In today’s edition … NEWS: Democrats to file new discharge petition on gun safety … What we’re watching: Senate AI forum … Biden faces a moment of peril as UAW threatens broad strike … Lawmakers plan official visits to China to cool tensions … but first …
McCarthy tries to thread the needle
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is expected to unveil a plan this morning for how to fund the government, averting a government shutdown and giving lawmakers more time to hash out a larger spending deal.
Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Republican Study Committee — one of the “five families” that represent different factions of the Republican conference — said McCarthy would lay out a plan for “getting a certain amount of approps bills passed so we have a better, stronger position leading into dealing with the Senate.”
He expected McCarthy’s plan to include how to deal with President Biden’s requests for disaster relief funds — the cost of which some House Republicans have called to be offset — and more aid to Ukraine.
As for a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running past the end of fiscal year on Sept. 30, multiple Republicans familiar with the matter said such a bill — known as a continuing resolution, or CR — will need to include some component of border security, if not the entire border security bill the House passed earlier this year.
How good is McCarthy’s balance?
McCarthy is attempting to walk a narrow — perhaps impossibly slender — line on spending.
It’s still not clear as of this morning if McCarthy has the votes to pass the defense appropriations bill that leadership hopes to have on the floor today as far-right members want commitments on top-line spending numbers first, which we reported Tuesday. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) voted against the rule in the Rules Committee last night, signaling there could be others still not satisfied.
If McCarthy seeks to pass government funding legislation without including any of the demands of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has vowed to trigger a vote to depose him. If he tries to pass legislation with too much of what the Freedom Caucus wants, he’s likely to lose the votes of more moderate House Republicans and imperil the bill’s passage.
- So McCarthy is trying to strike a compromise similar to the one he achieved on Tuesday, when he announced that the House would open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. The Freedom Caucus and its allies have pushed for such a move for months.
But McCarthy announced the inquiry unilaterally, reversing his previous pledge to put it to a floor vote to spare Republicans who represent swing districts who weren’t eager to vote on the issue.
“We don’t have the votes,” between absences and jittery members, one senior Republican aide said of why McCarthy decided not to hold an impeachment inquiry vote. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe leadership’s strategy.
Furious conservatives, sanguine moderates
McCarthy’s concession to the hard right on impeachment didn’t seem to faze moderates (who won’t have to vote yea or nay on the idea for the moment) or placate conservatives.
Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), the chair of the moderate-leaning Republican Governance Group, who expressed skepticism about opening an impeachment inquiry in recent days, declined to do so on Tuesday.
“I support Speaker McCarthy’s decision to direct the House Committees on Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” Joyce said in a statement. “I am confident Chairmen [James] Comer, [Jim] Jordan, and [Jason] Smith will conduct thoughtful and thorough investigations into allegations against the President, which I will carefully review.”
And Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who represents a swing district that Biden carried by more than 12 points, said he had no concerns about McCarthy’s move to open an inquiry to investigate whether Biden aided or profited from his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings while he was vice president.
“We haven’t gotten enough information to get the clarity that Americans deserve at this point, and the inquiry is the tool to get that,” Garcia said. “I have no concern about the optics of it.”
Hard-right House Republicans, on the other hand, didn’t give McCarthy an inch on the spending bill for meeting their demand to start the process of potentially impeaching Biden.
Passing a bill to keep funding the government at current levels for weeks or months without attaching the Freedom Caucus’ priorities “is completely out of the question,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It would endanger the Republican majority and endanger Speaker McCarthy’s leadership.”
- Gaetz — who is not a Freedom Caucus member but is often on the same side as the group — made the threat explicit in a floor speech on Tuesday in which he vowed to force a vote to depose McCarthy if he passed such a bill. And he called McCarthy’s opening of an impeachment inquiry “a baby step following weeks of pressure from House conservatives to do more.”
But other ultraconservative lawmakers declined to make similar threats.
Norman said passing a bill to fund the government temporarily at current levels would be “unacceptable” but did not say whether it would be cause for ousting McCarthy.
Still, he expressed enthusiasm for a showdown over government spending, even if it comes at a cost.
“It’s time to fight,” he told reporters. “If it shuts the government down, shut it down.”
Thanks to the indefatigable Marianna Sotomayor for her help reporting.
NEWS: Democrats to file new discharge petition on gun safety
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) will announce in a House Democratic caucus meeting this morning that she will file a new discharge petition on gun safety today.
The discharge petition, a mechanism to force a vote on the House floor, is on a bill known as Ethan’s Law that requires the safe storage of firearms by gunowners.
DeLauro; Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), chair of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.); Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) and other members of leadership will hold a news conference on the effort this afternoon.
This will be the fourth discharge petition Democrats have filed this Congress on gun safety. The others have been to expand background checks, close the “Charleston loophole” and ban assault weapons.
A discharge petition must sit in committee for 30 days before it can be brought to the floor for signatures. Once it obtains the support of a majority of the House, it forces the House to take a vote.
None of the Democrats’ gun safety discharge petitions have received enough support to garner a floor vote — and they are still missing a few Democratic signatures.
But the leaders of the effort say it’s an opportunity to draw contrast with Republican who are advancing legislation in the House to expand access to guns.
The Senate is holding a forum on artificial intelligence today. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates; IBM CEO Arvin Krishna; Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who owns X, formerly known as Twitter; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai; Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association; Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are just some of the nearly two dozen people who will be in the same room to talk to senators about AI.
Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) are leading the forum. All 100 senators were invited to the closed-door all-day event.
We’re watching whether senators have a better direction of what AI regulation should look like, if they better understand AI, if they solve the Hollywood writers strike and if Zuckerberg and Musk will finally have their cage match. (We’re joking on the last point and half-joking on the second to last.)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release new data this morning that’s expected to show that “prices climbed about 3.5 percent in August compared to the year before, and 0.2 percent compared to the previous month,” our colleague Rachel Siegel reports. “That would mark the second-straight bump in the annual inflation rate, backing up economists fears’ and policymakers’ warnings that getting inflation to normal levels will not be easy or predictable.”
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will participate in America First Works’ new speaker series this morning. He’s scheduled to deliver remarks and participate in a fireside chat with the group’s president, Brooke Rollins. During the event, he is expected to unveil a domestic policy proposal that would drastically reduce the number of federal workers, per the Washington Examiner’s Julia Johnson.
- Ramaswamy’s appearance is notable because he’s running against Trump and America First Works is a sister group to the America First Policy Institute, a think tank that’s stocked with former Trump administration officials, including former chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
ICYMI: Rounds and Heinrich joined Leigh Ann on Washington Post Live Tuesday where they previewed todays forum on AI, laid out parameters of where they see AI regulation headed and discussed the challenges of Congress legislating in this arena.
Biden faces a moment of peril as UAW threatens broad strike
Our colleague Toluse Olorunnipa is out this morning with a look at how the looming autoworker strike has placed Biden, who fashioned himself the “most pro-union president in history,” in a politically perilous position as he campaigns for a second term in office. Here’s an excerpt:
- “Biden’s push to help the auto industry transition to clean energy technologies has become a key sticking point for autoworkers, who fear the shift to electric vehicles will mean fewer jobs and lower pay,” Tolu writes. The United Auto Workers, which hasn’t endorsed Biden’s reelection, “has specifically chided the administration for facilitating billions of dollars in tax incentives and loans for automakers without requiring them to share the benefits with union laborers.”
- Although Biden has not publicly endorsed the UAW’s list of demands or criticized the automakers’ offers, a strike would be politically precarious because “the key presidential battleground state of Michigan [will] likely be the most impacted by a work stoppage,” Tolu writes.
Lawmakers plan official visits to China to cool tensions
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) are planning to lead delegations of U.S. lawmakers to China this fall “in what would be the latest in a string of high-level visits, encouraged by the Biden administration, as Washington debates how to address a dangerously frayed relationship with Beijing,” our colleague Abigail Hauslohner reports.
- All hands on deck: “In recent months, the White House has dispatched to Beijing Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who in June became the first top American diplomat to visit China in five years. He was followed, in July, by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Biden’s special envoy on climate change, John F. Kerry. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo went in August.”
- But this latest round of trips comes as lawmakers express skepticism toward the effectiveness of such an outreach and as “U.S. officials acknowledge that the administration’s overtures thus far have yielded only modest results.”
Trip details: Schumer and Crapo would lead a bipartisan visit to China in October, while Khanna, a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), would lead one for House members, Abigail reports.
- Schumer “extended invitations to Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).” But Cornyn, Heinrich and Shaheen have so far declined. Haggerty and Rounds, meanwhile, both expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the trip.
- Virginia candidate who livestreamed sex videos draws support from women, Democratic leader. By the Associated Press’s Denise Lavoie and Matthew Barakat.
Some of us spent all day yesterday exploring the digital relaunch of The Post’s Style section. This morning, Tobi’s going to read about the “great year” Shakira’s having — despite a few hiccups.
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