

Reconciliation, CEOs and taxes – oh my!

Sometimes in the news business it rains, and then sometimes it pours. This week was a downpour when it comes to tax and other economic news.

Four times a year we produce our Vault Quarterly edition, so that always makes things busier as we zoom out with some special tax and financial services coverage. However, the 2025 tax debate is also in full swing, Republicans are filling key committee roles and there’s a flurry of activity to get anything that can possibly get done into the CR, the final train to leave the legislative station this year.

Plus, I couldn’t miss our annual holiday party! So here are a couple of snapshots of some of the news I was jostling between during a wild week of tax reporting.

My big quarterly interview: The quarterly edition featured my interview with Joshua Bolten, CEO of the Business Roundtable and a major lobbying force for corporate America in Washington.

I met with Bolten at BRT’s offices over at The Wharf. We got into the tax priorities that the group is lobbying for next year along with tariffs, the debt and overhauls of permitting rules.

One of the interesting dynamics right now is that President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House has companies breathing a sigh of relief on the corporate tax rate. But if Trump follows through on any kind of big widespread tariffs across imports, that’s going to cause heartburn.

On a fun note, while I was over at BRT for the interview, I took a minute to look at the trade group’s signature wall filled with the names of CEOs leading the biggest companies in the country. Some of the signatures had flair like big initials or fancy cursive, but some were pretty relatable – basically just scribbles. CEOs, they can be just a little like us sometimes!

Reconciliation: I also spent the week on all things reconciliation. Republicans are already divided over the best strategy for getting Trump’s priorities to his desk next year when they’ve got control of the House and Senate.

If you listen closely, there are at least a few different versions of what these packages, including tax, spending cuts, border security and energy could look like. Republicans want the same things at a high-level view. The question is how to divide all those policy priorities up between one or two bills, which could ultimately decide what gets done and when. And these are just the versions getting public airtime.

It’s going to be a wild year for tax fans.

What I’m listening to: We had our Punchbowl News holiday party this week so I’ve still got some of the karaoke songs still stuck in my head! The 10-minute version of Taylor Swift’s All Too Well, Flowers by Miley Cyrus and a couple of Chappell Roan songs were some of the highlights.

– Laura Weiss

From lawmaker to advocate, a father pleads with Capitol Hill for action

Brandon Guffey has an Abe Lincoln beard, an accent he refers to as “universal Southern” thanks to family across the region and sad red eyes when he talks about his oldest son.

Guffey, a Republican South Carolina state lawmaker, was on Capitol Hill this week pushing for the House to pass the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act on social media design and the Take It Down Act on deepfake porn. He took up the issues after his 17-year-old son, Gavin, died by suicide in 2022 following an online sextortion scheme.

Guffey’s story is undeniably moving and he hopes both his legislative know-how and Gavin’s story convince Speaker Mike Johnson to advance KOSA in particular. Johnson, despite pressure from Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr., has said the bill needs more tweaks to preserve free (and, frankly, conservative) speech.

The bill’s sponsors say they’ve worked through the issues, especially with Musk’s recent input as a social media platform owner. KOSA’s time is next year, Johnson says.

In a great example of horseshoe theory, Johnson has allies among some LGBTQ groups. They say that, under KOSA, social media firms would decide to lessen litigation risk by erasing resources for transgender kids. That’s another group of youth facing not just an alarming mental health crisis but determined opponents in the incoming administration.

The reality is that there are almost always kids to consider when making policy for 338 or so million people.

Guffey said being a state lawmaker — and one who often has to work through some of those competing interests — actually makes his KOSA advocacy all the more exasperating.

“Seeing behind the scenes of how the sausage is made makes it very frustrating whenever you have something very personal to you” caught up in that process, he said.

Guffey didn’t name names, but he was emphatic he sees “political games getting played by” people who he “once looked up to or had a lot of respect for.”

With the final KOSA and Take It Down windows closing for this year, parents and kids themselves have been showing up on the Hill.

“As an elected official, I can tell you, I might have a card dropped off with staff or an issue that’s left on my desk,” Guffey said. “Staff is not going to… be able to share that message the same way as that grieving parent.”

I spend most of my time with lawmakers, policy staffers, lobbyists and thinktankers. Plenty of them do what they do “for the children.” It’s hard to imagine any of us could do our jobs well without a little bit of distance from grief and fear like Guffey’s or the parents of transgender kids, or recognition that people don’t always split neatly on these issues.

I don’t pretend to be able to balance parents’ concerns, nor is it my role. Sometimes it’s important to approach policy, though, with a thought for how personal it can become.

What I’m watching: I have a few wonderful people in my life who tend to get overwhelmed by holiday expectations, so “Christmas Vacation,” complete with all of Clark Griswold’s many breakdown rants is particularly important for annual rewatching.

– Ben Brody