TITLE: Banks, Tech, Crypto: The Biggest Winners and Losers in Congress
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-20/congress-2023-banks-tech-china-win-as-crypto-chipmakers-lose
EXCERPT: And the Winners are…
Bankers
Big banks, Visa and Mastercard beat back bipartisan efforts to require more competition in processing credit card transactions, a move supporters forecast would have saved retailers and customers $10 billion a year or more in swipe fees paid to the financial industry. Even efforts to pass modest, bipartisan legislation clawing back the compensation of executives at failed banks following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank went nowhere.
Railroads
The toxic railroad disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, prompted a public backlash and push for legislation imposing stricter safety standards for trains. Donald Trump and the Biden administration even lined up behind the idea, a rare point of agreement between the era’s two great political antagonists. But senior Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz opposed bipartisan safety legislation as inflexible and too costly. Cruz also wants to make it easier to transport liquefied natural gas by rail. Meanwhile, memories of the tragedy fade.
US Debtholders
Financial markets and corporate America dodged a US debt default, thanks to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his top negotiator Patrick McHenry. The deal to raise the legal debt limit they negotiated with the Biden administration even shrank funding for IRS tax enforcement without goring corporate sacred cows.
Big Pharma
After an exceedingly rare defeat for drug companies with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, efforts stalled in the Democratic-led Senate to take more steps to slash drug prices, including expanding the IRA’s Medicare cap on insulin prices to all insurance plans.
Tech Giants
A wave of public concern over the impact of social media on youth mental health has fueled momentum for bipartisan legislation to strengthen children’s safety and privacy online. But legislation that would require social media companies to take steps to keep children safe from bullying and harassment — and from content that promotes suicide, substance abuse, eating disorders, and sexual exploitation — stalled. Another bill to block online platforms from gathering information on teenagers without their consent also has been stymied.
Equitrans Pipeline
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin secured approval of the massive Mountain Valley Pipeline from his state of West Virginia to Virginia as part of the debt-limit deal, causing the stock price of owner Equitrans Midstream Corp. to soar.
Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin finished the year gloating over Ukraine’s “heavy losses” and dwindling resources. President Joe Biden’s efforts to send more than $60 billion in fresh US aid has been delayed until at least January. The delay signals weakening resolve in the US to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
China
An internal Republican squabble scuttled bipartisan efforts to restrict outbound investment to China, and a House panel dominated by critics of Beijing hasn’t secured testimony or documents they’ve demanded from top companies. Efforts to ban TikTok also failed.
TITLE: House Dysfunction by the Numbers: 724 Votes, Only 27 Laws Enacted
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/us/politics/house-republicans-laws-year.html
EXCERPT: Despite the low number of bills signed into law, the House saw a frenzy of activity on the floor. That included numerous votes for numerous speaker candidates (19 across two historic speaker elections), multiple attempts to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress (three), failed and successful votes on censuring Democratic lawmakers (six) and dozens of votes on hard-right amendments to appropriations bills that ultimately did not pass, or proved to be non-starters in the Senate because they were laden with conservative policy priorities.
The mismatch between the number of votes taken and the number of laws passed is something far-right House Republicans might consider a win. One of the demands the faction made of Mr. McCarthy in January as they were withholding their support to make him speaker was to open up the legislative process and allow more votes on the floor.
And some of the votes happened because House members defied the speaker and forced them against his wishes, like a resolution to impeach Mr. Biden over his border policies and a move to censure Representative Adam B. Schiff of California and fine him $16 million.
“It’s a good reminder that not every vote is in pursuit of an actual legislative product,” Ms. Reynolds said.
Some Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at their inability to get things done. “If we don’t change the foundational problems within our conference, it’s just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver,” Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota vented to reporters in October after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster.
But those foundational problems remain.
Rebellious right-wing Republicans, angry at Speaker Mike Johnson for relying on Democrats to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown, voted to block two major spending bills from coming to the floor.
That marked the fourth time this year that House Republicans broke a longstanding code of party discipline by refusing to back procedural measures proposed by their own leaders that must be passed to bring legislation to the floor. That did not happen once under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the House for a total of eight years, or under the previous two Republican speakers, Paul D. Ryan or John A. Boehner.
When it came to the politics of retribution and revenge, however, the House had a historically productive year. It sometimes took multiple attempts, but Republicans were ultimately successful at formally censuring three Democratic members of the House: Mr. Schiff and Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Jamaal Bowman of New York.
Before this year, only two members had been censured in almost four decades.
“I suspect that has something to do with the breakdown on the Republican side of party leadership,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University. “There’s no restraining of members from going to the floor.”
It took the House three tries, but it also made history when it voted to expel Mr. Santos, making him the first person to be expelled from the House without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.
Republican leaders tried to frame the year as productive, in its own way.
In his end-of-year recap, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, said Republicans had succeeded in passing legislation to “confront rising crime, unleash American energy, lower costs for families, secure President Biden’s wide-open border, combat executive overreach and burdensome agency rules, and refocus our military on its core mission of national security.”
But many of those bills amounted to political messaging tools that would stand no chance of passage in a Democratic-controlled Senate.
Other than the must-pass bills, those that did make it into law addressed the smallest of small-bore issues, such as the 250th Anniversary of the United States Marine Corps Commemorative Coin Act and a bill to designate the clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Gallup, N.M., as the Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura V.A. Clinic. On Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden signed into law the Duck Stamp Modernization Act of 2023, which allows waterfowl hunters the use of electronic federal duck stamps instead of physical ones to meet licensing requirements.
TITLE: House conservatives weaponize debt deal, backed by Trump advisor
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/20/gop-debt-deal-dems-00132351
EXCERPT: House conservatives hated the summer debt deal so much they ousted Kevin McCarthy for negotiating it. But now they’re weaponizing the agreement heading into next month’s budget showdown, with behind-the-scenes coaching from Donald Trump’s former budget chief.
Strategically, it’s a 180-degree turn by GOP hardliners. But six months after McCarthy and Democrats struck the debt accord, its terms have become more favorable to them — and they see it as a handy way to cut domestic spending.
That’s because the deal mandates across-the-board cuts or caps if lawmakers can’t reach an agreement on funding the government for the fiscal year that ends in October. When then-Speaker McCarthy and President Joe Biden reached the deal in June, the ax was set to fall harder on defense than non-defense programs — a tradeoff that many conservatives disliked.
Since then, nonpartisan budget scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office readjusted their calculations. Under the new numbers, if Congress resorts to a long-term spending patch, the non-defense funding that most Democrats prize would get slashed much more deeply than defense spending. That’s good news for conservatives, who are now more open to a long-term continuing resolution, because it would trigger deeper cuts.
“That’s Mike Johnson’s ace that he was dealt. He got a lot of crummy cards. But he got an ace,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a key architect of the 1 percent across-the-board cuts and caps in the debt deal.
The January showdown will play out just as Trump’s presidential primary rivals struggle to overcome his lead in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. And GOP conservatives are talking out their strategy with Russ Vought, who served as Trump’s Office of Management and Budget chief as his term ended.
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Democrats’ top House appropriator, said it is clear Vought’s guidance “has a very direct effect” on the GOP game plan.
“It’s all a transparent ploy to extract the cuts that Democrats don’t want and that most Republicans don’t want,” DeLauro said. “Russ Vought has his fingerprints all over this strategy.”
Conservatives want Johnson to use the threat of the sweeping cuts — which would take effect at the end of April, in the form of either an across-the-board cut or caps based on that cut — to force Democrats into more specific spending reductions, as well as policy riders that limit federal support for abortion, among other changes.
Massie predicted that the speaker would risk the kind of revolt that led to McCarthy’s undoing if he instead strikes a spending deal that passes the House with mostly Democratic support and only a few dozen Republican votes, rather than the reverse.
“If it’s lopsided toward the Democrats or perceived as lopsided toward the Democrats in the House, that’s perilous for the speaker,” Massie said.
Johnson isn’t talking publicly about how the risk of cuts or caps is factoring into his spending strategy as he bats offers back and forth with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and swears off another short-term spending patch.
But the speaker frequently notes in public that the debt limit deal, massive cuts included, is the “law of the land” — as he decries the agreement’s “side deals” that would add tens of billions of dollars in spending beyond what’s explicitly written in the text.
Democrats are irate to hear Johnson suggest he won’t honor those side deals.
“It’s reneging on what was already agreed to,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Appropriations Committee. “It was a total agreement.”
The impasse will come to a head in less than a month, when cash for many federal agencies expires on Jan. 19. Two weeks later, on Feb. 2, funding for the military and other major programs runs out.
Resorting to a continuing resolution to fund the government through October would cut non-defense funding by $73 billion and forgo $26 billion in defense spending, as it is now widely understood among fiscal conservatives and spending leaders in Congress. That adds teeth to Johnson’s vow that he would pursue such a patch without a deal, even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday sounded skeptical of a long-term stopgap.
“He’s put himself in a box, saying we’ll never do another CR,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), former House majority leader, said of the speaker. “But he will be confronted with the responsibility for shutting down the government.”
The cuts would be harsh under a shorter funding patch, too. Come April 30, if the government is still operating under a stopgap that doesn’t run through September, it would trigger $41 billion in non-defense funding cuts, plus $10 billion in defense reductions.
Republican defense hawks are not pleased with either scenario.
“That’s why I voted against the debt deal. I thought it was stupid,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “Everybody’s getting screwed.”