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Tag: showdown

  • McCarthy builds a kitchen Cabinet ahead of debt showdown — without his No. 2, Scalise

    McCarthy builds a kitchen Cabinet ahead of debt showdown — without his No. 2, Scalise

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    Most House Republicans insist publicly that they’re paying no attention to the simmering mistrust between McCarthy and Scalise. But privately, many are watching the duo’s dynamic strain under the stress of the debt-limit fight. That’s true even as McCarthy mends fences with the budget chief he’d previously sidelined, Scalise ally Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas).

    GOP lawmakers and senior aides say McCarthy and Scalise are friendly in private, and that Scalise is happy at No. 2, where he’s focused on policy priorities like energy and education. Yet it’s no secret that Scalise, once seen as waiting in the wings if McCarthy stumbled, is now competing for the speaker’s ear with other confidants on several issues.

    The resulting tension is starting to simmer just as McCarthy, like his predecessors John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faces the ultimate test of House Republican loyalty — a debt standoff. And it shows that the rift that opened between McCarthy and some senior Republicans during his grueling bid for the job hasn’t faded in the months since.

    “People say there’s goldfish memory: 30 seconds, and everything’s forgotten,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), one of the 20 conservative holdouts who delayed McCarthy’s ascension to speaker. “But I’m not sure that’s always true.”

    It’s not uncommon for legislative leaders to lean on an unofficial circle of friendly colleagues. But any sign of daylight within McCarthy’s leadership team was bound to draw scrutiny after what he endured to secure the speakership — and his narrow margin for error to keep it.

    McCarthy’s relationship with Scalise isn’t the only one taxed by the debt drama. As he moved closer to releasing a bill designed to unite his members, the speaker put distance between himself and Arrington. Allies of McCarthy had seen Arrington as speaking out of turn about the conference’s approach to the high-stakes debt-limit talks.

    But since then, McCarthy has quietly worked to repair ties with Arrington — even putting the Budget Committee chair’s name on the GOP’s opening bid in the debt talks — in what members saw as an effort to show unity to the rank and file.

    Arrington said in an interview that McCarthy called him hours before releasing the House GOP’s debt plan and asked if he would add his name as lead sponsor.

    “I said, ‘If I can help the conference succeed in this endeavor, which I think is critical for our country’s future, I’m in’,” the Texan recalled.

    Still, some members are keeping a close eye on McCarthy and Scalise as the House hurtles toward a likely vote next week on the speaker’s debt plan. The two meet one-on-one at least weekly, but suspicion about a rift between them flared again heading into January’s speakership race, as McCarthy worked fiercely to win over his skeptics, while behind closed doors his allies fumed that Scalise wasn’t boosting him enough.

    “Steve could have said the simple thing in the press and refused to do so,” one House Republican allied with McCarthy said, insisting on anonymity to speak freely about Scalise’s handling of the speakership fight. “I think there’s a level of distrust between the two members that exists, sure. But the staffs are working well together and that’s all it really needs for this [debt ceiling] thing.”

    Scalise made several public statements supporting McCarthy for speaker in the runup to the balloting and nominated the Californian on the floor. And Scalise allies are defending his efforts on steering other high-profile GOP measures to passage in recent weeks, including a marquee energy bill and a “parents’ bill of rights.”

    Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), a member of the elected leadership team, said Scalise was instrumental in smoothing over hiccups on the parents’ bill as language in the text threatened to trigger a damaging jailbreak: “It went from a dead bill to something we were able to fix in 30 to 45 minutes.”

    In the first months of the new majority, however, McCarthy became increasingly reliant on his own sounding boards, like McHenry, Hill, Graves and others. They serve as McCarthy’s shadow Cabinet of sorts, offering perhaps the most precious commodity in Washington: loyalty.

    Graves and McHenry, in particular, seem to be involved in most of the GOP’s tactical decisions these days. Graves is running point on McCarthy’s debt conversations across the conference, after helping to shepherd a major energy bill and internal talks about earmark rules. McHenry has been pulled in on multiple issues that range beyond his financial expertise.

    Their fellow House Republicans note that McCarthy’s unelected lieutenants, in addition to being viewed as strong on policy, are also not as threatening as Scalise because they’re not seen as angling for his job.

    “It’s natural for folks to fall back with people they trust, and people who aren’t afraid to tell them ‘that’s a bad idea,’” Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) said.

    It’s a practice that past speakers have also engaged in, as former Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) pointed out.

    “Having close friends be trusted advisers outside of elected leadership is not uncommon,” said Davis, a close McCarthy ally. “Boehner had members like Tom Latham and Dave Joyce, among others. Paul Ryan had Jim Sensenbrenner and Sean Duffy, too. Kevin is doing the same thing with trusted folks that were essential in helping him win the speaker’s gavel.”

    But that practice has a way of chafing the members left on the outskirts of the conversation — such as those elected to leadership or committee chair positions. In Scalise’s case, he took pains to project alignment with McCarthy in the run-up to November’s midterms that became harder to maintain after the House GOP’s hopes of a commanding victory faded to a narrow, four-seat majority.

    That small margin of control, of course, made it much harder for McCarthy to win the speakership earlier this year. Throughout the 15 ballots he needed to win, McCarthy allies argue Scalise should’ve had more of a hands-on approach, rather than a hands off, which triggered old suspicions that the Louisianan was lying in wait for his opening to rise, feelings of which have percolated throughout the duo’s first 100 days in charge of the House.

    Allies in both camps note that the majority leader is keeping his head down and focused on policy — including putting out fires in another fraught intraparty debate: immigration policy. The Louisianan has helped broker conversations between holdouts like Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and his Lone Star State rival, GOP Rep. Chip Roy. But a New York Times report earlier this month that highlighted his frayed relationship with McCarthy only made things worse.

    “It was a little weird. I don’t think that was one of the best moments, but there have been many good moments,” Bishop acknowledged.

    Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a purple-district incumbent and McCarthy ally, said he called the speaker’s office to raise concerns about the “undermining” that he perceived in the Times report. Bacon added that he’s “seen no evidence” of bad blood between the “very collegial” speaker and majority leader.

    In a potential win for McCarthy, some of his biggest skeptics during the speakership skirmish appear to be tuning out what’s happening at the top. About a half-dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus interviewed for this story largely shrugged off the leadership drama as separate from their world — though some were displeased and defensive about the sidelining of Arrington, a fellow conservative albeit not a member of the group.

    The Freedom Caucus’ bigger focus right now is eking all the wins they can get from the debt deal, which leadership needs the right flank on board for as much as possible.

    Arrington, for his part, appears back in the fray on the debt talks. He attended a closed-door meeting Thursday afternoon as a cross-section of the conference demanded changes to the leadership-crafted measure’s proposed Medicaid work requirements, while shrugging off any questions about discord.

    Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), one of the conference’s more respected senior members, observed that Boehner once likened the speakership, during tough internal battles to corralling “jumping frogs in the wheelbarrow.”

    “Keeping all the jumping frogs together, at some snapshot in time when we’re voting, is going to be the test of leadership,” Womack said.

    Jennifer Scholtes, Jordain Carney and Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.

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    #McCarthy #builds #kitchen #Cabinet #ahead #debt #showdown #Scalise
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • 5 key moments from the Supreme Court showdown over Biden’s student debt relief

    5 key moments from the Supreme Court showdown over Biden’s student debt relief

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    The three liberal justices and Amy Coney Barrett all raised questions about whether the states had standing to bring the case. A big wild card is three other Republican appointees — Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts — all of whom were silent on the standing question, even though they seemed sharply critical of the merits of the case.

    Here’s POLITICO’s look at five key aspects of Tuesday’s closely-watched arguments on one of the Biden administration’s highest-profile policy initiatives:

    John Roberts: Size matters

    One particular fact about the Biden administration’s education debt relief program really seemed to be galling to Chief Justice John Roberts: It’s so darn big.

    Roberts seemed fixated on the sheer amount of the debt cancellation the Education Department was planning to offer before the courts froze the effort: an estimated $400 billion.

    Not content with the B-word that made astronomer Carl Sagan famous, the chief justice turned to the even more gargantuan T-word at least four times to make the debt relief program sound simply enormous.

    “We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Roberts intoned just minutes into the arguments Tuesday. “Congress shouldn’t have been surprised when half a trillion dollars is wiped off the books?”

    That became the prevailing framing of the program for Roberts and many of his colleagues, even liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

    Justice Samuel Alito uncharitably characterized the administration’s arguments this way, perhaps with inspiration from the late Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen: “When it comes to the administration of benefits programs, a trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, it doesn’t really make that much difference to Congress.”

    Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the conservative justices they were making a mistake to put so much emphasis on the overall cost and insisted it was proportionate to the need. “I recognize that this is a big program,” she said, adding, “but that’s in direct reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, which itself was a really big problem.”

    Did Kavanaugh compare student loan relief to Korematsu?

    One of the most jarring comparisons at Tuesday’s arguments came when Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the dangers posed by Biden’s debt relief plan could be akin to those from some of the worst excesses of presidential power. Kavanaugh mentioned the seizure of steel mills by President Harry Truman in 1952.

    Another leading example that the Trump appointed-justice didn’t cite directly is the internment President Franklin Roosevelt ordered of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, a policy blessed by the Supreme Court in 1944 in Korematsu v. U.S., a decision many Americans hold in disgrace.

    “Some of the biggest mistakes in the Court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive emergency power. Some of the finest moments in the Court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power. And that’s continued not just in the Korean War, but post-9/11 in some of the cases there,” said Kavanaugh, who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House during the September 11 attacks.

    While Kavanaugh said that history left him concerned about the Biden policy, he later seemed to backtrack a bit, pointing to an amicus brief calling the debt relief plan “a case study in abuse” of those powers. “I’m not saying I agree with that,” the conservative justice quickly added, muddling the question.

    The most pointed rejoinder to Kavanaugh came from Justice Elena Kagan, who sits next to Kavanaugh and often trades quiet asides with him during arguments. She said Biden’s action didn’t sideline Congress as other presidents have, but directly embraced Congressional authority.

    “Congress used its voice in enacting this piece of legislation,” the Obama appointee said, referring to the 2003 law allowing the Education secretary to waive various rules during emergencies. “All this business about executive power, I mean, we worry about executive power when Congress hasn’t authorized the use of executive power.”

    Where’s MOHELA?

    The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, known as MOHELA, figured heavily in the justices’ debate over whether the GOP states had standing to bring their lawsuit in the first place.

    Missouri, one of the states, argues that it can advance its case based on harms to MOHELA, which is a state-created entity that will face a reduction in revenue under Biden’s student debt relief plan.

    Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, conceded that if MOHELA itself had brought the lawsuit, the government wouldn’t contest its standing to bring such a case. But she said that Missouri couldn’t adopt MOHELA’s injuries as its own.

    Several of the justices also seized on the fact that MOHELA wasn’t part of the case.

    “If MOHELA is an arm of the state, why didn’t you just strong-arm MOHELA and say, ‘you’ve got to pursue this suit?’” Barrett asked the lawyer representing the GOP states.

    “That’s a question of state politics,” responded James Campbell, the Nebraska solicitor general who was representing the group of Republican states, including Missouri.

    Kagan suggested the state of Missouri was so far removed from MOHELA that the attorney general had to submit a public records request to obtain documents from the company. “If MOHELA was willing to hand you over the documents, you wouldn’t have filed a state FOIA request,” she said.

    Alito, who appeared sympathetic to the state’s argument for standing, speculated that MOHELA might have been worried about its contract with the Education Department under which the company is paid to manage millions of federal student loan borrower accounts. “Do you think there might be a dependent relationship between agencies like MOHELA and the federal government since we’re speculating about why they’re not here?”

    Indeed, MOHELA has publicly distanced itself from the GOP states’ lawsuit. The company has said its “executives were not involved” with the Missouri attorney general’s decision to file a lawsuit.

    MOHELA officials from the company also privately sought to reassure Democratic congressional aides and Biden administration officials that they were not involved in the lawsuit, POLITICO previously reported.

    Sotomayor tugs at heartstrings

    In hours of debate on complicated legal questions of standing, statutory interpretation and separation of powers, one soliloquy by Justice Sonia Sotomayor stood out: She detailed what hangs in the balance for borrowers in personal terms.

    “There’s 50 million students who … will benefit from this who today will struggle,” Sotomayor said, somewhat inflating the number of federal student loan borrowers who would benefit. (The Education Department estimates the total is roughly 42 million).

    “Many of them don’t have assets sufficient to bail them out after the pandemic,” the Obama appointee said. “They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments. The evidence is clear that many of them will have to default. Their financial situation will be even worse because once you default, the hardship on you is exponentially greater. You can’t get credit. You’re going to pay higher prices for things. They are going to continue to suffer from this pandemic in a way that the general population doesn’t.”

    Sotomayor also seemed to warn her colleagues against substituting their judgements about fairness and need for those the administration made in setting up the debt relief program.

    “What you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them,” Sotomayor said during an exchange with Campbell. “Instead of the person with the expertise and the experience, the Secretary of Education, who’s been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans, we’re going to take it upon ourselves.”

    A former Education secretary makes an appearance:

    Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who invoked the HEROES Act in 2020 to extend the pandemic moratorium on student loan payments, was among those who watched the arguments from the court gallery.

    DeVos has been sharply critical of student debt relief and signed an amicus brief with other former Republican education secretaries that blasted the proposal as unconstitutional.

    Under her leadership, the Education Department developed a legal opinion concluding that the agency lacked the legal authority to cancel large amounts of student debt without new Congressional approval. The Biden administration last August rescinded the department’s legal opinion and issued its own memo concluding that the HEROES Act provides a basis for broad-based debt relief.

    Several Biden Education Department officials also attended the arguments, including Rich Cordray, the head of the department’s student aid office, who oversees implementation of the debt relief program.

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    #key #moments #Supreme #Court #showdown #Bidens #student #debt #relief
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )