The Hill’s Morning Report — McCarthy to face a punishing July

by Kristina Karisch - 07/05/23 6:15 AM ET

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The appropriations clock is ticking.

Fresh off a successful effort to raise the debt ceiling, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) now faces what might amount to an even tougher challenge: preventing a government shutdown without sparking an all-out revolt within his own conference. House GOP leaders will return to Washington next week after an Independence Day recess with one major item on the summer docket: moving 12 appropriations bills to the Senate and putting pressure on upper-chamber Democrats to swallow some Republican priorities.

But as recent events — namely a days-long standstill of the House floor orchestrated by a small number of right-wing members protesting McCarthy’s debt deal — show, that process will be far from easy. The GOP conference is sharply divided in its approach to 2024 spending, pitting centrists and leadership allies — who concede the need for a bipartisan compromise on government funding — against conservative hard-liners demanding deep cuts, back to 2022 levels, in defiance of the deal McCarthy cut with President Biden in June.

The dynamics set the stage for a punishing July for McCarthy and GOP leaders, who are racing to win over the conservative holdouts and move the spending bills with just a razor-thin majority that allows scant room for defections ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline.

Complicating their effort, the conservative hard-liners are now vowing to use their considerable leverage — and hardball tactics — to force the Speaker to hold a tougher line in the spending debate. If the government shuts down in the process, they say that’s a price they’re willing to pay (The Hill).

To say McCarthy’s task is difficult, said Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), is “the understatement of possibly the decade.”

“But difficult is not impossible,” he quickly added. “We’re more united than perhaps the mainstream media would give us credit for.”

One possible option House GOP leaders are discussing is a stopgap spending bill that would be put on the floor as soon as this month, acting as a fail-safe while they try to build support to pass fiscal 2024 appropriations bills that appear on shaky ground. The idea, Roll Call reports, is to have a stopgap in place to continue government funding in the event all the regular appropriations bills are not passed by the end of the fiscal year.

That plan — which most House conservatives would likely reject — would avoid a government shutdown in October if the Senate also passed the stopgap and Biden signed it into law, and it would remove some of the pressure from Democrats to accept appropriations bills that have higher spending than conservatives want.

Roll Call: House and Senate majorities are putting their stamps on earmarks.

Related Articles

▪ The New York Times: A vote to send the Homeland Security Committee impeachment articles against Biden for his border policies has underscored rifts in the GOP about whether to try to remove him, and for what.

▪ Politico: Inside the House GOP’s plan to go after FBI and DOJ.

▪ The Hill: Democrats’ effort to force gun votes fizzles in the House.

▪ The New York Times: Dozens of lawmakers are seeking to loosen a law that limits long-distance flights to and from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. For some of them, success could mean a shorter commute.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ POLITICS

Republicans are split on whether their presidential contenders should embrace a federal 15-week ban on abortion as the party tries to find its footing on the issue going into 2024.

As The Hill’s Caroline Vakil and Julia Manchester write, in a radio ad released Thursday in Iowa, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) vowed to back a national 15-week ban on the procedure. That ad followed a call in late June from former Vice President Mike Pence, who urged the other candidates to embrace a federal 15-week ban. But the issue has continued to dog other candidates, including former President Trump, and has sparked disagreement among anti-abortion groups over how candidates should be handling the issue on the campaign trail.

“What’s interesting is that neither [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis or Trump, who are the two — for lack of better term — front-runners, neither one of them are really saying what they’re trying to do in terms of federal legislation,” Ralph Reed, the founder of the influential Faith and Freedom Coalition, told reporters last week at the group’s annual gathering. “So others are going to try to force them, and it will be very fascinating to see how it plays out, and then by the time we get to the convention in Milwaukee, we’ll have a platform and there will be a position.”

Republican senators, meanwhile, are looking for a way to avoid the political hit they took on abortion rights in the 2022 midterm election, when they suffered a net loss of one seat, as Senate Democrats ramp up to make it a top issue in 2024, writes The Hill’s Alexander Bolton. But Senate Republican strategists warn their hopes of winning back the majority in 2024 could be derailed by the abortion debate, as they believe happened last year — especially in races in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, which Democrats won.

▪ The Hill: Lesser-known candidates vying for the Republican nomination are facing a difficult problem: How to break through a crowded field if you can’t make it on the debate stage.

▪ Politico: The GOP field is more diverse than ever, but the party isn’t heralding the achievement.

▪ Axios: Younger 2024 candidates highlight athletic prowess.

▪ The Washington Post analysis: Parents aren’t as conservative as the right likes to think.

▪ The New York Times: Stumping on July 4, Trump’s rivals pitch themselves to early-state voters. Trump loomed large over the campaign trail, even though he was among the few GOP contenders who stayed away from it.

Election Day 2024 is still 16 months away, but plenty has been revealed in the early months of the presidential campaign, The Hill’s Niall Stanage outlines in The Memo. The Republican field looks set. Biden is not facing a truly serious challenge for the Democratic nomination. And the Supreme Court keeps throwing curveballs.

The high court’s term came to an end last week with decisions that reaffirmed its conservative bent — from nullifying Biden’s student debt relief plan to ending affirmative action in college admission programs. But as The Hill’s Ella Lee reports, the court issued several unexpected outcomes this term that suggest it may be more nuanced than meets the eye, and Supreme Court watchers say those outcomes are less indicative of a moderating court than one aware of its falling public standing.

A Quinnipiac University poll last month found 30 percent of registered voters approved of the Supreme Court, while 59 percent disapproved — the high court’s lowest approval rating since Quinnipiac started asking the question in 2004.

“It’s still going to be an aggressively right-wing court, but maybe there are some boundaries that the court is going to impose on itself because it is — and I would say, the chief justice in particular, is — worried about its own reputation and standing with the public,” Mary Cheh, a professor at George Washington University Law School, told The Hill.

▪ Axios: The Supreme Court’s ideology continues to lean conservative, new data shows.

▪ The Associated Press: In a polarized U.S., how to define a patriot increasingly depends on who’s being asked.

▪ The Atlantic: What I learned retracing the footsteps of the Capitol rioters. How should we memorialize Jan. 6, 2021? Consider the walking tour.

➤ ADMINISTRATION

In an extraordinary preliminary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment, a federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies about “protected speech.” For more than a decade, the federal government has attempted to work with social media companies to address criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism, and the Trump-appointed judge’s move could undo years of efforts to enhance that coordination (The Hill, The Washington Post and The New York Times).

▪ ABC News: Secret Service investigating suspected cocaine found inside White House complex.

▪ The Hill: Biden calls for gun reform after a “wave of tragic and senseless shootings” in recent days.

▪ Politico: How the FBI hacked Hive. The bureau is trying to take the fight to foreign ransomware gangs, even if it means giving up on bringing some of them behind bars.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: The U.S. funds shadow police units all over the world. They pursue matters ranging from heroin smuggling to protecting pangolins, pursuing American interests when regular cops can’t be trusted.

▪ Politico: Biden’s trade experiment is ticking people off. His trade rep is on the receiving end.

At a moment when the Republicans and Democrats are trading fierce fire from the trenches of a war over social and cultural policy, Biden is staying out of the fray.

The president has largely avoided becoming enmeshed in contemporary battles over gender, abortion and other hotly contested social issues. His armor against cultural attacks might seem unlikely for a president who has strongly advocated for LGBTQ people, the leader of a party whose strengths ride on the wave of abortion politics, and a man who owes his presidency to unbending support from Black Democratic primary voters.

While his age has become one of Biden’s chief political weaknesses, both his allies and adversaries say it also helps insulate him from cultural attacks by Republicans. Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator who recently began a campaign to become the first transgender member of Congress, told the Times Biden’s language gave him the ability to solidify Democrats behind a progressive social agenda and “reach communities and demographics that are not yet fully in the coalition” (The New York Times).

“His background allows him to say things that I think would be heard as more radical if they were said by a younger politician,” she said.

▪ Politico: Meet the Delaware state senator who transformed Biden’s view of transgender rights. McBride, the nation’s first transgender state lawmaker, has been a major force in forging the president’s worldview of LGBTQ rights.

▪ The Washington Post analysis: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg calls the Supreme Court “out of step” on LGBTQ+ issues. He has a point.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ INTERNATIONAL

A Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces has been “particularly fruitful” in the past few days and Ukraine’s troops are fulfilling their main tasks, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said Tuesday. The comments were Kyiv’s latest positive assessment of the month-old counterattack, although Moscow has not acknowledged Ukraine’s gains. Russia still holds swathes of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday his troops had made progress after a “difficult” week (Reuters).

Russian air defenses said Tuesday they foiled a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow that prompted authorities to briefly close one of the city’s international airports, as a Western analysis said that Russia has managed to slow Kyiv’s counteroffensive. Authorities in Ukraine, which generally avoids commenting on attacks on Russian soil, didn’t say whether Kyiv launched the drone raid (The Associated Press).

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of last month’s short-lived rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group that fought for Russia in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be scrambling to coup-proof his system once more. For decades, people who know him say, Putin has been remarkably focused on his personal security and on preventing rivals from using the powers of government against him. So far, he has avoided the sort of large-scale purge that other authoritarian leaders have carried out in response to coup attempts or rebellions, perhaps to avoid destabilizing his system further (The New York Times).

▪ The Associated Press: Putin says Russia is “united as never before” during Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Moscow’s war propaganda targeting Russian speakers has carved a rift through families, pitching people across generations and backgrounds against one another.

▪ The Atlantic: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized. Unelected bureaucrats get a bad rap. But some, such as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, do an essential job.

The White House is preparing to restrict Chinese companies’ access to U.S. cloud-computing services, The Wall Street Journal reports, in a move that could further strain relations between the world’s economic superpowers. The move comes as China unveiled a new export licensing system Monday that highlighted its role in the global production of gallium and germanium, which are used to make chips, electric cars and telecommunications equipment. The announcement to control the export of the metals — just days before Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits Beijing — appears timed to give China leverage as it pushes the White House to remove export controls that risk hobbling the nation’s development (Bloomberg News).

▪ Reuters: The Syrian regime organized feared ghost militias, war crimes researchers say.

▪ The Associated Press: Israel ends West Bank raid calling it a blow to militants. Palestinians grapple with destruction.

▪ Bloomberg News: Spain is confident Turkey will give the nod to Swedish NATO entry.

▪ The New York Times: Biden and the Swedish prime minister to discuss NATO bid.

French President Emmanuel Macron promised “fundamental answers” to more than 200 mayors in a meeting to reflect on the violence that has gripped the country for nearly a week. Protests broke out nationwide after the recent police shooting at close range of a 17-year-old of north African background at a traffic stop. Some protests turned violent, with demonstrators attacking government buildings including town halls, schools and mayors’ offices. After more than 3,400 arrests and signs that the violence is now abating, France is once again facing a reckoning — as it did after previous riots in mixed-race, disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s (DW and The Associated Press).

Politico EU: After the riots, Macron must fix a broken France. Fixing the growing rift between disadvantaged youth and French institutions will be no easy task for the president.

OPINION

■ Why there’s reason to believe American democracy has a bright future, by Megan McArdle, columnist, The Washington Post.

■ Putin created a beast, and now he has no idea how to rein it in, by Colin P. Clarke, guest essayist, The New York Times.

WHERE AND WHEN

📲 Ask The Hill: Share a news query tied to an expert journalist’s insights: The Hill launched something new and (we hope) engaging via text with Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. Learn more and sign up HERE.

The House will meet Thursday at noon for a pro forma session; lawmakers return July 11 to the Capitol.

The Senate will convene on Thursday at 10 a.m. for a pro forma session. Members return to Washington July 10.

The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 10 a.m. At 2 p.m., he will meet with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in the Oval Office.

Vice President Harris is in Los Angeles and has no public schedule.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Trinidad and Tobago. He will participate in Caribbean Community (CARICOM) events in Port of Spain and meet with U.S. Embassy staff and families at 4:15 p.m. ADT. At 6:45 p.m. ADT, he will meet with Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry before attending a CARICOM working dinner at 8 p.m. ADT.

The White House daily press briefing is scheduled at 2:15 p.m. 

ELSEWHERE

➤ HEALTH & WELLBEING

Maternal deaths across the U.S. more than doubled over the course of two decades, but the tragedy unfolded unequally. Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. And some states fared worse than others, according to findings of a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019 — but not the pandemic spike — for every state and five racial and ethnic groups.

Among wealthy nations, the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose.

“It’s a call to action to all of us to understand the root causes — to understand that some of it is about health care and access to health care, but a lot of it is about structural racism and the policies and procedures and things that we have in place that may keep people from being healthy,” Allison Bryant, one of the study’s authors and a senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham, told The Associated Press.

▪ The Hill: More than one-third of young women in the U.S. suffer from iron deficiency, research finds.

▪ Vox: What could cause a malaria comeback in the US — and what could stop it.

▪ The Hill: Almost 1 in 4 people in the US hadn’t gotten COVID-19 by the end of 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

THE CLOSER

A parliament clerk carries used pencils in the Italian parliament, in Rome in 2022.

And finally … ✏️ An Iowa man may be well on his way to an official world record — for his pencil collection. Aaron Bartholmey, of Colfax, Iowa, has been collecting wooden advertising pencils since he was a child, and he now claims to own more than 70,000.

That number is substantially higher than the current Guinness World Record for the largest pencil collection: 24,000, held since 2020 by Emilio Arenas of Uruguay. Bartholmey told KCCI-TV that his most treasured pencils are those from his hometown, noting that in many instances the pencils “are the only place where there is any record of that business still, and I think it’s just a neat way to preserve history.”

Two counters from the American Pencil Collectors Society have visited the Colfax Historical Society to count Bartholmey’s pencils, and now he’s waiting to hear if the count is approved by Guinness, which estimated the review process could take up to three months (The Associated Press).

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