The Senate is in this week, the House is out. President Joe Biden heads to Texas today with stops in Austin and Houston, where he will pay respects to the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). Vice President Kamala Harris will be in Atlanta on Tuesday and then in Houston on Thursday for Jackson Lee’s funeral. Former President Donald Trump will hold a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Wednesday.
We’re going to focus on the Senate, which is on track to pass a major social media safety and privacy package in the final few days before senators leave for the August recess.
But first, let’s talk about the funeral for Jackson Lee, who died on July 19. The 74-year-old Jackson Lee recently disclosed she was being treated for pancreatic cancer.
An unforgettable figure on Capitol Hill, Jackson Lee served in Congress for 29 years. She served on the Judiciary, Budget and Homeland Security committees. Jackson Lee ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Houston last year. Yet she still was able to win the 18th District’s Democratic primary in March and was on track for reelection in November.
The memorial services for Jackson Lee this Thursday in Houston will be a major event.
Harris is giving a eulogy, per her office. Former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi will all be in attendance. CBC Chair Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) is expected to attend as well.
A military aircraft will leave from D.C. to ferry lawmakers to the funeral, although it’s unclear how many members will be traveling from Washington given the House is in recess.
Jackson Lee will lie in state in Houston City Hall for 10 hours Monday, the AP reported.
Harris and Jackson Lee were both members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first Black collegiate sorority. It has more than 360,000 members in 12 countries.
Back to the Senate: If you’ve followed Big Tech closely on the Hill, you know that Congress has struggled for years to pass legislation to regulate social media companies.
But this week, the Senate is taking a major step in that direction. While it’s unclear what the House will do, the Senate will vote on — and overwhelmingly pass — a pair of long-stalled bills Tuesday afternoon aimed at safeguarding children on social media platforms, as well as enhancing privacy protections.
The package includes the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It’s being hailed as a first-of-its-kind effort to hold Big Tech companies accountable for the harms their platforms can inflict on minors. The package represents a major overhaul of how the federal government regulates platforms that millions of Americans use daily.
Under KOSA, social media platforms would be required to take steps to shield underage users from potentially harmful content. This includes limiting the platforms’ most addictive features. COPPA would effectively bar those companies from passing along minors’ personal data that would have otherwise been used for targeted advertising.
With the House already out until September, it’ll be a while before the measure could possibly reach Biden’s desk. Speaker Mike Johnson told us last week that he’d “like to get it done,” but he didn’t make any commitments. Yet a big bipartisan win in the Senate would put a lot of pressure on the House to act.
Supporters of the package could face opposition from hardline conservatives and progressives concerned about civil liberty issues.
In the Senate, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have voiced objections to KOSA in particular on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment and gives too much power to the executive branch to determine which types of content should be censored.
Paul’s and Wyden’s objections aren’t likely to have a big impact on the vote margin in the Senate Tuesday afternoon. However, their views are likely shared by far more House members, which would make passage more complicated.
There could be an effort by Big Tech companies to water down or even block this legislation, although there are huge political sensitivities around the issue, of course.
We’ll note that a sweeping bipartisan data privacy bill was derailed in the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month. Big Tech opposition has also quashed antitrust legislation in the House and Senate in the past. Congress, though, overwhelmingly passed a forced divestiture bill aimed at social media giant TikTok back in April.
One more thing: The Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees will hold a joint hearing tomorrow morning on the assassination attempt against Trump.
This is the first public Senate hearing on the matter, coming a week after now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was sharply criticized by both parties for her less-than-forthcoming testimony before the House Oversight Committee. Cheatle resigned the following day.
The joint Judiciary-HSGAC hearing in the Senate will feature testimony from Ronald Rowe Jr., the acting Secret Service director, and Paul Abbate, the deputy FBI director.
