While Republicans believed the plan they passed Wednesday would force Biden to the table, the White House and most congressional Democrats have brushed it off and made clear they won’t entertain the GOP’s demands. Instead, both sides have retreated further into their corners, with each party planning to spend the coming days talking almost entirely to its respective base voters.
“I think we in the House ought to message the hell out of it,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said, warning that Democrats would “make false claims” about their bill: “We need to be on offense on the message.”
As for the next steps, Roy said: “The ball’s in the president’s court and the Senate court.”
Roy is far from alone in the GOP conference in arguing that the problem is no longer in their hands, putting the blame squarely on Democrats’ shoulders. Most Republican lawmakers insist they have little anxiety about the increasingly rattled nerves on Wall Street as a dysfunctional Congress barrels closer toward this summer’s drop-dead debt limit date.
“Every day that he refuses to negotiate, he is putting the U.S. economy at risk,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said. “The next move is on Biden.”
Top Democrats have revealed little about their next steps. While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called on Republicans to work with him on a clean debt plan, it’s unclear if his caucus would even unite to vote in favor of one. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), specifically, has put the onus on Biden to meet with McCarthy.
And at least some in the party are getting nervous: “We all should be getting anxious,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said.
All the focus next week will be on the Senate, which will return to Washington facing the pressure from House Republicans — and possibly from the Treasury Department. Officials there are expected sometime in the coming days to update the public on the “X date,” before which Congress will need to pass a debt limit lift to avoid default.
“I think once we have that date with clarity … then we’ll know with some urgency our timeframe for dealing with this challenge,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters Friday, adding: “Understand that this is a manufactured crisis that extreme MAGA Republicans are foisting on the American people.”
In the meantime, Democrats plan to spend their time turning the GOP’s debt plan into campaign fodder, betting that fresh attacks on Republican plans to slash spending on programs like food stamps and Medicaid will hurt in the swing districts they need to flip next November.
Many of the Republicans currently holding those battleground seats, however, say they aren’t sweating their yes votes.
Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), who flipped a purple Long Island seat last fall, said he recently did a tele-town hall with over 13,000 callers where he asked each person to weigh in on whether they supported his position on debt: Raising the limit, but with some cutbacks to federal spending, including Covid aid.
“Three to one, [constituents] agreed with my position,” LaLota said Friday.
Ever since House Republicans passed its plan on Wednesday, both parties have resorted to finger-pointing to try to pin blame if negotiations go south.
Still, the GOP bill remains a win for McCarthy, who faced a steep climb as he wrangled a deal among the disparate wings of his party with only a handful of votes to spare. By working closely with conservatives to craft a plan packed with right-flank priorities, the speaker achieved near-total unity in his bid to kick off negotiations with Biden.
Even so, White House officials have emphasized in conversations with Democratic congressional leaders the importance of staying aligned on Biden’s no-negotiation stance. The president’s team is clearly betting that it still holds the stronger hand in the debt ceiling standoff; the White House reacted to the House GOP’s bill by issuing a flurry of statements and analyses detailing the damage it would do to the economy and popular programs.
While Biden administration officials have explored a variety of potential alternative options for averting default, there is skepticism that any would be workable — and none are seen as preferable to Congress simply voting to raise the debt ceiling.
The House Republican pitch that would raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion, or through March of next year — whichever comes first — setting up another fight with the White House next year. In particular, Republicans are proudest of the bill’s slashes to federal spending, including $130 billion in the upcoming fiscal year that would effectively return discretionary spending totals to nearly the same level as two years ago.
But the task is far from done, and McCarthy still could be squeezed yet by his own party.
Some members of the conservative Freedom Caucus are arguing that the California Republican should refuse to negotiate down at all as Democrats decide on their counter — a position that other Republicans in the conference view as irrational.
“I don’t do red lines because there might be a different price that I might want for something, right? Put a border bill on there, change the length and times. There’s always a way to come up with something that will actually be good for the country,” Roy said of the potentially negotiable items.
“Go ahead, Mr. President,” he added. “Go ahead, Sen. Schumer.”
Adam Cancryn and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
But on Thursday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Walker’s 288-page order was based on legal errors and “clearly erroneous” findings of fact. The appeals court sent the case back to the lower court for review.
It also reversed the requirement that Florida needs prior clearance to change parts of voting law. It affirmed Walker’s ruling that a restriction on soliciting voters within 150 feet of a ballot drop box was unconstitutionally vague.
Jeremy Redfern, deputy press secretary to DeSantis, hailed the ruling as a “great win for Florida’s voters.” Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, which was a plaintiff in the case, said she was disappointed and maintained that the election law diminished the power of Black voters.
The case began in 2021, when the Florida Legislature approved voting restrictions that placed new limits on the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, blocked solicitation of voters within 150 of those drop-off points and placed restrictions on collecting and delivering voter registration applications. At the time, Democrats and civil rights organizations criticized the legislation and subsequent law, saying it disenfranchised Black voters and lead to voter suppression.
The Legislature approved the measure in the wake of the 2020 election, when former President Donald Trump was publicly railing against — without evidence — election results.
After the law was challenged in federal court, Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama, framed the law as another in a long line of changes that were aimed at Democrats and placed illegal burden on minorities.
“At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” Walker wrote, adding, “Florida has a horrendous history of racial discrimination in voting.”
The 11th Circuit, however, said Walker erred from the start in establishing a pattern of discrimination in Florida’s voting laws.
“We have rejected the argument that ‘a racist past is evidence of current intent,’” the appeals court said in citing another of its rulings in a 2021 Alabama voting case.
Justice Jill Pryor of the appeals court dissented from the opinion, stating that the district court “in its thorough and well-reasoned order” had committed “no reversible error.”
There was no immediate response from the House and Senate’s Republican leaders. But the Republican National Committee called the ruling “a landmark victory for election integrity and Florida voters and a major blow to Democrats’ election integrity misinformation campaign.”
Blake Summerlin, statewide communications manager for the League of Women Voters of Florida, said while the group was disappointed by the reversal of the district court’s “well-reasoned, factually supported opinion, our fight is not over.”
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“You have got to think about the scale — I know he had an audience of three million people. There are 330 million people in the country,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said, adding that Carlson and other cable anchors have bigger sway over what lawmakers “think is wrong, versus how they can make things better.”
That response stems in part from Republican lawmakers’ disinterest in giving Carlson too much credit for the occasionally polarizing messages he broadcast on foreign policy. He waged a relentless campaign against further U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He filmed his show in Hungary, the scene of significant democratic backsliding, and praised its far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Carlson also exerted serious pull on Donald Trump’s views on foreign policy and military issues while blocking and tackling for the former president. He defended Trump’s meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, saying that leading a country “means killing people.” And he called the outrage over Saudi Arabia’s government-sanctioned killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi “false.”
Steve Bannon claimed in 2019 that Carlson “has more influence on national security policy than many of the guys on [Trump’s] National Security Council.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally, said this week on Newsmax that he and Carlson were “directly involved in persuading President Trump to ignore some of the bad advice he was getting.”
But for members of Congress, Carlson’s noisiest jeremiads against them amounted to little more than static. As South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, put it: “National security issues, those are for most members a responsibility they take very seriously. And, yes, there are influencers out there. But I don’t think, one way or the other, that swings votes.”
Even as allies like Gaetz rallied around the ousted host, the vast majority of Republicans whom Carlson picked on-air fights with wouldn’t directly jab him in the aftermath of his sudden departure.
“[We] probably agree on many things, but I think we have a different worldview,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), blasted by Carlson just last month for advocating “anti-American stupidity” in Russia. “My worldview is not dependent on what somebody says on cable TV.”
A common refrain among GOP lawmakers was that while Carlson’s word greatly affected Trump and the GOP base, the broader electorate is less focused and responsive to the whims of cable news.
“It’s more about what my constituents are saying to me than different individual personalities,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said.
Sullivan pointed to a letter opposing “unrestrained” additional American support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia that got signed by just three Republican senators and 16 House Republicans as proof that Carlson’s arguments struggled to find a broader audience in Congress.
“I consume most of my information from podcasts at this point,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who’s leading a new House panel countering the influence of China. Gallagher acknowledged that Carlson is “very influential, but I presume he’ll still have a massive platform.”
Other Republicans who have aligned with Carlson’s views at times said his voice won’t be missed for long. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who described Carlson as a “personal friend,” predicted the former commentator would retain influence within the Republican Party wherever he ultimately lands.
“He has a very strong following,” Hawley said. “He has a very distinctive point of view and I bet that we’ll continue to hear his voice — and I think it’s an important voice.”
And even some lawmakers who often disagreed with Carlson’s divisive foreign policy positions still praised them, underscoring that the effect of his departure on the GOP isn’t black or white.
“Whether you agree with him or not, he was one of the few people out there that every day was sort of challenging orthodoxy — you didn’t like the show, you don’t have to watch it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. “There’s things I don’t agree with him on. There’s things that I find that he says that are edgy and interesting.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) was among the lawmakers who opted against wading into Carlson’s departure for the same reason they avoided weighing in on CNN’s parting with anchor Don Lemon.
“I listened to both of them [Carlson and Lemon] and sometimes I agreed with them — and sometimes I didn’t,” Kennedy said. “But they always made me think, and that’s a good thing.”
One foreign-policy establishment voice on the Hill, however, wasn’t so circumspect.
“I’ve shed many tears over Tucker Carlson losing the show — many, many tears,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), whom Carlson once derisively referred to as “eyepatch McCain,” quipped in a brief interview. Crenshaw quickly added that he was being “really fucking sarcastic.”
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A later vote extended the deadline to 1982, but a sufficient number of states still did not ratify. The Senate’s resolution would remove the 1982 deadline and recognize the ERA in the Constitution.
The measure was bipartisan, sponsored by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But all Republicans save for Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted against it, arguing it’s not necessary to include in the Constitution. Opponents also said it raises legal questions about Congress’ authority to remove amendment ratification deadlines or whether states can rescind it.
Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) alluded to the uphill climb for Democrats to get the measure over the finish line on Wednesday.
“It only takes 41 to block,” Thune said, implying Democrats didn’t have the votes for passage. “I think it will be a heavy lift.”
Before the vote, Schumer called the deadline to ratify the ERA “arbitrary” and said it must be passed.
“There is no good reason — none — for this chamber, this Congress, and this nation to bind itself to limitations set fifty years ago,” he said on the Senate floor. “The Constitution itself imposes no such barrier; by keeping this barrier in place — this seven year barrier — all we’re doing is needlessly obeying skewed rules set by politicians who are long gone, and whose views ought not rule the day any longer.”
“In 2023, we should move forward to ratify the ERA with all due haste, because if you look at the terrible things happening to women’s rights in this country, it’s clear that we must act,” he added.
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) set the tone at the beginning of the week, privately telling Democrats in a leadership meeting that the debt vote could be framed to the American people in the same way liberals responded to Republican efforts to privatize Social Security, repeal Obamacare and pass the 2017 tax cut package, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
“We’re focused on doing the right thing by the American people, which is to make sure we avoid a dangerous default and ensure that America pays its bills,” he said Wednesday in a brief interview.
Democratic groups are already gearing up to knock Republicans over the debt standoff. The DCCC said vulnerable Republicans were “helping build the case against themselves” and their re-election, and House Majority PAC singled out frontline Republicans who voted for the bill.
A focus on the GOP’s debt bill and proposed cuts isn’t without its own political pitfalls. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made clear his caucus is not responding to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) legislation — ultimately putting the issue between President Joe Biden and the speaker after its passage in the House.
By contrast, the 2017 tax bill was signed into law with a GOP trifecta, giving Democrats real-life consequences to use against Republicans. It also gave candidates an avenue to campaign against Republicans without tying them specifically to then-President Donald Trump.
But what Democrats saw as effective campaign messaging in the 2022 midterms around the Jan. 6 insurrection and abortion rights could end up ranking higher on the list than potential spending cuts.
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Christie warned against giving in to such thinking; in fact, the entirety of the former U.S. Attorney’s water-testing stump speech is The Case Against Trump. But in the very hour he was delivering that argument, Trump was on the opposite end of the Eastern Seaboard demonstrating how well-positioned he is at the moment.
Summoning the House members from Florida who’ve endorsed his candidacy to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, a troll of Ron DeSantis bearded as a toast to Trump, the former president used the dinner to deliberate over how much he should even compete in the Republican primary.
Going around the table, as he’s wont to do, Trump surveyed the lawmakers about whether they thought he should show up for the first GOP primary debate and lend legitimacy to there being a serious contest for the nomination, an attendee told me. Some of the Republicans wondered out loud about the wisdom of exposing himself to attacks from lesser candidates when he’s so far up in the polls. But there was more support (including among Trump’s advisers in the room) for attending the initial debate, in part because he’d be a punching bag if he skipped it, so why not be there to punch back.
Before going any further, let’s stipulate that presidential nominations are rarely decided a year before the balloting. And, if I may, there’s been an overcorrection to the post-midterm conventional wisdom that Trump is doomed (the conventions of political speculation, sadly, don’t allow much space between sure thing and roadkill).
Ok, to-be-sure out of the way, onto where the Republican race stands. It will ring quite familiar to anybody who paid attention to the last two Democratic primaries.
2024 could look a lot like 2020. That was when we in the political press corps dumped oceans of ink on the ideological differences among the candidates, questions about their specific policy proposals (will Elizabeth Warren release her own healthcare plan, inquiring minds didn’t want to know) only to cover a race that effectively turned on a single question: Who can win the general election? Democrats were effectively single-issue voters and their bet on President Joe Biden paid off in November.
Four years earlier, in 2016, there was a deeply flawed frontrunner, a proven presidential loser and polarizing figure among the general electorate, who many smart Democrats had misgivings about nominating. But she lined up early endorsements eager to be on the right side of the nominee, much of the party was cowed and she, eventually, did turn out to be inevitable.
Are today’s Republicans poised to nominate Donald J. Rodham?
Yes, there are glaring differences between 2016 and 2024, but what alarms so many Republicans (and encourages the fatalism) is another similarity that’s less obvious. Just as progressives privately worried that Hillary Clinton and her party’s moderates would never truly embrace Bernie Sanders if he prevailed, many pessimistic Republicans wonder the same about Trump next year.
It’s preposterous to imagine him, arms held aloft with DeSantis or whoever beats him, at a Unity Breakfast the morning after the nomination is decided. At best, Trump will be an irritant to who defeats him.
So why not, as Christie alluded to last week, stop fighting political gravity, submit to Trump and then, if he again loses, begin the Republican reformation in 2025. After all, it took Democrats three consecutive losses in the 1980s for the Democratic Leadership Council to finally gain traction and elevate one of their own in 1992.
Republicans would only have to suffer two White House defeats to finally move on from Trump and, in the meantime, there’s that Supreme Court majority he helped deliver as the political backstop.
As a shrewd Republican strategist, and no NeverTrumper, put it to me recently: “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”
This Republican, as with a number of his like, has been hoping for a strong Trump alternative to emerge but has grown more pessimistic, DeSantis’ early stumbles confirming his doubts about the Florida governor. Moreover, there’s the matter of Roe being overturned and the political vise the party is caught in between its unyielding anti-abortion activists and a broader electorate that supports legal abortion. “We’re the dog that caught the car on Trump and abortion.”
So, yes, there are some doubts in GOP ranks about 2024. And not just from the self-hating type.
Yet there’s another class of Republicans who look at President Biden’s dismal standing and reject the moping and detest the fatalism about Trump on top of the ticket. They say all that’s needed to put a Republican in the White House is to nominate someone other than Trump.
Some of these Republicans even have a name: They’re called those who will be on the ballot in swing districts next year.
One of the most promising freshmen GOP lawmakers, 36-year-old Mike Lawler from upstate New York, is all but begging Republican primary voters not to saddle him with Trump, using all the right code words.
“Whoever the nominee is going to be needs to be forward-looking and they need to be focused on the American people, not the grievances of the past, and it certainly can’t be about the 2020 election,” Lawler told me.
I think I know who he means.
But the challenge Lawler has is that Trump as the nominee can become a self-fulfilling prophecy when the congressman’s colleagues are lining up to take their turn at Mar-a-Lago, wanting to be with the winner (and maybe secure that coveted cabinet gig or endorsement for a future primary).
No, individual endorsements don’t matter much these days. But the collective validation of Trump by party lawmakers can create a snowball-down-the-mountain effect.
Lawler is all too aware of this risk — and the threat it poses to him and a House majority that depends on California and New York, states Trump would lose badly. But he won’t name names. “Who’s to say I haven’t had that conversation?” he asked back at me when I wondered if he had carped to any of his colleagues about their early endorsements.
He did, though, allow that most Republicans are in seats where they’re “more worried about their primary than the general election.” And he noted that lawmakers like him, running in districts Biden carried, will be “the difference between us having the majority or not.”
The same can be applied to the Senate, at least in the purple-to-blue states Republicans are targeting. Trump is no anchor in the reddest races — Montana, West Virginia and Ohio — but if those don’t fall then Senate Republicans will need states where the former president is anathema to the pivotal suburbanites who decide elections. And if Trump appears destined to lead the ticket, well, let’s just say that some of the potential candidates in these more competitive states aren’t as enthused about running,
“It makes it harder to get in,” one potential Senate GOP recruit told me about how Trump’s inevitability shapes calculations, grumbling about the lawmakers racing to the former president’s side.
There is another Republican eyeing a 2024 race, however, who isn’t resigned to a Trump threepeat.
“I think that the majority of the party doesn’t want him,” Christie told me the morning after his appearance at New England College in Henniker.
Christie will decide whether to run in May, he said, indicating it will largely depend on whether he thinks he can raise the money.
Christie rejects the idea that there’s only two options, nominate Trump or see the nominee undermined by Trump, arguing that if the former president loses “he’ll be a diminished figure” and “a two-time loser” rather than a MAGA kingpin.
He said sure nominating Trump is “a guaranteed pathway to lose,” but when I asked if, to borrow a phrase, Republicans had gotten tired of losing yet, he acknowledged it was a good question: “I think we’re going to find out.”
But when I pressed Christie on whether, were he not to run, he’d work to rally support for an alternative, he didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic or optimistic. “I’m sure I’ll try, yeah, don’t know I’ll find one,” he said. (No, he said, he’s not going to back Trump again, either in the primary or general election.)
Like a lot of prominent Republicans, Christie has no relationship with DeSantis and harbors evident skepticism about somebody who has led a “very sheltered existence down there in Florida,” as the former governor put it.
Among the voters I spoke to in New Hampshire, there’s more openness to DeSantis. But already it’s easy to see the bright lines coming into view: The Republicans wanted to hear out DeSantis, but the independents who can vote in (and often shape) New Hampshire primaries were as dead set against DeSantis as they are Trump.
And if those two anti-Trump constituencies, the time-to-move-on Republicans and the pivotal independents, aren’t aligned, well, we’ve seen that movie before. It was called 2016, and not only did Trump win the New Hampshire primary but it was former Ohio Governor John Kasich who came in second, because he won so many independents and the other, more conservative Republicans split the remaining vote (nearly 50 percent!).
Christie’s theory is that by confronting Trump directly he can coalesce the two groups — he took care to note in his stump speech that he’s “not some Never Trumper” — and there’s plenty of voters here who are focused on electability, a la Democrats in 2020.
“I’d like us to get somebody that could win,” Grace Solinsky, a Bedford, N.H., resident, told me at a Christie house party in Bow, N.H., lamenting the “baggage” Trump bears.
That’s the good news for Christie. The bad news is that those most curious about his candidacy are those who aren’t Republicans, or who, like him, at least say they won’t vote for Trump in a general election.
More to the point, the biggest group that showed up for his town hall were a group of male undergraduates who took off for the exits the second the event ended like their seats were on fire. When I took off after them to record their impressions, one got straight to the point. They were members of the college baseball team and, by attending Christie’s town hall, had gotten out of running at practice.
Meanwhile, Trump may be headed to a showdown over the debates that will reveal how much power he holds over his adopted party.
He’s angry, people close to him tell me, that the Republican National Committee is insistent upon holding the first debate, sponsored by Fox News, in Milwaukee during the dead of summer simply because that coincides with the party’s summer meeting there. Not only is it too early, Trump has told people, but he has questions post-Tucker Carlson defenestration about how friendly Fox may be to him and wonders whether his lead is so significant that there’s no reason to give their news side anchors the draw they crave.
Trump’s view of the debates, and the GOP broadly, evokes what one of his predecessors once told a young corporal who was directing him to “his helicopter.”
“Son,” LBJ replied, “they’re all my helicopters.”
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And it was a hard-fought victory, at that. The conference had been in talks over the bill for months, yet McCarthy was still negotiating with on-the-fence members shortly before the vote. Still, GOP lawmakers cheered the bill’s passage, hoping it will give them some leverage to force leading Democrats to back down from assertions they would not negotiate at all over the debt limit.
“I think everybody is focused on solving this problem and finally getting the president … to come to the table,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), adding that Republicans want to give McCarthy the “opportunity to go and negotiate with the president.”
Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Tim Burchett (Tenn.) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.) were the Republicans who opposed the bill, along with all Democrats.
It’s still far from clear that the House GOP plan will change the calculus either at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue or across the Capitol with Senate Democrats. Both have stressed for months, along with their less influential House colleagues, that they want a “clean” debt ceiling increase, with no spending cuts attached.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lambasted McCarthy ahead of the vote on Wednesday, accusing him of having “capitulated to the hard right once again” as he worked to lock down the votes to pass the debt plan.
“It’s a bill that might as well be called the Default On America Act. Because that’s exactly what it is — DOA, dead on arrival,” Schumer said.
The House Republican bill combines across-the-board spending cuts with other conservative proposals, including stricter rules for social safety net programs and energy production incentives. But after vowing for days that they wouldn’t open the bill for negotiations, worried it would create a tidal wave of demands, Republican leadership cut a middle-of-the-night deal to try to win over two critical holdout groups: Midwesterners and conservatives.
For Midwestern members, GOP leadership agreed to kill changes to incentives structures for renewable diesel, second generation biofuel, carbon dioxide sequestration and biodiesel. For conservatives, they beefed up the work requirements and sped up the implementation timeline. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who flipped to backing the bill on Wednesday, also said McCarthy committed to working on balancing the budget in a conversation with her.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) acknowledged that his conservative members weren’t sold on all the bill’s provisions but argued that passing the proposal was crucial to keeping Republicans at the table.
“It is not perfect. It’s a step in the right direction. We’ve got to be in the arena and stay on offense,” Perry said.
The next phase won’t get any easier for Republicans, though, who barely scraped by this time on a 217-215 vote. McCarthy eventually needs to cut a deal with Biden and Senate Democrats that somehow would also win over both the centrist and conservative factions of his conference.
”It’s gonna have to be a conservative package if it’s going to win the support of the Republican conference, but I don’t think it serves anyone’s interest by talking about red lines right now,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), the chair of the business-oriented Main Street Caucus.
Driving the debt-limit talks is still relatively new for House Republicans, who largely left it up to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to negotiate agreements on the debt ceiling during the first two years of the Biden administration. Those deals sparked fierce pushback not only from House Republicans but also Senate conservatives.
And Republican senators are warning they aren’t preparing to step into the breach again, at least not yet. Plus, it’s far from clear that a Senate GOP negotiated deal would even find favor in the more raucous House GOP conference.
The House bill “forces the administration to come to the table,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Wednesday. “The pressure really ought to be on the White House.”
Sarah Ferris and Burgess Everett contributed to this report.
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She accused House Speaker Matt Regier of taking away the voices of her 11,000 constituents and attempting to drive “a nail in the coffin of democracy” by silencing her.
“If you use decorum to silence people who hold you accountable, then all you’re doing is using decorum as a tool of oppression,” Zephyr said.
Speaking in support of barring Zephyr from the floor for the remainder of the 90-day legislative session, House Majority Leader Sue Vinton accused her of placing lawmakers and staff at risk of harm for her actions during protests in the chamber on Monday.
“Freedom in this body involves obedience to all the rules of this body, including the rules of decorum,” Vinton said.
Vinton and other House Republicans cited a Monday protest that disrupted House proceedings and accused Zephyr of inciting it. Authorities arrested seven people in a confrontation that Republicans claim she had encouraged.
“This is an assault on our representative democracy, spirited debate, and the free expression of ideas cannot flourish in an atmosphere of turmoil and incivility,” Republican David Bedey said on the House floor.
“What is at stake is the expectation that any member of this body, whoever that might be, has a duty to strive to maintain decorum, so that the people’s work, that work of all Montanans, can be accomplished.”
The censure motion is the latest development in a standoff over remarks Zephyr made last week on the proposed ban.
The House Speaker had previously said he would not allow her to speak until she apologized, which Zephyr refused to do. Since, she has been forbidden from speaking on the House floor.
Conservative Republicans have repeatedly misgendered Zephyr since the remarks by using incorrect pronouns to describe her.
Much like events in the Tennessee Statehouse weeks ago — where state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two Black lawmakers, were expelled after participating in a post-school shooting gun control protest that interrupted proceedings — Zephyr’s punishment has ignited a firestorm of debate about governance and who has a voice in democracy in politically polarizing times.
Zephyr’s remarks last week, and the Republican response, set off a chain of events that culminated in a rally outside the Capitol at noon Monday. Protesters later packed into the gallery at the Statehouse and brought House proceedings to a halt while chanting “Let her speak.” The scene galvanized both her supporters and and those saying her actions constitute an unacceptable attack on civil discourse.
Such a protest wasn’t allowed on Wednesday, when Republican leaders close the gallery to the public while the vote to censure Zephyr occurred.
Regier did not give a speech on the censure motion on Wednesday but earlier called the disruptions a “dark day for Montana” and pledged to ensure the chamber would “not be bullied.”
It’s under Regier’s leadership that the House has persisted in preventing Zephyr from speaking. He and other Republicans have said her “blood on your hands” remark was far outside the boundaries of appropriate civil discourse.
“There needs to be some consequences for what he has been doing,” said Rep. Joe Read, who frequently but not always used incorrect pronouns when referring to the Democrat.
He claimed Zephyr gave a signal to her supporters just before Monday’s session was disrupted. He declined to say what that was other than a “strange movement.”
“When she gave the signal for protestors to go into action, I would say that’s when decorum was incredibly broken,” Read added.
The events have showcased the growing power of the Montana Freedom Caucus, a group of at least 21 right-wing lawmakers including Read that has spearheaded the charge to discipline Zephyr. The caucus re-upped its demands and rhetoric Monday, saying in a statement that Zephyr’s decision to hoist a microphone toward the gallery’s protesters amounted to “encouraging an insurrection.”
Although several protesters resisted law enforcement officers trying to arrest them on Monday, Abbott pushed back at characterizing the activity as violent. She acknowledged it was disruptive, but called the demonstration peaceful. She said public protests were a predictable response to a lawmaker representing more than 10,000 constituents not being allowed to speak and questioned bringing in officers in riot gear to handle the chanting protesters.
“It was chanting, but it absolutely was not violent,” she said. “Sometimes extreme measures have a response like this.”
There were no reports of damage to the building and lawmakers were not threatened.
Zephyr said the seven arrested were “defending democracy. In an earlier speech, she said the sequence of events that followed her remarks illustrated how they had struck a chord with those in power.
“They picked me in this moment because I said a thing that got through their shield for a second,” she told a crowd of supporters gathered on the Capitol steps near a banner that read “Democracy dies here.”
She has said she does not intend to apologize and argued that her “blood on your hands” remark accurately reflected the stakes of such bans for transgender kids.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Several of the GOP holdouts with ethanol concerns signaled overnight they would flip their votes to yes given the changes, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
“Midwestern members made some good progress tonight,” one of the members involved in the talks said, speaking on condition of anonymity. This Republican cited the securing of “five critical wins for biofuels.”
“People were very pleased with this amendment,” echoed another Republican familiar with the conversations.
While it remains unclear if the wee-hour changes are enough to secure final passage on the floor, which Republicans are aiming for later Wednesday, McCarthy has regained momentum heading into a morning House GOP conference meeting that could help seal the fate of the bill.
Since McCarthy can only stand to lose four Republican votes assuming full attendance, wrangling all his members has been no easy task. In the end, GOP leaders agreed to changes that are designed to appease nearly all of their holdouts.
The amended proposal accelerates changes to work requirements for those receiving federal benefits, including food stamps, to 2024, a change intended to satisfy a small group of conservatives that includes Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Starting in September, states would be barred from saving up unused exemptions under the SNAP food assistance program and in October additional constraints on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program would kick in.
Major portions of the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last summer would be eliminated as well, including $1 billion to boost the adoption of building codes for energy-efficient construction, $5 billion for loans to back energy infrastructure projects, $1.9 billion in grants to improve transportation access to neighborhoods, $200 million for National Park System maintenance projects and $5 billion in grants for reducing climate pollution.
And the revised bill would still repeal the tax credits on clean fuels, but would now include an exception to allow the tax perk to continue for those in binding contracts or locked into investments for sustainable aviation fuel or for producing other “clean” fuel before April 19. The amendment would also kill changes in the incentive structure for renewable diesel, second generation biofuel, carbon dioxide sequestration and biodiesel.
Still, McCarthy still may have some work left to do.
As of Tuesday evening, at least two GOP lawmakers were declared no’s for different reasons: Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). In addition, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) has signaled he may oppose the bill. Gaetz, a perennial leadership gadfly, predicted before the late-hour deal that leaders was facing “at least” eight GOP no votes on the debt measure.
Mace argued to reporters that McCarthy’s debt ceiling proposal didn’t address balancing the federal budget and that it “doesn’t really tackle spending.” Burchett, meanwhile, told POLITICO that he is a decided “no” vote after he was stood up by someone in leadership during a planned meeting on Wednesday.
“The reality is: I’m a no vote and just don’t take me for granted,” he said.
Biggs, meanwhile, described himself as a “lean no” and warned that discussions “might have gone beyond the place” to get him to a yes — arguing that Republicans should return to fiscal year 2019 spending. The Arizona Republican is part of a conservative block, which also includes Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), who have been pushing McCarthy to go further in his opening bid, according to people familiar with their thinking.
In a sign of the bigger potential headache awaiting McCarthy if he didn’t make changes: House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) and other members of his group were publicly warning that they were undecided on the bill as they pushed to tighten work requirements for government programs. In addition to wanting to speed up their implementation, some conservatives were also looking to beef up the number of hours recipients had to work per week from 20 to 30.
“I’d love to see some changes on the work requirements. I want to see people going to work for, like, more than just a hobby,” Perry said.
Perry, though, declined to say if he had enough votes to sink the legislation if it wasn’t changed, quipping: “That’s for me to know and for you to see on the board.”
Meredith Lee Hill and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
He called Carlson “one of the smartest voices in the conservative movement,” and lauded Carlson’s willingness to “defect from party orthodoxy when necessary.”
“There’s definitely a thought leadership vacuum in political media, across the political spectrum. And Tucker was one of the great political thinkers and commentators of our time,” Ramaswamy said.
The 37-year-old biotech entrepreneur and author of “Woke Inc.” also has a connection to the ouster of Don Lemon on CNN. Lemon, who announced he was terminated by CNN on Monday, got into an on-air skirmish with Ramaswamy last week about race and the role of firearms in Black American history. During the heated exchange, Lemon indicated network staff off-screen were “talking in (his) ear.” The New York Times reported that Lemon’s conduct during the interview left top CNN officials “exasperated.”
“I think my exchange with him played a role in this,” Ramaswamy said on Monday, agreeing with the Times’ report.
“I think it’s a gutsy decision, that I applaud,” he said of CNN’s ouster of Lemon. “It’s another example of companies gaining a spine.”
Ramaswamy recently met with network CEO Chris Licht, according to a person aware of the meeting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
