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Happy Monday morning.

This will be another hectic week in Washington. We wanted to take this small slice of your morning to lay out what we expect will unfold during the next few days.

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SCOTUS. The Senate Judiciary Committee will meet today to begin the process of moving Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination for the Supreme Court to the floor. Under the committee’s rules, Judiciary Committee Republicans have the ability to delay the committee’s consideration of Jackson until next Monday – and they’ll do so.

In the interim, Republicans on the panel have been pushing for the disclosure of sentencing reports from cases involving child pornography that Jackson presided over as a district court judge. Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin has said he’s opposed to the release of these records and won’t delay the proceedings over the issue.

With all that said, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is backing Jackson, and her nomination is in strong shape. No Democrats are opposed, and the White House is still searching for GOP votes.

Jackson is still working lawmakers in the Capitol. She’ll meet with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) at 2 p.m. today. More senatorial one-on-ones with the Supreme Court hopeful are expected throughout the week

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The Scavino-Navarro contempt vote. The Jan. 6 Committee will vote tonight on a criminal contempt referral to the Justice Department for former Trump aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro. This motion will easily be approved by the committee and it will pass the House – if it gets to the floor. Here’s the report outlining the criminal contempt referral for Scavino and Navarro by the select committee, which was released last night.

The House has already approved criminal contempt referrals against former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Steve Bannon, the one-time aide to former President Donald Trump. The Justice Department has yet to take any action against the pair.

The select committee also adopted a criminal contempt referral against former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was closely involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, but that resolution has never made it to the House floor.

→	Budget week. President Joe Biden will release his 2023 budget this morning, which will take up a lot of oxygen on Capitol Hill this week.

House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) will hold a pen-and-pad meeting with reporters at 3 p.m. And newly confirmed OMB Director Shalanda Young will be in the White House briefing room today along with Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.Young will also testify before the House and Senate Budget committees on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively on the spending blueprint.

Remember: Budgets are important for one main reason – they’re reflections of the values of the party putting it forward. The proposal will become a punching bag for Republicans, and it is oftentimes politically unpalatable for the party in power.

We already know several key points on the FY 2023 budget plan:

1) The White House is going to be celebrating the big drop in the federal deficit from last year to this. Of course, in 2021 the federal government was dealing with the worst of the pandemic and Democrats enacted a huge spending bill to deal with the crisis, but this is politics, so you take wins wherever you can.

2) Biden is pushing a “billionaires tax,” something several Democrats have previously proposed during this Congress, including Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.);

3) Biden is going to seek a big boost in defense spending, per Bloomberg. Coming on top of the sizable Pentagon plus-up in the recent omnibus spending package, this is going to be tough for progressives to take. Watch for Republicans try to outbid the White House on this front.

Here’s how the White House describes their proposal:

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USICA. The Senate will finish work on USICA – the chips/competitiveness package – tonight. Technically, senators will vote on final passage to amend the House bill, attaching bipartisan Senate language. That will then be sent to the House, clearing the way for the two chambers to begin a formal conference negotiation. The negotiation could begin later this week. Lawmakers are hoping they can resolve their differences on the package, which is designed to aid U.S. high-tech research and manufacturing to compete with China.

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Covid funding. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer continued negotiating this weekend over the contours of a new Covid aid package. Remember – Romney’s demand is that the White House take account of the unspent money from previous Covid packages before seeking new funding. Democrats seem upbeat that a deal could be reached this week and a vote could happen. We’ll take a wait-and-see approach here.

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Oil ban and trade relations with Russia and Belarus. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked consideration of the bill to end oil imports from Russia and rescind trade relations with Russia and Belarus. Senate Democratic leadership plans to offer several unanimous consent agreements to put pressure on Paul to end his blockade.

→	Ukraine briefing. Biden administration officials will be on Capitol Hill Wednesday at 3 p.m. to give senators a classified briefing.

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Don Young. The body of the late Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) will lie in state in Statuary Hall on Tuesday. Young, the longest-serving House Republican in U.S. history, died on March 18. Young represented Alaska in Congress from March 1973 until his death. There will be a formal ceremony tomorrow with Young’s family present.

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Also worth noting: White House COVID watch. Deputy White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre – who traveled to Europe with President Joe Biden – disclosed Sunday night that she had tested positive for Covid. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tested positive for Covid last week and couldn’t make the trip to Europe.

“This afternoon, after returning from the President’s trip to Europe, I took a PCR test. That test came back positive,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement released Sunday night.

“I last saw the President during a socially distanced meeting yesterday, and the President is not considered a close contact as defined by CDC guidance. I am sharing the news of my positive test today out of an abundance of transparency.”

Jean-Pierre, who is vaccinated and boosted, said she has “only experienced mild symptoms.” She’ll work from home and return to the White House following the five-day isolation period and a negative test.

One more nugget for you: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce, told us at the GOP retreat in Florida last week if Republicans take the majority, her committee will invite the executives from social media platforms like Gettr, Parler and Truth Social to testify about the “challenges they face” in getting traction in the marketplace.

→	Stay tuned: A special edition of The Daily Punch with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will post this afternoon. Listen here.

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