Morning Report — Rep. George Santos survives expulsion vote

Embattled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) will remain in Congress after a Wednesday floor vote failed to expel him. His legal and political troubles are not over, however. 

His drama is likely to continue in two weeks when the Ethics Committee issues its findings and expulsion risks reawaken in the House. 

Santos — whose fabrications of his backstory and résumé propelled him to notoriety after his 2022 election — wasted no time claiming a victory for due process. He vowed to contest criminal and ethics charges.  

“I will continue to serve the 3rd Congressional District of New York until the people choose to not have me,” he told reporters as he left the Capitol.  

Santos also lashed out at the New York Republicans who led the expulsion effort, accusing them of acting purely out of “political expediency” in a tough election cycle. And he dismissed the concerns that his remaining in Congress could be a drag on his party — and might cost them control of the House.  

Wednesday marked the second attempt this year to remove Santos. In May, the House voted to refer a Democrat-led expulsion resolution to the Ethics Committee, a decision that was largely regarded as redundant because the panel had been looking into the congressman for months. 

But this week’s attempt was significant. The effort was led by a group of Santos’s fellow first-term New York Republicans, and it comes as he faces 23 federal charges and stares down a September 2024 trial start date. It also occurred a day after the House Ethics panel announced it would reveal its “next course of action” in the months-long investigation by Nov. 17, which could include expulsion from the House.  

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), who led the expulsion effort against Santos, said he believed the looming update from the Ethics panel drove some lawmakers to vote against the legislation. “There’s no question that the memo that they put out definitely gave some of our colleagues the ability to say let’s hold off for the two weeks and see where the report leads up, which is fine,” he told reporters following the vote (The Hill). 

Among the 31 Democrats who voted not to expel Santos were Senate hopeful Colin Allred (Texas), Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Steven Horsford (Nev.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). House lawmakers also voted Wednesday to torpedo a resolution censuring Tlaib for her harsh criticisms of Israel in the wake of Hamas’s deadly attacks last month. The vote was something of a surprise: Tlaib, a staunch liberal who’s been harshly critical of Israel, has few fans in the GOP when it comes to Middle Eastern politics (The Hill). 

WITH JUST 15 DAYS UNTIL A GOVERNMENT FUNDING DEADLINE, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Republican senators Wednesday that U.S. military aid to Israel must move by itself, warning them that a larger package — requested by the White House — with additional funding for Ukraine, Taiwan and the U.S. southern border can’t pass the House.  

Johnson also told GOP senators that he supports sending military aid to Ukraine but cautioned that it must be attached to reforms to improve border security, which the White House and House Republicans support. His plan is to move separate measures to the floor sequentially, with $14.3 billion in Israel aid going first on Friday.  

According to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Johnson said he supports bringing a Ukraine assistance bill to the House floor but emphasized he wants to do “Israel first.”  

“He’s for both of them; he’s just trying to do one at a time,” Tuberville told reporters after the meeting.  

He did not reference a timetable for a measure packaging Ukraine with border funding, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton and Al Weaver report. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who favors a single measure in the Senate to vote on Israel and Ukraine aid, made no comment, according to senators who participated in the discussion and spoke with reporters afterward.   

But as The Hill’s Bolton reports, conservatives led by Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) are urging McConnell to follow Johnson’s lead. But McConnell, the longest serving party leader in Senate history, is not inclined to take orders from a new Speaker whose legislative experience in Washington began in 2017. 

Meanwhile, a group of Senate Republicans on Wednesday attempted and failed to overcome Tuberville’s blockade of more than 370 military nominations, marking the first time GOP members have attempted a maneuver of this kind (The Hill). 

WITH A SHUTDOWN DEADLINE APPROACHING, Johnson told Senate Republicans he favors a continuing resolution to keep the government operating beyond Nov. 17, when stopgap funding expires, into 2024. The duration has yet to be worked out with House Republicans and could be envisioned to last until spring. It’s a risk for the new Speaker, who understands that some House conservatives oppose voting for new spending without achieving a significant dent in federal red ink. 

The Senate passed its first batch of government funding measures for fiscal year 2024 Wednesday, teeing up a clash with House Republicans as the party presses for steeper spending cuts and a host of partisan riders. The package covers full-year funding for the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies (The Hill). 

“We just passed a strong, bipartisan spending package, the only bipartisan spending bills in Congress, by the way, and we did it with an 82-15 vote,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said after the vote. “So let’s be crystal clear about what that means. Unlike the funding measures we’ve seen pushed through the House, these are serious and reasonable, bipartisan bills that can actually be signed into law. They are the product of months of hard work, careful negotiation, thoughtful input from members on both sides of the aisle.” 

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LEADING THE DAY 

MIDDLE EAST 

An estimated 500 to 600 Americans have been prevented — for weeks — from escaping Gaza but may begin to exit today through the Rafah gate at the border with Egypt, according to U.S. officials. Only about 10 U.S. aid personnel made it through on Wednesday. Why others and their families have been held back has not been explained. At least 361 people with foreign passports were allowed to leave Gaza on Wednesday, some by bus to Egyptian hospitals for treatment of injuries. 

A negotiated agreement late Tuesday among Israel, the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas, which controls Gaza, made crossings possible by certain categories of people, including Palestinians and dual passport holders. 

Biden, speaking in Minnesota, noted, “We’ll see more of this process going on in the coming days, working nonstop to get Americans out of Gaza as soon and safely as possible.” 

THE SLOW EXODUS across the Gaza-Egypt border took place as Israel continued airstrikes against Hamas amid episodic power and telecommunications blackouts, said to be part of Israel’s war plan to keep the militants guessing. 

As lawmakers in Washington debate legislation this week to send additional U.S. military support to Israel, that country’s forces on Wednesday continued to bombard the Jabaliya neighborhood about half a mile from destruction carried out during Tuesday’s major strikes in Gaza. Videos verified by The New York Times showed several large buildings pancaked into mountains of concrete. Footage showed rescue workers and residents digging through rubble and carrying what appeared to be the injured and corpses. 

The Hill: Biden told a heckler who called for a cease-fire in Gaza: “I think we need a pause.” 

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Today’s Capitol Hill staffer spotlight: Here are 10 top schedulers and operations staff based on colleagues’ recommendations, via the CNCT app.

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ZOOM IN 

POLITICS & CAMPAIGNS 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is drawing the ire of top Senate Republicans after he proposed legislation that would end unlimited corporate donations to PACs, a key provision of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that dramatically changed campaign finance law based on a First Amendment interpretation. As The Hill’s Al Weaver reports, it has helped bankroll top GOP groups for more than a decade.  

Hawley, a former clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, captured McConnell’s attention, who dressed Hawley down during lunch Tuesday and warned GOP colleagues that they should not join Hawley’s push. The Senate Leadership Fund, a group run by McConnell allies, was born out of the Citizens United ruling and has been a prominent bulwark for Senate GOP incumbents and new candidates. “It was pretty clear that [McConnell] was pretty understanding of the issue,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said — with a laugh. 

The future of Hawley’s bill is unclear, since overturning the decision requires the Supreme Court to do so, or a constitutional amendment. That’s because the 2010 case was decided on constitutional grounds — under the First Amendment — as opposed to statutory grounds (MSNBC). 

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ELSEWHERE 

ECONOMY  

The Federal Reserve, as widely expected, left interest rates unchanged Wednesday, the first time in nearly two years that the central bank paused rates over the course of two consecutive meetings. Since March 2022, the Fed has hiked its benchmark interest rate from near-zero percent to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent in an effort to curb inflation to 2 percent (The Hill). At 3.7 percent, inflation is running twice as high as the Fed’s goal. 

“The rise in long-term interest rates in recent months has had the same desired effect of monetary tightening, effectively doing some of the Fed’s dirty work for them,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for the financial services company Bankrate, said in a statement to NBC News. 

STRONG ECONOMY: Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank may have missed the mark in gauging the continued resilience of consumer and small business’s finances. 

“We may have underestimated the balance sheet strength of households and small businesses,” he told reporters Wednesday. 

Investors who have been listening for months to the Fed’s higher-for-longer messaging about rates were not surprised by Wednesday’s central bank decision. The question now is what Fed governors will opt to do at their December meeting, and Powell said pauses do not mean future rate hikes are off the table. He also emphasized that “we’re not thinking about rate cuts.” 

“I still believe, and my colleagues for the most part still believe, that it is likely to be true … that we will need to see some slower growth and some softening in the labor market to fully restore price stability,” Powell said. “The idea that it would be difficult to raise again after stopping for a meeting or two is just not right,” he added.  

Some analysts remain skeptical. “The fact that they left rates unchanged for the second time in a row suggests the Fed might leave rates unchanged in December. And if they do, that means the Fed is done,” Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities, told Reuters. 

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COURTS 

As Trump and his children — Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka — prepare to testify in the sweeping New York civil fraud case regarding the former president’s real estate empire, The Washington Post explores how Trump’s four-year presidency — and the tumultuous period of investigations and criminal and civil litigation since he left office — have reshaped much of the Trump family’s wealth, business and dynamics with one another. 

Donald Trump Jr., the co-chief of his father’s business empire, denied in court Wednesday that he was involved in preparing financial documents that exaggerated his father’s net worth. His testimony came in the $250 million civil trial in which both men stand accused of widespread corporate fraud. While the younger Trump allowed that he advised the accountants about the value of individual deals that he had worked on, he said those conversations weren’t for the specific purpose of preparing the statements of financial condition (Politico). 

“I could have sat there and gone through each of the deals individually … not even knowing that it was for the purpose of this,” he said of the document. “It doesn’t mean that I used that to put this together,” he said, adding, of the accountants, “They did that.” 

Eric Trump is scheduled to appear in court today, and Ivanka Trump next Wednesday. The former president is scheduled to testify Monday. 

Chances that California-based attorney Steve Elster will be able to trademark “Trump too small” as a slogan to use on shirts he sells to mock the former president may be gone. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday appeared inclined to side with the Justice Department in rejecting the trademark application, perhaps skeptical of Elster’s free speech arguments. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted a long historical tradition of such a prohibition (The Hill). 

“At the end of the day, it’s pretty hard to argue that a tradition that’s been around a long, long time since the founding — common-law type stuff — is inconsistent with the First Amendment,” Gorsuch probed Elster’s attorney, Jonathan Taylor. “That might be the case; it can happen. But you’ve got to come up with a pretty good argument, right?” 

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OPINION 

■ I grew up in Mike Johnson’s district, where kindness can mask cruelty, by Charles M. Blow, columnist, The New York Times. 

■ Making the new Pregnant Workers Fairness Act work for women and families, by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), opinion contributor, The Hill. 

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THE CLOSER 

Take Our Morning Report Quiz 

And finally … It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for this week’s Morning Report Quiz! Inspired by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s newest job, we’re eager for some smart guesses about world leaders’ vocations and avocations, past and present. 

Be sure to email your responses to asimendinger@digital-staging.thehill.com and kkarisch@digital-staging.thehill.com — please add “Quiz” to your subject line. Winners who submit correct answers will enjoy some richly deserved newsletter fame on Friday. 

Former President George W. Bush made headlines with what hobby after he left office? 

1. Polo 

2. Needlepoint 

3. Painting and portraiture 

4. Horticulture 
   

Boris Johnson is adding a new job to his C.V. What is it? 

1. Television presenter for GB News 

2. Advice columnist 

3. Premier league soccer coach 

4. Consultant 
   

Before politics, a career in comedy and acting led Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to be cast in which TV role? 

1. U.S. Secretary of State 

2. President of Ukraine 

3. Famous painter 

4. Hollywood star 
   

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was elected prime minister of Iceland in 2009. Her ascent in politics followed a 30-year career as what? 

1. Flight attendant for Icelandair 

2. Schoolteacher 

3. Doctor 

4. Dog walker 

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Stay Engaged 

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