The Archive

IN THIS EDITION

What’s on Schumer’s and McConnell’s minds

Chaos follows Trump to the NABJ conference

The tax bill got its day in the sun — at last

Reading the Fed tea leaves

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What’s on Schumer’s and McConnell’s minds

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.

Take it away Andrew…

Let’s just call July 2024 what it was — weird.

No, not the type of “weird” you may have read about last week. Just flat-out weird. A lot happened in a very short amount of time. Let’s review.

— Democrats agonized over how to deal with President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance at a debate with former President Donald Trump, leading to Biden deciding to step aside as the Democratic nominee.

— Trump was almost assassinated on live television, leading to the resignation of the Secret Service director and sprawling congressional investigations into the security failures that allowed a gunman to get close enough to the podium.

— Republicans had their convention in Milwaukee. Trump announced Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate.

— Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was convicted on all counts in his corruption and bribery trial. He’s resigning from the Senate later this month.

So you can imagine why we had a lot of questions this week for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Schumer sat down with a number of outlets, including Punchbowl News. McConnell, meanwhile, talked to us exclusively. Both men reflected on the last month — and looked ahead to the November elections — in vastly different ways.

On Wednesday, we walked into Schumer’s office to find the New York Democrat in a jovial mood — understandably so.

Schumer’s July started off flat-out terrible. Democrats were in full-on panic mode after the debate, having convinced themselves that they’d lose the Senate, House and White House if Biden stayed on as their presidential nominee. Schumer himself refused to comment publicly on the internal chaos, which he had a front-row seat to.

During our interview, Schumer’s face lit up as he was talking about the 180-degree turnaround in Democrats’ enthusiasm after Biden dropped out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The veep’s fundraising numbers in the initial days were off the charts — and she raised a staggering $310 million in July. Suddenly, a month that started out with anguish was ending with some hope.

But… maybe too much hope? Schumer boldly predicted that not only will Democrats defend all of their Senate incumbents, but they’ll gain a seat or two. He named Texas and Florida as potential Democratic pickups. Bres immediately interjected: “Come on.”

Republicans are heavily favored to take back the Senate, and the smart money is on exactly that. But GOP senators keep reminding themselves — and sometimes us! — that they still have time to somehow screw it up. They’re referring to the past few cycles when they say this.

OK, so how was McConnell? As we chronicled in Friday’s AM edition, McConnell wanted to talk about Biden’s Supreme Court reform plan, panning it as a dangerous and unconstitutional power grab.

McConnell is in a weird — there’s that word again — spot. He’s on his way out as Senate GOP leader and his worldview is getting trampled on by Trump and fellow MAGA allies. Don’t forget those boos at the convention, too.

But McConnell is still finding ways to get under the skin of Democrats and Trump fans alike.

The Kentucky Republican isn’t going quietly into the night. As he’s reminded us before, he’s still got two years left in his Senate term after leaving the GOP leadership suite.

McConnell’s self-described “top priority” will be to blunt the rise of the Trump-Vance foreign policy doctrine in his party. But the last month shows us that it won’t come at the expense of going after his actual political opponents.

“The level of radicalism on the other side is very, very disturbing,” McConnell told us. “What I think they have in mind will change the country even further.”

What I’m reading this week: I know it’s been shared a million times already, but the Wall Street Journal’s tick-tock on the diplomatic talks to free wrongly imprisoned reporter Evan Gershkovich and other Americans is well worth your time. And yes, you need to read it to the very end.

— Andrew Desiderio

You can find The Readback in your inbox every Saturday at 10 a.m. And don’t hesitate to reach out to readback@punchbowl.news with feedback. Enjoy The Readback.

Chaos follows Trump to the NABJ conference

Everywhere Donald Trump goes, there’s likely to be fireworks, for better or for worse. It was no exception with his appearance before a house packed with Black journalists gathered for the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago this week.

As I did last year, I came to NABJ again representing Punchbowl News, which also co-sponsored a networking dinner for political journalists. I had my eye on some specific learning sessions and the abundance of free conference swag, particularly water bottles for my teenage son who goes through them like shirts.

Typically, the NABJ annual convention is a jovial gathering. The streets of whichever town is bestowed with the honor of hosting the convention are teeming with sharply-dressed journalists rejoicing at seeing their long-lost friends from half a block away.

We gather, we commiserate, we learn, we laugh, we eat, we trade war stories, celebrate our victories and swap survival tips.

This time, however, the convention got off to a tense start when it was announced that Trump would be appearing for a moderated conversation. The backlash on social media was swift. And brutal.

To be clear, NABJ has a history of inviting sitting presidents or leading presidential candidates to speak at the conventions. This was no different, organizers argued.

But lots of people didn’t agree. There was no precedent, they countered, for someone like Trump — who has repeatedly disparaged people of color and denigrated Black female journalists — to attend.

Being on the ground meant I’d cover the event for Punchbowl News. I didn’t know what to expect. I was both a reporter and a spectator.

The line to get into the room was so long, it snaked down at least three floors past the lobby of the Hilton Chicago Hotel. It took nearly four hours to get people cleared through security.

To give my thumbs a rest from doomscrolling while waiting in line, I decided to ask others what their reasons for going in were.

“I don’t know, actually,” one woman told me. “He’s here, so why not?” Fair point.

It was a mix of people curious to see how it would go, some who thought it was a historic and important moment for the convention and a fair share who were not about to miss a good mess. Schadenfreude can be a strong motivator.

By now you probably already know how it went. A disaster. Perhaps the most shocking moment — the one everyone is talking about — was Trump questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’ blackness in front of a room full of…well…Black people.

While coverage of the Trump event has overshadowed the convention, most of the fury played out on social media.

Here in Chicago, people quickly pivoted to enjoying the annual gathering, learning from other seasoned professionals, making important connections and, of course, enjoying the abundance of food in the Windy City. Attendees were even treated to a free red carpet early screening of the upcoming movie, The Forge. And I got enough water bottles to last my son through the rest of the year.

What I’m reading this week: In between conference sessions and hugging lost friends, I have been following the details of the complex two-year negotiations that led to the freeing of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan and more than a dozen others.

— Elvina Nawaguna

The tax bill got its day in the sun — at last

The last stages of the Wyden-Smith tax bill’s rise and slow, painful fall have finally played out.

It’s been a long six months since the tax deal came together in a surprise, election-year compromise and then passed the House with a huge bipartisan tally in late January. Then it all came crumbling down.

The Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican, Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), didn’t like the deal and did little publicly to hide that. In the end, his opinion had significant sway over much of the Senate GOP Conference.

As a reporter, it’s rewarding to follow a big bill from the closed-door negotiations through to its final stage, even if that finale was clear months ago. With the 2025 tax fight on the horizon, it’s been interesting to see key tax players sketch out the deals they will and won’t cut and publicly back certain priorities.

Here are some of the interesting nuggets I noticed along the way:

– Back in the deal-cutting phase, negotiators were trying to achieve dollar-for-dollar parity between the bill’s child tax credit expansion and business tax breaks and be able to offset the costs. What got the ax? Bigger, upfront deductions for businesses’ foreign research and development spending. It turned out to be a tidy messaging point for House Republicans and didn’t cause a stir on K Street.

– The senators who broke ranks on both sides of the doomed Senate vote this week were mostly a who’s who of lawmakers who don’t mind spurning their leadership. That includes Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who was an interesting surprise “yes” for the tax bill. Scott is up for reelection in a state that would benefit from disaster tax relief in the bill due to hurricanes. Lawmakers may keep pushing that disaster relief on its own, given how big of an issue it is for several members.

– Most of all, the Wyden-Smith bill’s problems underscore how protracted and bitter the standoff could be if there’s a divided government in 2025 when the Trump tax cuts expire. If Republicans win big in November, they’re also laying the groundwork to move quickly on a reconciliation bill. Rest up in August, tax world — we’ll need it!

What I’m watching this week: Women’s gymnastics. The Summer Olympics have been a lot of fun. Unfortunately, Senate votes got in the way of some prime gymnastics viewing this week.

But when I was in the chamber for the tax bill vote, fellow tax reporters and I spotted the all around-finals playing on someone’s laptop. Glad that Senate business didn’t fully disrupt watching Simone Biles win live!

– Laura Weiss

Reading the Fed tea leaves

This week marked the beginning of the end for the U.S. economy’s top storyline — how the Federal Reserve has responded to inflation by cranking up interest rates.

For much of the past year, the Federal Reserve’s press corps — which I’m a marginal member of, at best — has spent news conference after news conference hounding Chair Jay Powell for glimmers of insight into what it would take for the Fed to cut rates.

This week was a big one. Powell explicitly acknowledged that a rate cut could be appropriate as soon as the next meeting, scheduled for September. No decision has been made, but this week’s shaky jobs report only strengthens the case for a cut sooner than later.

Fed-watching is a discipline unto itself, and it’s frankly not one I practiced much before arriving at Punchbowl News in late 2022. Besides covering Congress, I’m more of a financial regulation guy by training.

But it’s been fun to step into the world of Fed-watching. The intricacies of being the world’s most sharply scrutinized central banker are many, with folks taking hints from his words, body language and even the particulars of how Powell interacts with his binder full of talking points and data.

It also helps that I picked up Fed-watching at the same moment that the U.S. economy has, at least for my lifetime, never been more unpredictable. The mid- and post-pandemic economy has simply been weird, and everyone’s been learning to deal with it at more or less the same time.

A normal economy isn’t supposed to be able to simply power through the highest rates in more than 20 years and notch real wins in GDP output and historically low unemployment as inflation slowly loses its momentum. Just ask the Larry Summers of 2022, who argued the economy needed to hit an unemployment rate above 5% before inflation would be on the back foot.

What comes next is the landing. We triggered a key recession indicator on Friday, pandemic caveats notwithstanding. The election looms, and whether Powell likes it or not, the Fed’s decisions — past and present — will shape the politics of the fall. We’ll be watching.

What I’m listening to: I’ve tried and failed to read Frank Herbert’s Dune books for years. Those first 100 pages are slow!

But I borrowed the audiobook version narrated by Simon Vance from the D.C. public library this week, and it’s a real treat. Great sound design, and some key scenes are performed by a solid cast of voice actors. It’s a lot harder to be hung up by the intricacies of space diplomacy, intrigue and intergalactic trade when you’re listening at 1.65x speed.

— Brendan Pedersen