On the role of Senator Kevin McCarthy in the fight against the California GOP ascension: a joint apology to Biggs, Scalise, and Jordan
Kevin McCarthy made it clear he will stay in the speakership race even if the fight goes to many ballots on the floor.
But Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a conservative hardliner who is challenging McCarthy to be the most powerful member of Congress, doubled down on his commitment to stop the California Republican’s ascension.
McCarthy’s supporters are vowing to keep voting for him on multiple ballots, and GOP sources said there are early discussions about a floor strategy for that potential scenario, including whether to recess the House or let the votes keep rolling – no matter how long it takes.
“If a small group refuses to play ball and be part of the team, then we’ll work across the aisle to find an agreeable Republican,” Bacon said. I hope we don’t get there.
McCarthy’s detractors think that if he doesn’t have the votes of the speaker by January 3 he’ll need to embrace it. GOP sources told CNN there’s potential room to negotiate to give members more power to call for a vote to oust the speaker – perhaps by allowing the vote to occur if a certain number of members call for one, rather than allowing a single lawmaker to call for a vote as the hardliners want.
If McCarthy withdrew his name, a number of GOP lawmakers would run, with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s top deputy, being the front runner.
If Kevin took his name out you would have good people running. Republican lawmaker said that he would probably be the guy.
Scalise has repeatedly vowed to support McCarthy and refused to speculate on whether he would jump into the race if the GOP leader can’t get the votes.
“No, I’m not going to get into speculation, that’s what I’m telling you.” “Obviously, our focus is on getting it resolved by January 3. And there’s a lot of conversations that everybody has been having, Kevin, surely, with the members who have expressed concerns.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, the conservative set to become the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, went even further, ruling out jumping into the race even though Gaetz and other hardliners have urged him to seek the speakership.
When he left a meeting with McCarthy on Wednesday, Norman said he would vote for Andy for speaker. He said all this is positive. We’re having good change, regardless of what happens. You will see more of it.
A group of seven Republicans onThursday laid out a list of demands to get their vote, but they didn’t threaten to oppose McCarthy if their demands aren’t met.
McCarthy has begun brokering rules changes to empower rank-and-file members, created a new select committee on China, vowed to boot some Democrats from their committees, and sketched out a plan to investigate Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary.
And the anti-McCarthy group is also still pressing for a process that would allow any single member to hold a floor vote on ousting the sitting speaker, which was wielded over former Speaker John Boehner before he was forced out of the job by the far right in 2015.
McCarthy has been adamantly opposed to restoring the “motion to vacate the chair,” and a majority of the House GOP voted against the idea during a during a closed-door meeting last month. McCarthy did not answer when asked by CNN if he would visit the issue.
The Republican representative said that the impact of a January red wave was the idea that people are sick and tired of noise and fighting. “And I know I get that wherever I go in my district is, ‘why can’t you guys just get things done?’”
The ongoing divide between the House and Senate GOP, while nothing new, has been a topic of conversation among members who have recently huddled with McCarthy as they plot their new majority.
Some Democrats said they would listen to it, including one who told CNN some of their GOP colleagues had approached him about it.
Joyce also said some members have reached out to him about potentially running, but he dismissed it. Kevin will be the new speaker at the end of the day.
Jeffries, the next House Democratic leader, said there were no discussions with Republicans about putting up an alternative candidate. If McCarthy could not get the votes, his caucus would have to help pick the next speaker.
Jeffries told CNN on Thursday that Democrats are trying to organize the conference. “Republicans are in the process of organizing the Republican Conference. Let’s see what happens on January 3.”
Some of the potential consensus picks that have been floated included retiring Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan and John Katko of New York, who both voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting the Capitol insurrection; Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus; and Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a veteran lawmaker and incoming head of the House Rules Committee.
But that would require agreement from every single Democrat and the help of five Republicans – no easy feat. He will be skiing that day, though he has no plans to be in Washington.
But Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman said this has happened before – nearly a decade ago in his state where minority Democrats in the Arkansas legislature joined forces with a handful of Republicans to elect a GOP speaker of their choice. Westerman privately made this case to his colleagues at a closed-door meeting this week.
The fight for the debt limit revisited: Democrat leadership is worried about the end of the 2012 budget crisis and is ready for battles next year
Westerman said that he was worried about January 3 being when they would be able to form a Congress and organize committees, as well as pushing the policy objectives they wanted to push.
The discussion about changing House rules is good for the party. But he added: “I’m not really excited about any type of destructive movement.”
The Treasury Department is projected to hit its borrowing limit next year, though it is unclear exactly when the agency will run out of so-called extraordinary measures to ensure payments continue for a few months.
McConnell has long found ways to avoid default, but the fight to raise the debt limit is already underway and will likely lead to a government default next year. In the meantime, Senate Republicans are eager to finish up this year’s funding package in the final days of the current Congress controlled by Democrats, a move that would take a major battle over a potential government shutdown off the table early next year.
Goldman Sachs economists warned in an analysis this week that bipartisan support to raise the debt limit “will be necessary, but hard to achieve,” and that the United States could veer the closest it had come to the economic tumult of 2011 since that standoff. The analysts also noted that less than a quarter of Republicans and less than a third of Democrats who will serve in the House in 2023 were there in 2011.
The North Carolina Senator, who is retiring at the end of the year, said that if he were to continue, he would hope that they would do it now. “We all know that on Feb. 1, the 2024 presidential races start, so you’re automatically already in the political season before you do anything next year, and I would hate for one side or the other to take the debt ceiling and to use it for the purposes purely being political.”
The debt limit could be raised if the Democrats used the fast-track budget reconciliation process. But party leaders have resisted the move, arguing that the vote should be bipartisan.
After the government funding standoff gripping Washington, it will be evident that a cold war will erupt between congressional Republicans and a Democratic White House.
Democrats want to pass a government funding bill in the last days of their majority in the House, and are also getting ready for battles at the beginning of next year.
It’s an early glimpse of the paralysis that could result from divided government with neither side having the power to fully deliver on promises they made to voters in last month’s midterm elections, when Republicans won the House and Democrats retained control of the Senate.
There are disagreements over funding social programs, and the need to raise the debt limit next year, which could lead to a government shut down. This heralds a return of the government shutdown threats that were a regular holiday season tradition during the Obama administration after Republicans gained congressional majorities. During the holiday season in December, the government shut down for 35 days because of a dispute over President Donald Trump’s demand for border wall funding.
In a sign of mounting political pressure, a group of Republicans wrote to the GOP leader last week, telling him that he should block the spending bill and agree to a short term funding measure to keep the government open for a few weeks.
Their stance helps explain why McConnell last week gave a grim prognosis for a deal with Democrats on a big funding bill, commenting, “We don’t have agreements to do virtually anything. … We do not have an agreement on how much we will spend and we are running out of time.
His comments, while offering a glimpse of how he plans to preside over a confrontation with the White House, also offered insight into how the GOP House could make McConnell’s life more complicated next year as he tries to manage his party in the Senate.
But a senior Biden administration official warned last week that even a funding deal that lasted a year would have “disastrous” consequences for key programs.
The House Budget Crisis in the Light of McConnell and McCarthy: A Republican Lawmaker’s View on the Party Leaders of the House of Representatives
On Sunday the independent senator from Vermont said that Republicans were trying to prevent Democrats from taking control of the House of Representatives at the end of the year.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” he stated that Republicans see it as an opportunity to hold us hostage and get demands that they would not make in normal circumstances.
“Look, they have not been shy about making it clear they want to cut Social Security, they want to cut Medicare, they want to cut Medicaid,” Sanders told Dana Bash.
Biden sent the secretaries of state and defense to Capitol Hill last week to brief senators on the war in Ukraine. But in a sign of the consuming nature of the spending showdown, Republicans emerged from the meeting complaining that the two secretaries spent time lobbying for an omnibus spending bill over a continuing resolution.
It was not a good use of their time. John Kennedy was a Republican senator from Louisiana. He said that Schumer wanted to know why the new spending bill was necessary. “I knew as soon as Chuck said that. … this is just a political exercise,” Kennedy said.
“Bring your Yuletide carols and all that stuff here because we may be singing to each other,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters last week.
The deal in the works was broadly appealing when McConnell declared on Tuesday that the package was a good one. Top congressional negotiators announced Tuesday evening that an agreement has been reached for a framework that should allow lawmakers to complete a sweeping full-year government funding package.
One Republican lawmaker pointed out that McConnell and McCarthy are dealing with different conferences and political dynamics, which explains their sometimes conflicting approaches.
“It’s a House-Senate dynamic, and the conference in the House, obviously, a lot of times can be in a different place than the conference in the Senate,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune, the South Dakota Republican who serves as McConnell’s top deputy.
McCarthy doesn’t want to deal with the threat of a government shutdown immediately upon entering their new majority. Funding the government is most likely going to be a challenge due to the political divide and the fact that the House majority is so thin that they’re making demands about the border.
“Everybody’s probably got a reason at the moment to oppose it,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican and top GOP appropriator, said of McCarthy. “They may oppose it on philosophical grounds, maybe opposes it on political grounds.”
Off the House floor on Tuesday, McCarthy sidestepped a question about McConnell’s support for the emerging funding package and instead pointed his finger back at Democrats.
“Well, my message is to Democrats who want to spend more,” McCarthy said when asked about McConnell. I would not be adding more money after they spent so much last year.
The Kentucky Republican said they were on defense. “We’re dealing with the cards we were dealt.” He said that they were able to ramp up funding for defense programs and hold the line against Democrats’ push to raise money for other domestic programs.
McCarthy is under fire from his right flank to take a harder line on a number of issues, including the spending package. Hardliners want to wait to fund the government until the new year when the House GOP will be in charge and thus have more leverage in the process.
Even as McCarthy signals his staunch opposition to the massive spending package, some of his critics are complaining about how the process is playing out.
McConnell is preparing the House to take up trillions of dollars in new spending, said Rep. Scott Perry, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Tell me how it’s different here. I’m interested to hear, but right now, I don’t see anything changing.”
House GOP leadership is formally whipping against the one-week short-term spending patch to extend this Friday’s deadline until December 23, and Republican sources believe leaders will likely whip against the omnibus bill as well. McConnell is likely to vote for both packages.
A Bipartisan, Bipartisan Framework for Government Funding Negotiated by Senate Speaker Patrick Leahy and House Speaker Rosa DeLauro
The member said that they have different styles of conferences. “The dynamic is different. McCarthy is fighting for his political life.”
The framework for a full year government funding package has been reached, congressional negotiators announced Tuesday evening.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said in a statement that he and ranking Republican member Richard Shelby and House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro have “reached a bipartisan, bicameral framework that should allow us to finish an omnibus appropriations bill that can pass the House and Senate and be signed into law by the President.”
The announcement did not delve into specific details of what the agreement encompasses, but marks a major breakthrough as lawmakers work to fund the government before the end of the year.
While Democrats have controlled both chambers of Congress they have passed a number of measures that Republicans claim are wasteful and have increased inflation.
Democrats counter by saying those measures were necessary to help the country recover from the devastating impact of the pandemic as well as to tackle other critical priorities. And Democrats say that money to respond to Covid, health care and climate should not mean there should be less money next year for government operations and non-defense, domestic spending.
Dick Durbin, the majority whip, warned that the government funding fight will move into next year. The Illinois Democrat said that it would invite more negotiating obstruction. “This fiscal year began October 1. Let’s get this job done this year, do it before Christmas.”
He said that people would want to fund the government until there was a long-term resolution in place.
If the two sides can’t reach an agreement on a year-long package, the Democrats will not agree to a stopgap bill until the new Congress is up and running.
If a broader bipartisan deal does come together, it would be poised to pass both chambers. A deal would be expected to have the votes in the House, but it is likely to take some Republicans breaking with McCarthy to get there. House Democrats will only have a two seat margin, and because negotiators would have to craft any deal in order to win 10 GOP votes in the Senate, it’s likely the bill won’t pass muster with some progressives in the House looking for more domestic spending.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that negotiations on a year-long government funding bill are moving forward and if talks continue as they are, he’s “hopeful” they’ll reach a deal.
The Senate will need to pass a stopgap measure this week in order to avoid a government shutdown on Friday. He said he hopes no senator “stands in the way” of quickly passing the funding patch. The consent of all 100 senators is needed to speed up the process.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/government-funding-shutdown-latest/index.html
The Enhanced Child Tax Credit: A Democrat’s Perspective of Working Families and the Future of Taxes in the 21st Century
A group of Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocates are pushing hard to restore at least part of the enhanced child tax credit that stabilized many families’ finances in 2021.
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said on Tuesday that he plans to “fight with every ounce of my strength” over the issue.
“The number one interest of companies today is for trained and educated workers. You make investments like the Child Tax Credit and you give the employers the chance to get more of what they want. He said that he supports the Child Tax Credit and the Research and Development Credit very much.
When asked about a tax package being included in an omnibus deal, he said that there is a lot of expiring tax policy that needs to be extended. I don’t see it at the moment.