The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

Congress limps into August

GOP defense hawks come to terms with a VP Vance

The Vault: Hill Dems want Harris to stick with the tax playbook

House sets up Trump shooting task force

THE TOP

Congress limps into August

Happy Thursday morning.

Congress was historically productive during the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, passing landmark bipartisan bills on infrastructure, gun safety and semiconductor chip funding.

Democrats jammed through hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding during the 117th Congress to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spurred massive foreign aid packages. A same-sex marriage bill became law (which is kind of shocking looking back on it).

The 118th Congress, on the other hand, has been, well, pretty weak. And Biden — with his own party rebelling against him — decided to “pass the torch” to Vice President Kamala Harris just over 100 days from the election.

With a GOP-run House and a Democratic-controlled Senate, there’s been little real progress on the challenges facing the country. Bitterly divided House Republicans dumped former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year for cutting a debt limit and spending deal with Biden, and they would’ve dumped Speaker Mike Johnson this year if Democrats hadn’t stopped them.

The appropriations process is broken. Congress punted on the farm bill. Former President Donald Trump and Johnson blew up a bipartisan Senate immigration and border security deal they didn’t like earlier this year, guaranteeing no congressional action on the issue until 2025 at the earliest.

House Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — just the second impeachment of a Cabinet official in U.S. history — only to see the Senate swat it away. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was convicted on a slew of bribery and corruption charges and will resign next month after one final paycheck. Multiple House members were indicted and one of them — former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) — was expelled. A wave of members have announced they’re retiring, fed up with the toxic partisanship on the Hill.

There was a brief burst of activity this spring as Johnson finally faced down his right flank and pushed through two massive spending packages, as well as $60 billion in new Ukraine aid. That was what almost cost Johnson his job. A TikTok divestiture bill passed. FISA Section 702 and the FAA were reauthorized.

The Senate is on the brink of passing a landmark crackdown on Big Tech and social media platforms. Johnson has spoken positively on the measure, but we’ll see if anything happens.

As the summer heated up, and Election Day loomed larger, bipartisan cooperation pretty much dried up too. We told you it would happen, especially after the Ukraine vote.

Consider what’s been left on the cutting-room floor in the Senate: the House-passed Wyden-Smith tax bill, the railway safety bill, cannabis banking legislation and more. Most of these have been dead for some time, but the window to even hold “show” votes has pretty much closed.

The House will adjourn today until mid-September with only five of the 12 annual spending bills passed — and those on party-line votes. The Senate will be gone after next week. It hasn’t passed any spending bills, although the Senate Appropriations Committee is marking up several bills today.

Lawmakers will need to pass a CR when they come back in September in order to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month. House GOP conservatives want to attach the SAVE Act — a bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — to that CR and dare Senate Democrats to shut down the government five weeks before Election Day, but we doubt they can really make it happen.

Johnson hasn’t decided yet whether he prefers the House pass a CR until December or January. Some hardline conservatives want to kick the funding deadline until next year when, they hope, Trump will be back in the Oval Office. Other Republicans, including House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), don’t want to gum up the opening months of a new Trump presidency with a government funding fight.

Here’s Johnson:

House and Senate leaders also need to pass the annual defense authorization bill during the lame-duck session.

Yet there was one last brief moment of bipartisanship late Wednesday night.

By a 416-0 vote, the House set up a task force to look into the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump (see below). That episode left two people dead, including the shooter, while Trump narrowly avoided being killed.

But after several GOP lawmakers made ugly comments this week about Harris as a “DEI hire,” House Republicans plan to leave town today having pushed through a resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.”

Also: Johnson and a number of House Republicans went to Union Station Wednesday night to replace the American flags that protestors took down during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

— John Bresnahan, Andrew Desiderio and Jake Sherman

THE SENATE

GOP defense hawks come to terms with a VP Vance

Senate GOP defense hawks went to battle with Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) over his opposition to a Ukraine aid package, warning that the Ohio Republican’s “isolationist” views were dangerous and short-sighted.

But the party’s hawks are downplaying the impact of former President Donald Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate, even though the freshman senator has become the face of the Trumpian “America First” foreign policy doctrine on Capitol Hill. Vance has led the charge against efforts to pass new Ukraine funding and hasn’t been afraid to antagonize the GOP’s more traditional defense hawks.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), for example, told us he had faith that Trump — not Vance — would be running things.

“I think that Team Trump is going to set the foreign policy of the next administration,” said Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I am very high on JD Vance and I think he’s for a strong national defense… Clearly we are not 100% together on the Ukraine issue, but I think President Trump is closer to my position.”

But Trump has fanned the flames of the anti-Ukraine right for years, and Wicker was among the loudest GOP voices pushing for the mega aid package that Congress passed earlier this year. Wicker and other Republicans routinely note, however, that Trump didn’t do much to try to block the Ukraine aid bill even as his allies excoriated the effort.

What about 2025? Trump has said that if reelected, he wants to push Ukraine and Russia toward peace talks. Ukrainian leaders and many Republicans in Washington oppose that because it would likely require Kyiv to cede territory to Moscow.

So it’s possible that a President Trump and a Vice President Vance could be at odds with a GOP-controlled Senate next year when the time comes to re-up Ukraine aid. In that case, it would require a strong majority of Republicans willing to stand up to Trump.

“This is a depressing thought, but the world is so primed for greater challenges that no one will be able to afford to be an isolationist as the world gets more dangerous for America,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who delivered an emotional plea for Ukraine in April while GOP opponents like Vance were trying to delay final passage of the aid bill.

Moran noted that Vance has argued the United States should prioritize the Indo-Pacific region. But the Kansas Republican said he hopes Vance “gets to the point in which we see” that the outcome of the war in Ukraine has a direct impact on would-be aggressors in the Indo-Pacific, including China.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who’s running to be the next Senate GOP leader, said these types of debates within the party aren’t new, and that they’re “healthy.”

Cornyn also knocked the Biden administration for its slow delivery of advanced weapons to Ukraine.

“I think that’s the biggest challenge right now,” Cornyn said “We’ll deal with the rest next year.”

The view from a Never-Trumper: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has said she’s voting for Nikki Haley for president this year. Collins criticized what she called the “more isolationist strain in the Republican Party right now.”

But Collins acknowledged the selection of Vance could help Trump with certain pockets of voters.

“JD Vance will help President Trump appeal to a lot of younger voters, people from military families, working families. And [he] brings some vibrancy to the ticket,” Collins told us. “And he’s a very skilled debater. I know that — having talked on the floor about Ukraine.”

— Andrew Desiderio and Max Cohen

The Vault: Hill Dems want Harris to stick with the tax playbook

It’s Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign now. But when it comes to taxes, Hill Democrats want her to stick with the same message President Joe Biden was sounding before he dropped out of the race.

Democratic lawmakers see the tax policy message Biden and fellow Democrats have been running as a winning hand. They want to argue that the Trump tax cuts — which former President Donald Trump wants to extend next year — benefited the rich and big corporations, while Democrats would reverse that trend.

And Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 per year? Democrats on the tax-writing committees told us they want Harris to stick with that promise.

“She’s got like 110 days. I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said.

“When it comes to taxes, I think President Biden had the right plans at the beginning,” added Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), citing the $400,000 pledge, undoing Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest households and investing money in child care, the child tax credit and programs to help Americans buy homes and afford rent.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also said that’s the sort of message he expects Harris to convey to voters.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) urged similar messaging. Jayapal believes Harris should talk about her work on taxes with Biden, including on the Inflation Reduction Act.

“I think that she just is going to be able to connect on all of the pieces of the work that she already did with President Biden, but also the 100-day agenda that he started to lay out in Detroit,” Jayapal said of Harris. “And I think she’s got the chops to talk about it with communities that probably are disproportionately burdened.”

Other lawmakers are hopeful Harris will spotlight key tax issues they’ve pushed for, which generally align with priorities for the party.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) wants to see Harris run on a permanent expansion of the child tax credit, for example.

And Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) said he’s hopeful that after living in and representing California, Harris will put a focus on housing. Panetta backs a broad range of tax policies to incentivize more affordable housing, including for middle-income Americans. That’s a bigger focus in high-cost states like California.

The swing state view: Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who’s running for reelection in a key battleground state, didn’t want to weigh in on how Harris should message on taxes.

Nonetheless, Casey said he wants Harris to come to Pennsylvania to talk about taxes and the economy. Casey plans to tout Democratic priorities like expanding the child tax credit and raising taxes for billionaires and big corporations during the rest of his reelection run.

Casey also noted that the expiring Trump tax cuts next year create the circumstances for the “most important tax bill in at least 25 years.”

“I’m going to be campaigning on winning that tax fight for middle class families and kids,” Casey said.

— Laura Weiss

HOUSE INVESTIGATIONS

House sets up Trump shooting task force

The House unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday night establishing a task force to investigate the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, in a rare moment of unity for the chamber. There wasn’t a single no vote. The final tally was 416-0.

Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will now appoint members to the task force, which will be split 7-6 between Republicans and Democrats. The panel will have subpoena power and be responsible for delivering a report and potential legislative recommendations no later than Dec. 13.

While a number of committees have begun probing the security failures in the run-up to the July 13 Trump rally where the shooting took place, the commission is ready to take the reins of the high-profile investigation, much to the chagrin of some committee leaders.

Johnson is expected to unveil his selections for the panel this afternoon and has been working behind the scenes to ensure bipartisan cooperation with Jeffries. But there was some drama before the picks were even announced.

The House Freedom Caucus balked at the idea of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the former chair of the House’s Jan. 6 Select Committee, from serving on the task force. Johnson then told us he didn’t think Thompson would be a “good choice.”

The only problem? Thompson said he has no interest in serving on the panel. “I don’t want to be on it,” Thompson told us.

Still, Jeffries’ office sent along a statement blasting the House Freedom Caucus’ demands. Here’s his spokesperson, Christie Stephenson:

— Melanie Zanona and John Bresnahan

THE CAMPAIGN

Democrat Monica Tranel, who’s running for Montana’s 1st District, is up with a new Olympics-themed ad.

Tranel — a competitive rower who participated in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics — rows in the ad while talking about her plans to “go after out-of-state corporations that buy up our land.”

Tranel is challenging Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.). Tranel lost to Zinke by three points in 2022.

— Max Cohen

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