Tag: public finance

‘I don’t know how they will get to 218’: House GOP struggles to find consensus on averting shutdown | CNN Politics

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House Republicans are still struggling to reach consensus on a plan to fund the government, with lawmakers going back-and-forth over the issue and leadership forced to delay a planned procedural vote as they work to find agreement within their ranks.

GOP leaders are planning to plow ahead with a vote on their proposal this week, even as some conservative hardliners are still digging in and threatening to oppose a procedural vote, which would prevent the bill from coming to the floor. GOP lawmakers stood up during a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning to make their case for – or against – the plan, which would temporarily fund the government and beef up border security but is dead-on-arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

House GOP leaders canceled a procedural rule vote on the proposal originally slated for Tuesday morning amid that opposition from hardliners. It’s unclear when or if that vote will get rescheduled.

“There are a lot of ‘No’ votes in that room. I don’t know how they will get to 218,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, exiting a conference meeting on Tuesday morning. “Without a deal with Democrats, I don’t see it passing. … It is going to be a long two weeks.”

Government funding is slated to run out on September 30.

In another closed-door meeting Tuesday afternoon – this time in the office of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer – members of the GOP conference from all corners of the party engaged in talks to try and salvage a GOP spending bill that would fund the government for a month, with little progress to flag after more than four hours.

Republican steering committee chairman Kevin Hern, exiting the meeting, said he plans to introduce an amendment on the short-term funding bill to cut spending that would move three members from “No” to “Yes” on the embattled measure. The amendment is a new statutory spending cap, Hern said.

Amid the impasse in the House GOP conference, there are discussions underway among some Republicans and Democrats about teaming up on a so-called discharge petition to fund the government if the House Republican-brokered plan fails on the floor this week.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries will huddle with the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus on Wednesday, two sources told CNN, amid ongoing discussions between moderate Republicans and Democrats over a plan to avoid a shutdown. Politico first reported the meeting.

In another sign of the divisions within House Republicans, the House has failed to pass a procedural vote that would bring a bill to fund the Department of Defense for the next fiscal year to the floor for final passage. Five Republicans – most of them from the right flank House Freedom Caucus – voted against the rule, denying House GOP leadership of the 218 votes it needed for passage.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy encouraged members who are opposed to the GOP government funding proposal brokered over the weekend to work out their difference in Emmer’s office, according to sources in the room.

And Rep. Scott Perry, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus who helped negotiate the deal, told members during the meeting that if they are opposed to the current plan but think there’s something else that might support, “please tell someone what that is,” sources said.

Some conservative hardliners are now floating the idea of amending the proposal to include lower spending cuts. Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia said leadership is “entertaining everything” at this point, and said that even though the deal was negotiated by some members of the Freedom Caucus, he made clear they were not representing the entire group.

But he also predicted it would be hard to avoid a government shutdown at this point, though he added, it should not be something that they “fear.”

Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican, said he thinks they should work through the weekend until they are able to find agreement among House Republicans on how to keep the government open. He said he accidentally voted to support a rule for the short-term funding bill, saying he was “asleep at the wheel” during the meeting on Monday night, but plans to vote against the rule when it comes to the floor.

Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican and one of the negotiators of the package, suggested that one of the potential ways to move forward would be for the speaker to lay out a topline spending number and spending numbers for each of the appropriations bills to help members who are still on the fence see the full picture.

“I think the biggest thing that I have heard – and this is where my colleagues I think have a really important point – what do we do next? The speaker needs to set a topline, needs to set a structure, a target,” Roy said. “I have been saying that for months. We are here in my opinion because we haven’t had a clear target.”

But Roy did blast some of the opposition.

“I find it extremely difficult to explain or defend opposition to an 8% cut over 30 days in exchange for the most conservative and strong border security measures we’ve ever passed out of this body,” he said. “I think that is inexplicable. I think it is malpractice, and I think there are some outside groups … who are trying to advance themselves that are a part of this that are pushing this narrative that it is somehow malpractice to do that when what would be true malpractice is to head into a shutdown without a coordinated and concerted message.”

Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds said that members who negotiated the bill are willing to talk.

“I want to get real conservative wins, not talking points, not tweets, not any of that stuff,” Donalds said.

Perry said he continues to try and sell the bill to his colleagues and his message is simple, they can keep making changes but at some point, they have to decide: Do they want to pass something or get jammed by the Senate?

“This is a proposal. I speak for myself. It doesn’t mean that I love it, but I am working with my colleague to secure one of two paths. The one path is where we offer something and the American people can see what we stand for, the other path is quite honestly accepting whatever the Senate sends us,” Perry said. “You are not going to get every single thing that you want, but if you don’t do something, you aren’t going to get anything.”

There are at least 15 members currently opposed, and more that are undecided, according to an CNN whip count. Among those who are opposed: Reps. Good, Norman, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Victoria Spartz of Indiana, Eli Crane of Arizona, Cory Mills of Florida, Wesley Hunt of Texas and Paul Gosar of Arizona.

Those 15 “No” votes would easily sink the bill without any Democratic support, as Republicans control 221 seats to Democrats’ 212. It’s unclear, which votes Hern said would flip to “Yes” votes amid additional provisions being added to the proposal.

Burchett told reporters he is aware of at least 16 to 17 holdouts.

“Every day is progress, but I don’t see us doing a whole lot,” he said. “I think part of the problem is some of the folks that need to be in the room or not in the room.”

Among the five Republicans who opposed the procedural vote Tuesday that would have brought the Defense funding bill to the floor for debate and final passage were four known “No” votes – Bishop, Biggs, Rosendale and Norman – as well as Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado.

House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma had told reporters he planned to go to the floor Tuesday with the rule on the continuing resolution, but House leaders pulled a procedural rule vote on their short-term spending bill later Tuesday morning, in another sign that House Republicans are deeply divided on the path forward.

Even if his own party sinks the bill, Cole said he is not worried about the overall strategy.

“Welcome to politics,” Cole told reporters.

Cole, who said some of the “No” votes are “movable,” warned his colleagues who are withholding their votes for the wrong reasons.

“That’s not good legislation and that’s blackmail,” he said.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
House Democrats weigh risky strategy: Whether to save McCarthy | CNN Politics

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House Democrats have begun internal discussions about how to deal with the prospects of a chaotic situation: The possibility that Speaker Kevin McCarthy could lose his job in an unprecedented vote on the floor.

While no decisions have been made, some of the party’s moderates are privately signaling they’d be willing to cut a deal to help McCarthy stave off a right-wing revolt – as long as the speaker meets their own demands.

Publicly, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has not weighed in on how he’d want his members to manage a challenge to McCarthy’s speakership, saying it’s hypothetical at this point. But privately, Jeffries has counseled his members to keep their powder dry, according to multiple sources, a recognition it’s better for Democrats to keep their options open as the government funding fight plays outs.

“If somehow Democrats are asked to be helpful, it’s not just going to have to be out of the kindness of our hearts,” Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, told CNN. “If Kevin can’t govern with just his part – which clearly he can’t – and he wants to have a conversation with us about how to do that, we are going to have a policy conversation.”

Asked recently by CNN if he would need to rely on Democrats to help save him, McCarthy would not say.

“I am not worried about that,” he said.

The private discussions have picked up steam in recent days, as a handful of hardline GOP members dig in against a series of spending bills – an effort that could catapult the government into a shutdown – and as any move the speaker takes to advance a short-term spending bill with Democrats could trigger the end of his speakership.

If McCarthy’s position was threatened with a so-called motion to vacate, and there were five Republicans backing it, Democrats would have a major role in deciding McCarthy’s fate.

But members who spoke to CNN made clear that any Democratic help would come at a cost. And their asking price for saving his speakership, Democratic members say, is a bipartisan deal to avoid a shutdown – a route McCarthy is not yet prepared to take, as Republicans are still trying to find consensus on a GOP plan to fund the government.

“I think it is fair to say Democrats have a responsibility to be preparing for the possibility that there will be some sort of upheaval,” one Democratic member told CNN.

One of the strategies being discussed by Democrats is to vote “present” or vote to kill it all together if a motion to oust McCarthy is brought to the floor. Voting present would change the threshold and make it harder for McCarthy’s critics to oust him, which would require a majority of those voting in order to succeed.

It’s a complicated dance for Democrats, who don’t want to be seen as saving McCarthy – especially after he just launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden – and could open them up to backlash on the left. But some Democrats also fear the potential alternative: a government shutdown and the prospect of an even more right-wing lawmaker ascending to the speakership if McCarthy is ousted – or the House being paralyzed with no candidate able to win 218 votes to be elected speaker.

“If he just jams us with something awful, and they still try to kill him, and that’s gonna be his approach to work with the Freedom Caucus, there’s less incentive (to help him),” said one Democrat. “Still, even then, you’re gonna have a lot of people who say: ‘Well I think what’s behind door No. 3 might be a lot worse.’”

“I think if he’s willing to work together on things,” the member said, adding, “There will be enough of us to protect him.”

It’s still not clear when or if McCarthy’s detractors would try and push the issue. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida – one of McCarthy’s most vocal critics – would not specify Wednesday when he would move to force a vote on removing McCarthy as speaker. But he warned McCarthy against working with Democrats, and said House Republicans who work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown would be signing their own “political death warrant.”

“If Speaker McCarthy relies on Democrats to pass a continuing resolution, I would call the Capitol moving truck to his office pretty soon because my expectation would be he’d be out of the speaker’s office quite promptly,” said Gaetz, who privately told his colleagues Wednesday there are seven Republicans who would vote against any stop-gap measure, enough to kill it if all Democrats oppose a conservative plan.

With less than two weeks before a government shutdown, Democrats are watching the speaker’s actions carefully on spending and taking whether McCarthy is willing to cut his right flank lose in pursuit of a bipartisan deal on spending – short-handed on Capitol Hill as a continuing resolution or a CR – into consideration for how they’d act on the floor if a motion to vacate were brought forward.

“If we were actually part of the deal, like actually part of a commonsense agreement on CR and budget, I think you would find a significant group of people willing to vote present,” one Democrat said.

Meanwhile, as frustration in the GOP has reached a fever pitch, private talks between moderate Democrats and Republicans about a bipartisan funding deal have grown more serious: the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus has developed a framework for a plan, and Jeffries stopped by their meeting on Wednesday.

Leaving the meeting, Jeffries called for a bipartisan agreement in line with what was already negotiated in the debt ceiling package – a deal cut by McCarthy but later abandoned amid pressure from his right flank to seek deeper cuts.

“We need to find a bipartisan agreement consistent with what was previously reached,” he said.

But the mechanism for putting such a bill on the floor is complicated. One possible option is for GOP members of the group to sign onto a so-called discharge petition, a complicated and time-consuming procedural mechanism. If five Republicans did so, it would trigger a process that could force the bill onto the floor for a vote without McCarthy having to do it. But that process would likely take too long at this point to avert a shutdown.

Members are also discussing other procedural options with the House parliamentarian, lawmakers told CNN.

“Failure is not an option. We’re gonna do everything we can to prevent a shutdown,” said Republican Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a swing district in Nebraska.

Bacon warned that he would cut a deal with Democrats if they reach an impasse with conservative hardliners.

“Well, in the end, if not, we will have to work across the aisle and get it done. I think people got that message,” he said.

But the growing consensus is that with time running out, the most viable path to avoid a government shutdown is for the speaker to cut his right flank loose and make a deal with the middle – and then Democrats could bail McCarthy out from the inevitable vote to oust him that would be triggered by that scenario.

Democrats considering bailing out McCarthy say it wouldn’t necessarily stop there.

“We are having pretty broad conversations about like, use your imagination in terms of how you re-envision … this place is not working,” the member said. “I don’t think it would ever be as transactional as ‘OK, I get a vote on my bill and I am done …’ because you can’t trust him. I think then it becomes everything from what is committee presentation to how bills get pulled to the floor and how are those decisions made?”

An opportunity to extract concessions from McCarthy, however, likely would never be enough for some Democrats. For Democrats, extending a lifeline to McCarthy could mean facing a primary challenge back home, not to mention the fact that any goodwill McCarthy might have still had with some Democrats evaporated with his announcement he was launching an impeachment inquiry into Biden.

“There is not a chance in hell I would vote for the speaker. I barely have words. What reasonable thing has he done? What demonstrable outreach has he made to try to bring the House together, to work together in a deliberative and cooperative way,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told CNN. “The real answer is I don’t see a scenario right now in which he would warrant my support, but I also would never say never.”

Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota recently said “right now, no,” he and other Democrats would not come to McCarthy’s rescue if he faced a motion to vacate from his own party.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely. But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

He continued later: “I understand the position he’s in but these are times when people have to make a choice. Do you pander to the few or do you take care of the many?”

Several Democrats argued that past Republican speakers – like Paul Ryan or John Boehner – may have been worth saving. But McCarthy, they argue is different.

If McCarthy were challenged, it may only take a handful of Democrats to save him. Aside from voting “present,” they could also just vote to table the resolution – a procedural workaround that would essentially kill the effort. But, letting members walk the plank alone could be politically dangerous for moderates. Voting in total Democratic unison could shield members from the base.

“I think we need to have a party position on it. I don’t think that has been resolved yet. It is still evolving,” Democratic Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts told CNN.

Many Democrats are still weighing their options.

“You know there are so many variables right now, I really don’t have an answer,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania told CNN.

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August 2, 2023
Former IRS contractor accused of stealing Trump’s tax returns pleads guilty | CNN Politics

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The former IRS contractor accused of leaking former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and stealing tax information on thousands of the wealthiest people in the US pleaded guilty in federal court on Thursday.

Prosecutors say Charles Littlejohn of Washington, DC, sent Trump’s tax returns and other data to two media outlets that “published numerous articles describing the tax information they obtained from the Defendant.”

Littlejohn pleaded guilty to the one count of disclosing tax information, which he was charged with in late September.

The contractor’s crime affected so many individuals that prosecutors plan to create a public website to notify the victims of any developments in the case.

During the plea hearing, an attorney for Trump gave a victim impact statement, calling the crime “an egregious breach.”

Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, said that Trump’s returns were “kept in a vault at the IRS” and suggested that the leak may have cost Trump votes in the 2020 election.

Habba said Trump was opposed to the plea deal and called for the maximum sentence of five years in prison for Littlejohn.

Judge Ana Reyes, the federal judge overseeing the case, said she agreed “completely that anyone taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable.”

“I cannot overstate how troubled I am by what occurred,” Reyes said. “Make no mistake, this was not acceptable.”

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for January 29.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Microsoft to appeal IRS request for nearly $29 billion in back taxes | CNN Business

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Microsoft plans to contest a US Internal Revenue Service request for an additional $28.9 billion in back taxes for the years 2004 to 2013, the company said in a securities filing Wednesday.

The demand is the result of a yearslong audit by the IRS into Microsoft’s past accounting practices. In particular, the agency took issue with how the company “allocated profits … among countries and jurisdictions,” Microsoft said in the filing.

“The IRS says Microsoft owes an additional $28.9 billion in tax for 2004 to 2013, plus penalties and interest,” the company said. It noted that the IRS’s determination is not final and does not include up to $10 billion in taxes Microsoft paid under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that could reduce its final bill.

The company said it plans to appeal the IRS request, a process that will likely take several years.

“We believe we have always followed the IRS’s rules and paid the taxes we owe in the U.S. and around the world,” the company said in the filing. “Since 2004, we have paid over $67 billion in taxes to the U.S.”

Microsoft noted that as it prepares to work through the IRS Appeals Process — and, potentially, the courts — the company believes its current “allowances for income tax contingencies are adequate.”

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August 2, 2023
What could happen if the government shuts down | CNN Politics

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The prospect of a US government shutdown grows more likely with each passing day as lawmakers have yet to reach a deal to extend funding past a critical deadline at the end of the month.

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle are hoping to pass a short-term funding extension to keep the lights on and avert a shutdown. But it’s not at all clear that plan will succeed amid deep divisions over spending between the two parties and policy disagreements over issues such as aid to Ukraine.

Here’s what to know if the government shuts down and what’s driving the current state of play:

Government funding expires at the end of the day on Saturday, September 30 when the clock strikes midnight and it becomes October 1, which marks the start of the new fiscal year. (As shorthand, the deadline is commonly described as September 30 at midnight.)

If Congress fails to pass legislation to renew funding by that deadline, then the federal government will shut down at midnight. Since that would take place over the weekend, the full effects of a shutdown wouldn’t be seen until the start of the work week on Monday.

In the event of a shutdown, many government operations would come to a halt, but some services deemed “essential” would continue.

Federal agencies have contingency plans that serve as a roadmap for what will continue and what will stop. For now, agencies still have time to review and update plans and it’s not possible to predict exactly how government operations would be impacted if a shutdown were to take place at the end of the month.

Government operations and services that continue during a shutdown are activities deemed necessary to protect public safety and national security or considered critical for other reasons. Examples of services that have continued during past shutdowns include border protection, federal law enforcement and air traffic control.

Federal employees whose work is deemed “non-essential” would be put on furlough, which means that they would not work and would not receive pay during the shutdown. Employees whose jobs are deemed “essential” would continue to work, but they too would not be paid during the shutdown.

Once a shutdown is over, federal employees who were required to work and those who were furloughed will receive backpay.

In the past, backpay for furloughed employees was not guaranteed, though Congress could and did act to ensure those workers were compensated for lost wages once a shutdown ended. Now, however, backpay for furloughed workers is automatically guaranteed as a result of legislation led by Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, that was enacted in 2019. Employees deemed “essential” and required to work were already guaranteed backpay after a shutdown prior to the passage of that legislation.

And federal employees aren’t the only ones who can feel the effects of a shutdown.

During past shutdowns, national parks have become a major focal point of attention. Although National Park Service sites across the country have been closed during previous government shutdowns, many remained open but severely understaffed under the Trump administration during a shutdown in 2019. Some park sites operated for weeks without park service-provided visitor services such as restrooms, trash collection, facilities or road maintenance.

“If you’re a government worker, it’s highly disruptive – whether you’re not going to work or whether you are,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. “If you’re somebody who wants to use one of the services that you can’t get access to … it’s highly disruptive. But for many people … all the things that they are expecting and used to seeing of government are still happening and the inconveniences and the kind of wasted time and wasted resources aren’t things that they see and feel directly.”

There is a deep divide between the House and Senate right now over the effort to reach consensus on and pass full-year spending legislation as House conservative hardliners push for deep spending cuts and controversial policy add-ons that Democrats as well as some Republicans have rejected as too extreme.

With the funding deadline looming, top lawmakers from both parties hope to pass a short-term funding extension known on Capitol Hill as a continuing resolution or CR for short. These short-term measures are frequently used as a stopgap solution to avert a shutdown and buy more time to try to reach a broader full-year funding deal.

It’s not clear, however, whether there will be enough consensus to pass even a short-term funding bill out of both chambers before the end of the month as House conservatives rail against the possibility of a stopgap bill and have threatened to vote against one while demanding major policy concessions that have no chance of passing the Senate.

A fight over aid to Ukraine could also take center stage and further complicate efforts to pass a short-term bill.

Senate Democrats and Republicans strongly support additional aid to Ukraine, which could be included as part of a stopgap bill, but many House Republicans are reluctant to continue sending aid and do not want to see that attached to a short-term funding bill.

The White House issued a stark warning this week that a shutdown could threaten crucial federal programs.

In its warning, the White House estimated 10,000 children would lose access to Head Start programs across the country as the Department of Health and Human Services is prevented from awarding grants during a shutdown, while air traffic controllers and TSA officers would have to work without pay, threatening travel delays across the country. A shutdown would also delay food safety inspections under the Food and Drug Administration.

“These consequences are real and avoidable – but only if House Republicans stop playing political games with peoples’ lives and catering to the ideological demands of their most extreme, far-right members,” the White House said.

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August 2, 2023
House speaker crisis is a symptom of historic Republican divisions | CNN Politics

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You might have thought it was a Democrat who recently said that House Republicans were in the “same stupid clown car with a different driver.” And while I’m sure many Democrats feel that way, it was Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson who uttered that memorable phrase.

The South Dakota congressman was referring to the current House mess after eight Republicans voted (with Democrats) to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

But whether or not the House Republican majority elects a new speaker anytime soon is irrelevant. What we’re seeing now is something we haven’t seen in modern times.

This episode is symptomatic of a historic Republican divide in the House: It’s not just over ideology but also over trust in their leaders to compromise in a way that makes the party happy.

Much of the recent discussion over House Republican divisions tries to frame it along the right-left ideological spectrum. Those who voted against McCarthy are more conservative, on average, than the GOP at large – and this is a very conservative House majority. But there are plenty of Republicans who are quite conservative and didn’t vote McCarthy out (think Texas Rep. Chip Roy, for example).

What’s also going on is a split over whether Republicans should try to govern by way of compromise. Are people willing to line up behind the compromises House GOP leaders have made with Democrats to keep the government going?

Analyzing roll call votes in Congress can offer some answers. Not surprisingly, the Republican representative who has been the least friendly to party leadership this Congress is Florida’s Matt Gaetz, according to a metric produced by the academics at Voteview.

More importantly, the difference on this score between those House Republicans most open to compromise and friendly to party leadership and those most opposed (i.e., the top fifth and bottom fifth percentiles) is wider than it has been in the past 80 years. These lawmakers on the edges of the conference are so important because of how narrow the current GOP majority is – all it takes is a few members to topple the speaker, as we saw earlier this month.

Representatives like Gaetz didn’t pop out of nowhere. They are in the Congress because people elected them.

Specifically, many of the same people who really like former President Donald Trump.

Take a look at a question asked in our latest CNN/SSRS survey published on Thursday. We asked whether Republicans in Congress should “stand firm on beliefs without compromise, even if not much gets done in Washington, or work across the aisle to get things done in Washington, even if it means losing out on some high-priority policies?”

A majority of voters who are behind Trump in the 2024 GOP primary contest (52%) wanted Republicans in Congress to stand firm. Among Republicans not behind Trump, just 23% preferred lawmakers who didn’t compromise. Most (77%) yearned for congressional Republicans who worked across the aisle.

Of course, most Republicans (58%) are backing Trump in the primary, the CNN poll found. Part of Trump’s appeal is that he isn’t a conventional Republican who does business as usual.

Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising that a majority of Trump supporters (56%) approve of McCarthy being removed as speaker after he made a deal with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.

Among all other Republicans, only 37% approved of McCarthy’s ousting.

I should note that among Republican voters, the idea of compromising to avert a government shutdown isn’t terribly different than it was a decade ago. What does seem to have changed, to some degree, is the people in Congress.

GOP lawmakers who were seen as anti-establishment a decade ago – like Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, who voted to retain McCarthy as speaker – are apparently not anti-establishment enough these days.

Folks like Massie have been pushed aside for folks like Gaetz. For at least some Republicans in Congress, this now is the party of Trump.

Another key difference is that the current size of the House GOP majority is more reminiscent of the late 1990s and early 2000s than the tea party era of a decade ago.

Some 25 years ago, NBC polling found that Republicans were far more open to compromise than they were to standing on principle. When it came to negotiations with Democratic President Bill Clinton, 63% of Republicans wanted compromise and only 28% wanted to stand on principles when forced to pick between the two choices.

Today, Republicans again have a slim majority in the House – but with a party electorate willing to tolerate a lot in the name of principle. It’s no surprise then that we’re dealing with a House GOP leadership fight that seems more fitting of an Aaron Sorkin script than the real world.

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August 2, 2023
House Republicans are making a gamble with a possible Jim Jordan speakership | CNN Politics

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If House Republicans elect hard-charging Jim Jordan as speaker on Tuesday, they will be picking an election denier who is known for working to shut down the government rather than running it.

The party would be ending its two-week speakership debacle, but it’d be elevating a ringleader in former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election into a position that is second in the line of succession behind President Joe Biden.

A Jordan speakership would represent a huge victory for Trump, given the Judiciary chairman’s record of using his power to target Democratic presidential candidates, including Biden and 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton. Before the midterm elections last year, for instance, Jordan said at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he’d use probes into the Biden administration to “frame up the 2024 race” for Trump.

He has been as good as his word, working to highlight the ex-president’s claims that the federal government has been “weaponized” against him in an effort to distract from the four criminal trials the GOP front-runner is now facing. And Jordan has been a prominent player in the impeachment investigation opened against Biden, despite the failure of the GOP to provide evidence that the president personally profited from the business ventures of his son in places like China and Ukraine.

Jordan’s hopes of becoming speaker increased dramatically over the weekend as he began to turn holdouts amid an intense lobbying campaign. Some key moderates who had previously said they wouldn’t back the Ohio Republican had changed course by Monday. But given the tiny House GOP majority, Jordan can only lose a small number of Republicans and still win the job in a vote in the full House, which is expected at noon on Tuesday. Florida Rep. Gus Bilirakis will be away from the Capitol on Tuesday, further complicating the vote math for Jordan, making it so that he can only lose three Republicans.

But this is a temporary drop until the Florida congressman returns to Washington on Tuesday evening.

Several high-profile dissidents still insist they will only vote for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy or are firmly against Jordan, who co-founded the conservative Freedom Caucus that was instrumental in the demise of the last three Republican speakers. Jordan’s opponents have cited his role in the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection – when he discussed plans to object to the results – and have concerns that his hardline positions could alienate crucial swing voters next year.

If Jordan wins the speakership, his reputation for resistance to compromise is likely to immediately fuel fresh fears of a government shutdown caused by Republican demands for massive spending cuts. Facing a right-wing revolt, McCarthy was forced to use Democratic votes to pass a stopgap funding measure. And he paid for his effort to stave off a national crisis, which could have hurt millions of Americans, with his job. Jordan has been among the right-wing Republicans who want to use their power to bulldoze through their agenda despite the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the White House.

As speaker, Jordan would be in control of half of one of the three branches of the US government – a role that confers duties to the Constitution and the national interest far greater than those that weigh on individual members. By definition, he’d be an insider after years as an insurgent, a switch that could be a challenge. Fellow Ohioan and former Republican House Speaker John Boehner told CBS News in a 2021 interview referring to Jordan: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart – never building anything, never putting anything together.”

A Jordan victory would mark one of the most significant milestones in Washington Republicans’ embrace of an extreme right-wing populist, nationalist ideology that is more dedicated to tearing political institutions down than using them to forge change. And it would reward the eight Republicans who voted with Democrats to topple McCarthy. More broadly, it would remove power from the party’s traditional Washington, DC, political establishment, which many of the party’s grassroots voters despise, and place the Freedom Caucus at the pinnacle of power in the House.

The shift toward Jordan over the weekend, however, may also reflect a realization by lawmakers that the optics of continued chaos in the House are disastrous for the party and sends a message of American weakness amid a raging crisis in the Middle East.

New York Rep. Marc Molinaro, who represents a district Biden would have won in 2020 under redrawn lines, announced Monday evening that he’s backing Jordan. “What I care deeply about is getting back to governing. And having been home over the weekend, I can tell you that most people I talk to just want us to fight inflation, just want us to secure the border, just want us to govern on their behalf. And truly they just want this House to function,” he told CNN.

And if there is anyone who could keep far-right flamethrowers in line, it is Jordan. After all, he’s one of them. If wins the speakership, he’d potentially face a choice whether to at least seek a modicum of governance to show voters that the GOP can get results ahead of the 2024 election. Just as President Richard Nixon had the political cover as a hardline anti-Communist to forge an opening to Maoist China, Jordan might have more leeway than other potential Republican leaders to make painful concessions and keep his hardliners in line.

But choosing Jordan to end the impasse would also represent a huge risk for the GOP. His close alliance with Trump, who has endorsed the Ohio Republican for the top job, could alienate moderate voters in districts that paved the way to the party’s narrow majority in last year’s midterms. His record of full bore confrontation could exacerbate a showdown with the Democratic Senate and the White House over spending that could shut down the government by the middle of November and cause a backlash against Republicans.

And the qualities that his supporters see in Jordan – the fearsome use of power to drum up investigations against political opponents and a pugilistic refusal to find middle ground – are not those traditionally associated with successful speakers. Jordan has no history of bringing disparate factions of his party together – quite the opposite. His brand of politics is built around his history as a champion wrestler in college. “I look at it like a wrestling match,” Jordan told the New York Times earlier this year, referring to his staccato interrogations of witnesses in hearings that made him a hero on conservative media and a Trump favorite.

Another knock on Jordan is that he’s not known as a prolific fundraiser – one of the most important jobs of a party leader in the House. McCarthy was known for his lucrative hauls that he used to boost candidates and foster loyalty from his supporters. In fact, Jordan has actively worked against some fellow members in the past, with the political arm of the Freedom Caucus backing primary challengers to 10 GOP incumbents over the last few cycles.

The job of the House has traditionally been to pass laws. And by that measure, Jordan is one of the least effective legislators of his generation, according to the Center For Effective Lawmaking, a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University.

Still, Jordan’s supporters worked to mitigate his liabilities heading into a floor vote that would force opponents to publicly renounce him at the risk of drawing primary challenges. House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama, who had been vehemently anti-Jordan, flipped after what he described as “two cordial, thoughtful and productive” conversations with the prospective speaker and securing his support for a strong defense bill. Sources familiar with Jordan’s pitch to the GOP conference told CNN’s Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona Monday that the Ohio congressman had promised to fundraise hard for Republicans across the country and that he would also do what he could to protect moderates – potentially by ensuring that they don’t face primary challenges next year from hardline pro-Trump candidates.

However, Zanona and Grayer also reported that some big GOP donors had vowed not to invest in the House majority under Jordan and would instead concentrate their resources on flipping the Senate next year. That GOP coolness highlights how a 2024 Republican slate featuring Trump, the front-runner for the presidential nomination, and Jordan as the most powerful Republican in Washington could delight Democrats campaigning in the battleground districts that could decide the election.

Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a swing district in Nebraska, emerged from a meeting of Republican lawmakers on Monday evening resolved not to support Jordan, after expressing concerns that handing him the speaker’s gavel would represent a victory for the hardliners who ended McCarthy’s tenure. Bacon said he was inclined to vote for McCarthy even though the former speaker is not standing, at least in a first ballot. “I’m going to vote tomorrow and we’ll take it after that one at a time,” Bacon said.

Another anti-McCarthy holdout is Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who has said “part of” the reason he is opposed to Jordan is his behavior after the 2020 election. According to the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Jordan was a “significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and to block the certification of Biden’s victory in Congress, including in multiple conversations with Trump and senior White House officials.

But some key lawmakers appear to have made their peace with Jordan’s potential speakership, partly because of the damage being done to the GOP and their potential reelection prospects by self-indulgent internal battles. New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a freshman who is one of the most endangered Republicans next year and has been a strong supporter of McCarthy, called on the House to get back to work. “At the end of the day, we need to get back to the work of the American people,” Lawler told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. He said he told Jordan on Friday that he was not a “hell no” and that he’d only back him if he had the votes to become speaker.

He shrugged off attacks that are already coming from Democrats over his possible vote for Jordan.

“They are going to attack me no matter what I do. That’s their job, that’s their objective. They want to get back into the majority,” Lawler told Tapper.

“My constituents know who I am, they know where I stand on these issues,” Lawler said, noting how he had fought to raise the government’s borrowing limit earlier this year, averting a debt default, and to keep the government open.

Lawler might be right. But the potential chaos and discord Jordan could sow may give voters fresh reasons to vote against Lawler by November of next year.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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August 2, 2023
Bipartisan House caucus leaders say ‘all options are on the table’ as shutdown looms | CNN Politics

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With government funding slated to run out September 30, the leaders of the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus told CNN on Sunday that “all options are on the table” to force a vote on their alternative stopgap plan to avert a shutdown.

There is no consensus plan to keep the government funded, and persistent opposition by a bloc of conservatives to House GOP leadership’s agenda has made any effort to pass a stopgap bill in the House a major challenge.

While the caucus leaders, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Josh Gottheimer, said they hope House Speaker Kevin McCarthy puts the measure on the floor, they said they have spoken with the parliamentarian about other avenues and raised the possibility of using a discharge petition – an arcane procedural step – to force a vote.

The procedural tool can be used to force a floor vote, but only if a majority of House members sign on in support. Discharge petitions rarely succeed because of how high the threshold is to clear.

“We’re going to do whatever it takes to get that bill on the floor. … A discharge petition is one of several options, and a group of us met with the parliamentarian this past week to discuss all the options we have to force a vote on our bill,” Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, added: “I think our plan is reasonable. And it deals with the extremes and … instead of burning the place down as, Speaker McCarthy said of the far right, it actually provides a reasonable, commonsense solution working with people like Brian Fitzpatrick who want to get things done.”

The caucus last week endorsed a potential backup plan if House Republicans are unable to pass their stopgap bill alone. The bill would fund the government through January 11 and include Ukraine aid, disaster response and border security provisions.

“This is a decision the speaker is gonna have to make. He can bring that reasonable bill to the floor that we’ve proposed, and I guarantee you’re gonna get Democrats (and) Republicans coming together to support it and we can keep the lights on,” Gottheimer said.

McCarthy, who is under pressure and has faced threats of an ouster, said Saturday he still lacks support from a handful of GOP hardliners to put a stopgap measure on the floor, making a shutdown likely.

Rep. Tim Burchett, one of the holdouts, told CNN on Sunday he is still a “no” on passing a stopgap funding bill.

“No, ma’am,” the Tennessee Republican told Bash. “I think it’s completely blowing away our duties. We have a duty to pass a budget.”

He also said he would strongly consider support for ousting McCarthy if the California Republican cuts a deal with Democrats to keep the government open.

“That would be something I’d look strongly at, ma’am, if we do away with our duty that we said we’re going to do,” Burchett said.

McCarthy has been hoping the momentum of a handful of appropriations bills, which will head to the House floor this week, would bring some of those holdouts into the fold. But Burchett’s comments Sunday are the latest indication that hope may be in vain.

“We’re sticking to our guns and all of a sudden we’re the bad guys because we want to balance our budget,” Burchett said.

Another holdout, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said Sunday that McCarthy is in “breach” of promises he made regarding government spending when elected speaker.

“We should have separate single-subject spending bills. Kevin McCarthy promised that in January, he is in breach of that promise, so I’m not here to hold the government hostage, I’m here to hold Kevin McCarthy to his word,” Gaetz said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Gaetz added it would be fine if some departments shut down for a few days if it meant measures such as the Homeland Security appropriations bill passed first.

“If, you know, the (departments) of Labor and Education have to shut down for a few days as we get their appropriations in line, that’s certainly not something that is optimal, but I think it’s better than continuing on the current path we are to America’s financial ruin,” Gaetz said.

The holdouts’ comments come as the White House urges Republicans to find a solution, warning that a government shutdown could threaten crucial federal programs.

“Funding the government is one of the most basic responsibilities of Congress, and it’s time for Republicans to start doing the job America elected them to do,” President Joe Biden said Sunday at an event held by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Speaking on Sunday to CNN’s Bash, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called on House Republicans to “come to their senses and keep the government running.”

“This is something that can and should be prevented,” Buttigieg said on “State of the Union.” He echoed Biden administration talking points, saying Republicans should hold up their end of the agreement made this year during debt ceiling negotiations.

The White House has warned of massive disruptions to air travel if the government shuts down, as tens of thousands of air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration personnel will have to work without pay.

“They’re under enough stress as it is doing that job without having to come into work with the added stress of not receiving a paycheck,” Buttigieg said of air traffic controllers.

He added, “The American people don’t want to shutdown. From what I can tell, the Senate is ready to go. The administration is ready to go. House Republicans need to come to their senses and keep the government running.”

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August 2, 2023
Federal deficit effectively doubled in fiscal year 2023 | CNN Politics

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The US budget deficit soared in fiscal year 2023, which will likely complicate Congress’ efforts to come to a federal spending deal before government funding runs out next month.

The deficit was $1.7 trillion for the most recent fiscal year, which ended September 30, according to Treasury Department data released Friday. That marks a $320 billion, or 23%, increase from the prior fiscal year.

However, the deficit essentially doubled to about $2 trillion if the impact of President Joe Biden’s federal student debt cancellation plan – which the Supreme Court struck down before it took effect – is not included.

The US Treasury Department listed the fiscal year 2022 deficit as $1.4 trillion because it took into account the cost of the president’s proposal. Without it, the deficit would have been closer to $1 trillion.

The agency then logged the overturning of the cancellation plan as a savings for fiscal year 2023, which reduced the size of the deficit to $1.7 trillion.

“We are a nation addicted to debt,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “With the economy growing and unemployment near record lows, this was the time to instill fiscal responsibility and reduce our deficits.”

The nation’s hefty debt load will become even costlier in coming years as interest payments rise.

“We are seeing in real time the painful combination of rising debt, inflation and interest costs, all leading to even more debt,” said Michael Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to raise awareness of the US’ long-term fiscal challenges. “Interest costs rose almost 40% last year, and soon we’ll spend more on interest than we do on national defense.”

Also contributing to the growth in the deficit was a sizable drop in tax revenue.

More than 40% of the jump was attributable to lower tax revenues, according to Bernard Yaros, lead US economist for Oxford Economics. Individual income tax receipts plummeted because a weak stock market in 2022 resulted in lower capital gains and because the Internal Revenue Service extended the tax deadlines for much of California and parts of Alabama and Georgia due to natural disasters.

In addition, increased spending on entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as on Medicaid accounted for just over a quarter of the widening in the budget shortfall, Yaros said. The growing number of Social Security beneficiaries and the inflation-fueled 8.7% cost-of-living adjustment for 2023 contributed to the rise in expenditures.

The annual deficit data will likely factor into Congress’ already-fraught negotiations over funding federal agencies for fiscal year 2024. Lawmakers passed a stopgap spending measure on September 30, just before the federal government was set to shut down. It extended federal funding until November 17.

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August 2, 2023
White House readies itself for operating in a government shutdown | CNN Politics

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The White House is now “girding for a shutdown” and senior West Wing officials are drawing up plans for which personnel would be deemed “essential” starting on October 1 as the deadline to fund the government is only a handful of days away.

Most of President Joe Biden’s senior-most aides are expected to be designated “essential,” meaning they would not be furloughed, one administration official said. The contingency planning currently underway kicked off in earnest on Friday when the Office of Management and Budget began its formal process of communicating with agencies about the possibility of bringing to halt all work deemed “non-essential.”

Within the ranks of the White House, prior shutdowns have seen employees whose roles carrying the title “Special Assistant to the President” – a rank that also carries access to the Navy Mess – automatically deemed to be serving in essential roles. A 2023 directory of White House staff and salaries submitted to Congress each year showed 97 employees with that title.

Even Biden is planning to remain in Washington this weekend, a relatively rare occurrence, as the likelihood of a shutdown loomed. He typically decamps for one of his Delaware homes or Camp David on Friday afternoons, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday that he would remain in the capital.

The active preparations related to White House staffing is yet another sign of the widespread anticipation in Washington that lawmakers on Capitol Hill may fail to find a way to fund the government by the end-of-month deadline.

With four days until funding expires, Senate leadership on Tuesday reached a deal that would keep the government open through November 17, with $6.2 billion in funding for Ukraine and $6 billion for domestic disasters, CNN reported. A White House official had said earlier this week that Biden would be “broadly supportive” of a Senate-brokered deal, even if it included a fraction of the $24 billion the administration was seeking to continue assisting Ukraine.

But even after a deal was reached in the Senate, White House officials maintained that the ultimate outcome remained unpredictable, in large part because it was impossible to guess what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s next moves might be. McCarthy, who may see a harder-line package with steeper spending cuts as the antidote to his intra-party politics, has not committed to putting a bipartisan Senate bill on floor for a vote.

“Ultimately it’s going to come down to Kevin McCarthy and his conference,” said National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

Behind the scenes, the White House is not confident the two chambers can reach a mutually agreed deal in the next few days.

“Nothing is inevitable, but every day that passes, it’s more likely,” a White House official said of a shutdown. “It’s hard to say we are confident about anything.”

The White House has been closely monitoring the ongoing deliberations on Capitol Hill, including McCarthy’s efforts to placate some of the hardline members of his own caucus, as well as the deliberations in the Senate.

Yet without a direct role in the negotiations, the White House strategy has been as much about messaging as it is about finding a funding solution. Biden’s aides are broadly confident that Republicans will catch the blame if the government shutters, and the president recorded a video this week pointing the figure at a “small group of extreme House Republicans” he said are “determined to shut down the government.”

House Republicans, he added, “refuse to stand up to the extremists in their party – so now everyone in America could be forced to pay the price.”

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August 2, 2023
How the ‘uniparty’ myth shut the House down | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

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Republicans’ House speaker morass continued Tuesday with a little help from former President Donald Trump.

Yet another lawmaker with support from most House Republicans – Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who was picked as their party’s nominee – failed to get the support of nearly all Republicans. He dropped out of the running Tuesday afternoon, leaving Republicans again back at square one.

Emmer, who supports military aid to Ukraine and who voted to certify the 2020 election, saw his chances fade in the most bizarre possible way hours after being picked.

Trump lobbied against Emmer with a social media post that hit while Emmer was trying to convince a few dozen skeptics on Capitol Hill and Trump was inside a New York courtroom facing civil fraud charges. Trump later told reporters outside the courtroom, “It looks like he’s finished.”

After one fired speaker and three failed candidates who got majority but not universal support, no one seems currently capable of uniting their tiny House majority – and the idea of getting help from Democrats remains, for now, unthinkable to both Republicans and Democrats.

It’s a situation that highlights not only Republican divisions, but also the bright line between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.

But it’s important to note that it was born of a fringe protest meant to demonstrate there’s no difference at all between the two parties.

The term “uniparty” has been a favorite of people like Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House official turned podcaster. He’s been using it for years in conjunction with the similarly cynical idea of Washington as a swamp that needs to be drained or the belief in a deep state that needs to be rooted out.

Bannon’s goal is to mobilize support for dismantling the current version of the US government.

The term also features prominently in the more-conservative-than-Fox-News media environment – networks like One America News, known as OAN, and Salem Radio.

“Right now, we are governed by a uniparty,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, told the former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka in a September interview on the right-wing Salem News Channel in which he argued then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was in cahoots with President Joe Biden and the Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Gaetz posted the interview on his official House website.

“You’ve got a small band of House conservatives who are fighting, really, in a lot of ways, a political guerrilla war against that uniparty,” Gaetz said. In early October, it was Gaetz who moved to successfully oust McCarthy from the speakership.

It’s indisputable that government spending has ballooned in recent years and reasonably arguable that it is out of control. But blaming a perceived “uniparty” is oversimplified nonsense.

Republicans under Trump passed a tax cut bill all by themselves. Democrats under Biden passed a spending bill without help from Republicans.

Reforming costly programs seems impossible because the two parties rarely work together, not because they secretly collude.

Multiple Republicans who supported McCarthy have argued Democrats are to blame for the current lack of a speaker because they did not break party ranks and support McCarthy.

There has been no substantive movement toward a unity speaker of some sort, although it is becoming hard to imagine any Republican getting enough support to become speaker without help from some Democrats.

The current math is that any Republican can lose the support of only four party comrades and become speaker without Democratic help.

Another lawmaker who voted to oust McCarthy is Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who argued back in September that allowing the government to run out of money would not be that bad.

“Don’t let the DC uniparty scare you into thinking that a government shutdown is the end of the world,” Biggs said on social media in September, before McCarthy used Democratic votes to pass a funding bill.

This is a line of thinking that will get more attention, perhaps, when the government again faces a funding lapse November 17.

RELATED: The last time the government faced a funding lapse, just last month, CNN documented how a government shutdown could impact Americans.

Any potential speaker must find a way to both get the support of people like Gaetz and figure out how to fund the government in a little more than three weeks.

Emmer’s downfall is yet another cautionary tale. The majority of House Republicans backed Emmer, their fourth choice this year to be speaker, in both secret ballot voting and a behind-closed-doors roll call vote.

He had been working to convince holdouts when the post opposing him hit Trump’s social media account. For the fringe of the party, counts against Emmer include that he is a supporter of additional funding for Ukraine to repel Russia’s invasion. Foreign aid is a chief target of those who believe there is a uniparty.

Politico noted back in 2017 that the term has roots on the American left, in the rhetoric of Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate turned Green Party presidential candidate.

While there is not much polling on the idea of a uniparty, there is a lot of polling about the two main political parties.

In a Pew Research Center survey published in September, just 10% of Americans said they saw “hardly any” difference between the parties. A larger portion of the country – 25% – does not feel either party represents the interests of people like them, but that sentiment is held by roughly equal shares of Republicans and Democrats.

Similarly, about a quarter of both Republican and Republican-leaning voters and Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters do not feel well-represented by their parties.

Interestingly, despite gripes about a uniparty by the Republican fringe, Republicans are less likely than Democrats to express an interest in more party choices, according to Pew’s survey.

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August 2, 2023
America’s child care problem is about to get a lot worse. Here’s why | CNN Politics

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Sarah Morgan was looking forward to enrolling her 1-year-old son Lucas at the Skagit Valley Family YMCA’s early learning center in Anacortes, Washington, this fall.

Her older son Jameson, 5, had a wonderful experience there, learning his letters, numbers and colors, as well as social skills – all of which smoothed his transition to kindergarten this year.

But in late August, Morgan found out that the YMCA was closing the Anacortes center.

Like many child care providers across the nation, the YMCA has had to rethink its operations with the looming expiration of a $24 billion federal Covid-19 pandemic support program that kept many centers afloat over the past two years. The nonprofit, which received $271,000 for its early learning programs, opted to close the Anacortes location, which served 21 families, so it could funnel its resources into its three remaining centers, said its CEO Dean Snider.

That decision has left the Morgan family scrambling to find alternate arrangements for Lucas. Child care is limited on Anacortes, an island in the northwest part of the state. The YMCA’s closest remaining centers are a 40-minute drive away, which doesn’t fit the work schedules of either her or her husband, Travus. And the nannies they interviewed asked for hourly rates that are close to what Morgan earns.

So Morgan plans to place Lucas with an in-home provider, though she worries he won’t have the same educational opportunities that his older brother had at the YMCA.

“It’s really sad that my next one won’t have that type of experience,” said Morgan, a social worker employed by the state. “It’s just really been devastating.”

Nationwide, more than 70,000 child care programs are projected to close, and about 3.2 million children could lose their spots due to the end of the child care stabilization grant program on September 30, according to an analysis by The Century Foundation.

The historic federal investment, which was part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that Democrats passed in March 2021, supported more than 220,000 child care programs, affecting as many as 9.6 million children, according to the federal Administration for Children & Families. It reached more than 8 in 10 licensed child care centers, helping them hold onto workers by offering bonuses and raising wages, cover their rent, mortgage and utilities, buy personal protective equipment and other supplies, and provide mental health support.

“We have not spent that much money on child care previously in the US,” said Julie Kashen, women’s economic justice director at The Century Foundation. “What we learned was that it worked. It kept programs open. It helped address the staffing shortages. It kept children safe and nurtured. It kept parents working.”

Child care in America has long had issues: The costs are steep for both providers and parents, leaving it both in short supply and unaffordable for many families. Last year, the average annual price nationwide was nearly $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, though the rates can be much higher depending on the location.

At the same time, the pay is low, making it hard for workers to commit to the industry and for centers to hold onto their staff. Child care workers typically earned $13.71 an hour, or $28,520 a year, in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment remains lower than it was prior to the pandemic.

For Carla Smith, the stabilization grants were a “miracle.”

Smith, who founded Cornerstone Academy in Arlington, Texas, 17 years ago while nursing her newborn son, used $1.1 million in stabilization grants and other federal relief funding to rebuild after enrollment plunged in the first year of the pandemic. She was able to hire more employees and boost the wages of her teachers and administrative staff to as much as $25 an hour. That’s about double what most were earning before and enticed them to stay at the academy.

“It kept the day care open. It kept day care workers employed, and it kept families employed,” said Smith, who now cares for 50 children ages 6 weeks to 5 years.

Now that she won’t receive any additional federal stabilization funds, Smith is worried she might have to close her doors next summer if the church that houses the center doesn’t step in to help. She just raised tuition by up to $200 a month for most children and $600 a month for infants, prompting one family to leave and several others to pull out of the after-school program. She and the assistant director have taken five-figure pay cuts, she laid off one worker and she reduced the hours of the others.

“The next layoff will be myself,” she said, noting that she’s already looking for other jobs so she can keep the academy operating.

Without the stabilization grants, the Chinese-American Planning Council in New York City will have a tougher time hiring and retaining staffers who care for 180 children at six sites, said Mary Cheng, the director of childhood development services. The nearly $600,000 in funding allowed her to provide bonuses of up to $2,500 every six months between July 2021 and this summer, as well as temporarily increase the pay of the after-school staff by a dollar or two. In addition, she used the funds to buy air purifiers and cleaning supplies, as well as provide mental health support for the children and staff.

Now, she’s looking for several teachers and assistant teachers, as well as an education director for one of the sites. But it’s hard to attract candidates when the pay she’s offering – even for the director role – is less than an entry-level public school teacher.

Already, because of the staffing shortage, she’s had to close one classroom in a public housing development, turning away the parents of 12 children.

But the council may have to undertake some more fundamental changes to its child care program, which has been funded by the city since it started in the 1970s. Cheng is looking to raise $500,000 in donations and grants for its preschool and after-school programs this year to cover the shortfall in federal support, far more than the $15,000 it has raised annually in the past.

And it may have to start accepting children whose parents can pay tuition for the first time.

“Now I have to think about ‘How do I make a profit?,” said Cheng, who attended the child care program when she was little. “You have to sustain the programming that has to happen for these families. You have to think about a profit in that way because when things hit the fan like this, you’ve got to figure out ‘What can I do to make ends meet?’”

A group of Democratic and independent senators and representatives are pushing to extend federal assistance for child care beyond September 30. They introduced the Child Care Stabilization Act, which would provide $16 billion each year for the next five years.

“There was a child care crisis even before the pandemic – and failing to extend these critical investments from the American Rescue Plan will push child care even further out of reach for millions of families and jeopardize our strong economic recovery,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington said in a statement. “This is an urgent economic priority at every level: Child care is what allows parents to go to work, businesses to hire workers, and it’s an investment in our kids’ futures. The child care industry holds up every sector of our economy – and Congress must act now.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan bill introduced in the House would enhance three existing tax credits – the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit and the Dependent Care Assistance Program – to help make child care more affordable for families and to support employers in sharing the cost of care.

However, getting any additional funding through Congress will be difficult. House GOP hardliners are determined to cut spending in the fiscal 2024 government funding bill, making it more likely the government could shut down on October 1.

Vanessa Quarles is among the many child care providers who hope that Congress renews its support for the industry.

Quarles, who runs Bridges Transitional Preschool & Childcare in Evansville, Indiana, cannot take in more children until she can find more workers. But she can only afford to pay up to $14 an hour, which is barely a livable wage in the area, she said. Quarles raised tuition in February and stopped offering lunch, but she fears she’ll drive away parents if she asks them to shell out any more.

If she received federal funding, she would be able to provide raises and bonuses to attract more employees.

“A lot of people are having a hard time accepting the pay range of child care workers,” said Quarles, who did not receive any stabilization grants. “That’s one reason why we are not fully functioning.”

At least 17 states invested their own money into child care this year, according to a tally by Child Care Aware. These include historic investments by Alabama, Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Washington.

Washington funneled more than $400 million this year into early learning, the largest investment in state history, according to Child Care Aware. It builds on the Fair Start for Kids Act, which state lawmakers passed in 2021. The effort increased the number of households eligible for assistance by raising income eligibility limits – a family of four earning as much as $5,600 a month in 2023 qualifies for monthly copays of only $165. It also bumped up the rates paid to providers for serving state-subsidized families.

But more needs to be done to keep providers afloat, said Ryan Pricco, director of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware of Washington. Currently, reimbursement rates are determined by a market survey, but that reflects what parents can afford, not the true cost of care.

“Until we switch our subsidy system, and really our whole financing system, over to a cost of care model and reimburse programs that way, they’re going to continue to struggle to keep up with competitors and other low-income industries,” he said.

While the Skagit Valley Family YMCA needed the stabilization grants to bolster its child care workforce, those infusions alone are not enough to solve its financial imbalance, Snider said. Revenue from families paying full price and subsidized rates only cover the cost of staffing, not rent, food for the children and other expenses. The agency has racked up six-figure losses across its early learning centers so far this year, which is “obviously unsustainable,” Snider said.

“Early learning is not a viable proposition right now,” he continued. “Everyone calls it necessary, but no one’s willing to put the resources in yet to make it possible.”

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August 2, 2023
Fact check: Republicans make false, misleading claims at first Biden impeachment inquiry hearing | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Republican-led House Oversight Committee is holding its first hearing Thursday in the impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden – and Republicans on the committee have made a series of false and misleading claims, as well as some other claims that have left out critical context.

Below is a CNN fact check. This article will be updated as additional fact checks are completed.

Republican Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in his opening remarks at the hearing on Thursday that the committee has uncovered how “the Bidens and their associates created over 20 shell companies” and “raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019.”

Facts First: The $20 million figure is roughly accurate for Joe Biden’s family and associates, according to the bank records subpoenaed by the committee, but the phrase “the Bidens and their associates” obscures the fact that there is no public evidence to date that President Joe Biden himself received any of this money. And it’s worth noting that a large chunk of the money went to the “associates” – Hunter Biden’s business partners – not even Biden’s family itself.

So far, none of the bank records obtained by the committee have shown any payments to Joe Biden. And a Washington Post analysis in August found that, of about $23 million in payments the committee had identified from foreign sources, nearly $7.5 million went to members of the Biden family – almost all of it to Hunter Biden – and the rest to people Hunter Biden did business with. (The Post also questioned the use of the vague phrase “shell companies,” noting that “virtually all of the companies” that had been listed by the committee at the time had “legitimate business interests” or “clearly identified business investments.”)

A Republican aide for the House Oversight Committee disputed the Post’s analysis on Thursday, saying that bank records obtained by the panel actually show that, of $24 million in payments between 2014 and 2019, $15 million went to members of the Biden family and $9 million went to associates. CNN has reached out to the Post for comment; the committee has not publicly released the underlying bank records that would definitively show the breakdown in payments.

The records obtained by the committee have shown that during and after Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, Hunter Biden made millions of dollars through complex financial arrangements from private equity deals, legal fees and corporate consulting in Ukraine, China, Romania and elsewhere. Again, Republicans have not produced evidence that Joe Biden got paid in any of these arrangements.

Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio repeated a false claim about Hunter Biden that CNN debunked when Jordan made the same claim last week.

Jordan claimed that Hunter Biden himself said he was unqualified to sit on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

“Hunter Biden’s not qualified, fact number two, to sit on the board. Not my words, his words. He said he got on the board because of the brand, because of the name,” Jordan said Thursday.

Facts First: It’s not true that Hunter Biden himself said he wasn’t qualified to sit on the Burisma board. In fact, Hunter Biden said in a 2019 interview with ABC News that “I was completely qualified to be on the board” and defended his qualifications in detail. He did acknowledge, as Jordan said, that he would “probably not” have been asked to be on the board if he was not a Biden – but he nonetheless explicitly rejected claims that he wasn’t qualified, calling them “misinformation.”

When the ABC interviewer asked what his qualifications for the role were, he said: “Well, I was vice chairman on the board of Amtrak for five years. I was the chairman of the board of the UN World Food Programme. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. Bottom line is that I know that I was completely qualified to be on the board to head up the corporate governance and transparency committee on the board. And that’s all that I focused on. Basically, turning a Eastern European independent natural gas company into Western standards of corporate governance.”

When the ABC interviewer said, “You didn’t have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though,” Biden responded, “No, but I think I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board – if not more.”

Asked if he would have been asked to be on the board if his last name wasn’t Biden, Biden said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not.” He added “there’s a lot of things” in his life that wouldn’t have happened if he had a different last name.

A side note: Biden had served as the board chair for World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that supports the UN World Food Programme, not the UN program itself as he claimed in the interview.

Jordan cited new documents obtained from IRS whistleblowers, made public by House Republicans on Wednesday, to argue that the Justice Department improperly blocked investigators from asking about Joe Biden in a 2020 search warrant related to Hunter Biden’s overseas dealings.

“We learned yesterday, in the search warrant…examining Hunter Biden electronic communications, they weren’t allowed to ask about Political Figure 1,” Jordan said. “Political Figure number 1 is the big guy, is Joe Biden.”

Facts First: This is highly misleading. The Justice Department official who gave this instruction said Joe Biden’s name shouldn’t be mentioned in the search warrant because there wasn’t any legal basis to do so. Furthermore, this occurred during Trump’s presidency, so it doesn’t prove pro-Biden meddling by the Biden-era Justice Department.

The August 2020 email from a deputy to now-special counsel David Weiss, the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor who is leading the Hunter Biden probe, said the warrant was for “BS,” an apparent reference to Blue Star Strategies, a lobbying firm that represented Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was on the board.

The Weiss deputy said in the email that “other than the attribution, location and identity stuff at the end, none if it is appropriate and within the scope of this warrant” and that “there should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,” according to emails released by House Republicans. Another document released by the GOP confirm that Joe Biden is “Political Figure 1.”

Before obtaining a search warrant, investigators need to establish probable cause and secure approval from a judge. If federal prosecutors believed the references to Joe Biden weren’t within the legal scope of what the warrant was looking for, it wouldn’t have been appropriate or lawful to include them.

Comer said in his opening remarks that the committee recently uncovered “two additional wires sent to Hunter Biden that originated in Beijing from Chinese nationals; this happened when Joe Biden was running for president of the United States – and Joe Biden’s home is listed on the beneficiary address.”

Facts First: This lacks important context. Comer was correct that the committee has found evidence of two wire transfers sent to Hunter Biden from Chinese nationals in the second half of 2019, during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, but he did not explain that Joe Biden’s home being listed as the beneficiary address doesn’t demonstrate that Joe Biden received any of the money. Nor did he explain that there may well be benign reasons for the inclusion of the address. Hunter Biden has lived at his father’s Wilmington, Delaware, home at times and listed that address on his driver’s license; Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement to CNN this week that the address was listed on these transfers simply because it was the address Hunter Biden used on the bank account the money was going to, which Lowell said Hunter Biden did “because it was his only permanent address at the time.”

“This was a documented loan (not a distribution or pay-out) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Lowell said in the statement. “We expect more occasions where the Republican chairs twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”

White House spokesman Ian Sams wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday: “Imagine them arguing that, if someone stayed at their parents’ house during the pandemic, listed it as their permanent address for work, and got a paycheck, the parents somehow also worked for the employer…It’s bananas…Yet this is what extreme House Republicans have sunken to.”

Comer told CNN this week his panel is trying to put together a timeline on where Hunter Biden was living around the time of the transfers, which occurred in July 2019 and August 2019. Joe Biden was a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary at the time.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina claimed at the Thursday hearing, “We already know the president took bribes from Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors.

Facts First: Mace’s claim is false; we do not “already know” that Joe Biden took any bribe. The claim about a bribe from Burisma is a completely unproven allegation. The FBI informant who relayed the claim to the FBI in 2020 was merely reporting something he said he had been told by Burisma’s chief executive. Later in the hearing, a witness called by the committee Republicans, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, called “the bribery allegation” the most concerning piece of evidence he had heard today – but he immediately cautioned that “you have to only take that so far” given that it is “a secondhand account.”

According to an internal FBI document made public by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa earlier this year over the strong objections of the FBI, the informant said in 2020 – when Donald Trump was president – that the CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, had claimed in 2016 that he made a $5 million payment to “one Biden” and another $5 million payment to “another Biden.” But the FBI document did not contain any proof for the claim, and the document said the informant was “not able to provide any further opinion as to the veracity” of the claim.

Republicans have tried to boost the credibility the allegation by saying it was in an FBI document and that the FBI had viewed the informant as highly credible. But the document merely memorialized the information provided by the informant; it does not demonstrate that the information is true. And Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year that he had not been aware of any such payments to the Bidens; Archer characterized Zlochevsky’s reported claim as an example of the Ukrainian businessman embellishing his influence.

Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, falsely claimed that Hunter Biden never paid taxes on his foreign income.

He said Hunter Biden “failed to pay any taxes” on the millions of dollars he got from Ukrainian companies, and that this shows how “the Biden family doesn’t have to” pay taxes.

“Who’s going to write the check for the money Hunter Biden didn’t pay?” Burchett asked, adding that “hardworking Americans” would end up footing the bill.

Facts First: This is false. Hunter Biden repeatedly missed IRS deadlines, and his conduct was so egregious that federal investigators believe it was criminal, but he eventually belatedly paid all of his back taxes, plus interest and penalties, to the tune of about $2 million.

Documents from Hunter Biden’s criminal cases indicate that he repeatedly missed tax deadlines, even though he had the funds and was repeatedly warned by his accountant and business partners. He was prepared to plead guilty to two misdemeanors in July, for failing to pay taxes on time in 2017 and 2018, before the plea deal collapsed.

But there’s a difference between failing to pay taxes on time and failing to pay taxes at all. In 2021, while the criminal investigation was still underway and before any charges were filed, Hunter Biden paid roughly $2 million to the IRS to cover all the back taxes, plus penalties and interest.

Hunter Biden was able to make the massive payment thanks to a roughly $2 million loan from a friend and attorney who has been supporting him during his legal troubles, according to court filings.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York accused a Republican member of the committee, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, of cutting out “critical context” from an image of a purported text message that Donalds displayed earlier in the Thursday hearing. Ocasio-Cortez also said that Donalds had displayed a “fabricated image.”

The dispute was over an image Donalds showed of a purported 2018 text message from the president’s brother James Biden to the president’s son Hunter Biden – provided by IRS whistleblowers and released by House Republicans on Wednesday – in which James Biden purportedly wrote, “This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with you father [sic] alone !! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work.”

After showing the image, Donalds asked a witness at the committee, “If you saw a text message like this between the president’s brother and the president’s son, wouldn’t you be concerned about them trying to give plausible deniability for the president of the United States to not have any knowledge of said business dealings?”

Facts First: Donalds didn’t invent the James Biden text message, but Ocasio-Cortez was correct that Donalds left out critical context – specifically, context that showed there was no sign that the purported text exchange between James Biden and Hunter Biden was about business dealings. The information released by House Republicans this week appeared to show that James Biden’s purported text about getting “help” from Joe Biden came in direct response to a purported Hunter Biden text saying he could not afford alimony, school tuition for his children, food and gas “w/o [without] Dad.” Donalds did not display this purported Hunter Biden text at the Thursday hearing.

In other words, when James Biden purportedly mentioned the possibility of several months of help from Joe Biden, he gave no indication he was referring to some sort of business transaction, much less the foreign transactions that House Republicans have been focused on in their investigations into the president. But Donalds didn’t make that clear.

With that said, Ocasio-Cortez herself could have been clearer about what she meant when she claimed the image Donalds showed was “fabricated.”

The contents of the purported James Biden text Donalds displayed were not made up, according to the IRS whistleblowers. What appeared to be novel was the graphic Donalds used; he showed the text in a form that made it look like a screenshot from an iPhone text conversation, with white words over a blue background bubble. The House Republican spreadsheet that the words were taken from did not include any such graphics, and, again, it did include the preceding purported Hunter Biden message that Donalds didn’t show.

Republican Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas said at the Thursday hearing, “In an interview back in 2019 with The New Yorker, even Hunter admitted that he talked to his dad about business, specifically Burisma.”

Facts First: This needs context. The 2019 New Yorker article in question reported that Hunter Biden said he recalled Joe Biden discussing Burisma with him “just once” in a brief exchange that consisted of this: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”

It’s fair for Fallon to say that this counts as Joe Biden discussing business with his son, but Fallon did not mention how brief and limited Hunter Biden said the purported discussion was.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
Congress poised for messy September as McCarthy races to avoid government shutdown | CNN Politics

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GOP hardliners in the House are eager to play a game of chicken over the end-of-the-month deadline to fund federal agencies, seeking to force the White House and Senate to make a choice: Accept a slew of conservative priorities or risk a debilitating government shutdown.

And caught in the middle, once again, is Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

In a private conference call last week, McCarthy urged his colleagues to back a short-term spending deal to avoid an October 1 shutdown and instead focus their energy on the larger funding fight later in the fall, sources on the call told CNN. His argument: The year-long spending bills to fund federal agencies would be better suited to enact cuts and policy changes they have demanded, including on hot-button issues like border security and immigration policy.

And, he argued, if they spend too much time squabbling among themselves, they’ll end up getting jammed by senators in both parties and forced to accept higher spending levels than they’d like.

“It’s a great place to have a very strong fight and to hold our ground,” McCarthy told his colleagues, according to a person on the call, referring to having an immigration fight on the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security – not on short-term funding legislation that the far-right House Freedom Caucus is pushing to use as a bargaining chip.

As the Senate returns this week after its August recess, and the House reconvenes next week, the two chambers have little time to resolve major differences over funding the government. The two sides are hundreds of billions of dollars apart after McCarthy backed away from a previous deal he cut with the White House and later agreed to pursue deeper cuts demanded by his right-flank.

Now, the two sides will have to work together to punt the fight until potentially early December and pass a short-term funding bill – all as Congress faces other key end-of-the-month deadlines, such as an extension of federal aviation programs, and as a potential impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden looms in the House.

None of it will be that easy.

The White House and senators from both parties want to tie the short-term funding bill to $24 billion in aid to Ukraine and with another $16 billion in much-needed funds for communities ravaged by a spate of natural disasters. But a contingent of vocal House conservatives are furiously opposed to quickly passing more aid to Ukraine – while GOP sources said McCarthy privately voiced displeasure at the White House for formally unveiling its funding request during the congressional recess and not briefing lawmakers.

Moreover, to pass legislation in the House by a majority vote, the chamber must first approve a rule – a procedural vote that is typically only supported by the majority party and opposed by the minority party. Yet several hard-right conservatives told CNN they are prepared to take down the rule over the spending bill if their demands aren’t met.

That would leave McCarthy with a choice: Either side with conservative hardliners and set up a major clash with the White House or cut a deal with Democrats and pass the spending bill by a two-thirds majority, a threshold that would allow them to approve the bill without having to adopt a rule first but could force McCarthy to give more concessions to Democrats.

But if he works with Democrats to circumvent his far-right, McCarthy risks enraging the very members who have threatened to push for a vote to oust him from the speakership.

GOP Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, who leads one of the appropriations subcommittees, acknowledged that they’ll need Democratic support for both a short-term spending patch and for any longer-term bills to fund the government – which he said could put McCarthy in a predicament.

“The challenge for McCarthy, and I’ll be real honest with you, is that if he works with the Democrats, obviously, the Democrats are not going to do it for free. They want something. So, it’s going to be a compromise – one of those really bad words in Washington for some reason,” Simpson told CNN. “Then you’re going to find a resolution introduced on the floor to vacate the chair.”

One GOP lawmaker acknowledged there have been conversations among conservative hardliners about using a “motion to vacate” – a procedural tool that forces a floor vote to oust the speaker – to gain leverage in the funding fight, if they feel like McCarthy isn’t sticking to his spending promises or gives too much away to Democrats.

A few on the right, who were furious with McCarthy over his bipartisan debt ceiling deal, briefly floated the idea of triggering a motion to vacate this summer, but then dialed back their threat when it became clear there wasn’t much support for the move.

McCarthy allies say the hard-liners are playing with fire.

GOP Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a Nebraska swing district won by Biden, said of the right’s hardline approach to spending: “It’s not realistic.”

“This theory that you gotta have 100% (of what you want), and if you don’t get 100, you’ll take zero – it’s not that the way it works,” he added. “And it’s not good for the country.”

Part of the McCarthy strategy to get conservative hardliners on board is to channel their energy on other matters that won’t lead to an end-of-the-month shutdown.

In recent weeks, McCarthy has tried to use the right’s desire to investigate and impeach Biden as part of his argument against a shutdown, warning that their probes into the administration would have to come to a halt if the government were to shut down.

Meanwhile, the House will consider its homeland spending bill on the floor the week they return from recess, giving the right a fresh opportunity to offer amendments and shape their party’s border policy — and train their focus away from the must-pass short-term extension.

Democrats are already trying to pin the blame on any shutdown on the House GOP.

“When the Senate returns next week, our focus will be on funding the government and preventing House Republican extremists from forcing a government shutdown,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a letter to his colleagues on Friday.

How McCarthy deals with the immediate spending demands remains to be seen, including whether he’ll agree to pair the short-term spending bill with any aid to Ukraine.

While Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is a staunch advocate for Ukraine aid, McCarthy has been more circumspect amid loud calls from his right-flank against pouring more money into the war-torn country.

And as he toured Maui on Saturday, McCarthy acknowledged the need for more disaster relief aid, though it’s unclear if he will separate that package from Ukraine funding — even as the White House and senators in both parties want them to move together.

Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told CNN that disaster relief and Ukraine “need to be separated.”

“The president needs to come forward, or the speaker, leadership of the Republican Party, the Democrat Party need to come together to share with the American people what we’re doing, what’s the outcome of this?” Hern said.

Simpson said of tying Ukraine aid to the short-term spending bill: “That’s a tougher sell. Particularly in our conference.”

But advocates of more Ukraine aid say that the longer that Congress waits, the more difficult it will be to approve money needed to deter Russian aggression and the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s war.

“I think we need to get that done because we’re not going to get it done next year, right?” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat. “Once you get truly into the presidential cycle, everything gets that much more difficult.”

Hard-line conservatives are already threatening to make McCarthy’s calculus more complicated if he cuts a short-term spending deal with Democrats. Several of them are already threatening to oppose any rule if the bill falls short of their demands – a tactic that they have employed this Congress to bring the House to a halt. It would take just five Republicans to take down a rule, assuming all Democrats vote against it as they typically do.

Rep. Ralph Norman – who serves on the House Rules Committee, where such a procedural step would originate – told CNN he hasn’t made up his mind yet on the rule.

But the South Carolina Republican said he has concerns about the supplemental request for Ukraine aid, which he said needs to be offset, as well as top-line funding levels for their remaining spending bills.

“There is no appetite for getting our financial house in order by anyone of either party,” he said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, another hardliner, also hinted that he may vote against both the short-term spending bill and the rule, but when asked for clarification by CNN, he said: “I’m on a very different decision calculus than this.”

Gaetz didn’t respond to a follow-up question about what he meant, but later posted on social media a long list of grievances he has with GOP leadership – including on spending issues – and ended his post with: “We are going to have to seize the initiative and make some changes.”

Some have made their demands directly known to GOP leaders, including Virginia Rep. Bob Good, who said on last week’s conference call that lawmakers shouldn’t fear a potential shutdown, according to a source on the call.

Other Republicans made clear they want no part of a shutdown – something California Rep. Darrell Issa said is “not constructive.”

“We will get there,” Issa said of funding the government. “Now if we get there earlier without a shutdown, the American people are better served.”

When asked how the next few months will shake out, Simpson had some words of warning: “I tell people: buckle up. It’s going to be crazy for September, October, November, December,” Simpson said. “The next four months are going to be wild.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
Going to food banks. Canceling after-school activities. How federal workers will manage a government shutdown | CNN Politics

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The last time the federal government shut down five years ago, Jesse Santiago found himself standing in line at his local food bank, rationing medication and falling behind on his mortgage payments, which ultimately cost him his home.

Santiago, who has worked as a Transportation Security Administration officer at Houston’s airport since 2002, likes his job and takes pride in keeping Americans safe when they fly. But he’s outraged that Congress once again is on the brink of letting the federal government shut down, throwing him and his fellow federal workers into financial and emotional chaos.

“Imagine serving the American people only to have to beg for food,” said Santiago, who lives with his husband in Cleveland, Texas, and has started stocking up on canned beans and other nonperishable food in case this impasse drags out. “I refuse to stand in food lines again while working for the federal government.”

Santiago is among several million federal employees who will stop being paid if lawmakers cannot agree on funding the federal agencies by the start of the coming fiscal year on October 1. Some, like Santiago, are considered essential workers and have to go to work regardless. Others will be furloughed until Congress passes a spending package, which took more than a month during the 2018-19 shutdown.

Hundreds of people wrote to CNN to express their views about the looming shutdown. Several said they were concerned about taking trips to national parks, including a bride-to-be who is holding her wedding at one in mid-October, while many senior citizens said they were terrified they wouldn’t get their monthly Social Security checks. (In fact, Social Security payments continue during shutdowns.)

Some charitable organizations are already offering to help federal workers get through their payless period. Earlier this week, chef Jose Andres said his World Central Kitchen restaurants in Washington, DC, would provide food to federal employees during a shutdown, as they did during the previous impasse.

Among the hardest hit by government shutdowns are federal employees, who won’t get paid until Congress funds their agencies, and federal contractors, who don’t receive back pay. Many wrote of the toll the last shutdown – the longest on record – took on them and their concerns that they and their families will likely have to go through this again.

For Carrie Martin, who works in the finance department of the National Institutes of Health, potentially losing her paycheck comes at a tough time. Not only is she shelling out more for groceries, rent and other essentials because of inflation, but she’ll have to start making student loan payments of a little more than $700 a month in October.

“Not knowing when I will get my next paycheck is very stressful considering I am living paycheck to paycheck,” said Martin, who earned a master’s in health administration degree from George Washington University this spring. “Adding student loans back into my bills is making it 10 times worse.”

Plus, she said it’s difficult to work under such uncertain conditions. She and her colleagues have been putting in extra hours preparing for the end of the current fiscal year and the start of the next one.

“Preparing for something that may not happen takes a lot of energy out of you,” said Martin, who is also still adjusting to living on one income after her wife passed away last year.

Other federal workers are already planning to cut back their spending.

Nicole, a federal law enforcement officer in southern Missouri, said she won’t be able to throw a party for her 6-year-old son whose birthday is in early October. She had hoped to invite a dozen or so children since he just entered kindergarten and is starting to make friends. Instead, her son will just have cake and presents at home with his parents, grandparents and younger brother.

“I’ll probably feel more sad than he will,” said Nicole, who did not want her last name used because of the nature of her job. “I don’t want to tap into my savings and not pay my bills.”

Even though her husband will continue to be paid since he works in the restaurant industry, Nicole said the family will have to make sacrifices, including not signing up her older son for after-school activities, such as basketball and painting. And they’ll skip going to fall festivals in their area.

During the last shutdown, they bought fewer groceries, reduced their cable plan and paid a decent amount of late fees on bills. Plus, they had to take out a loan from their local credit union, though at least they didn’t have to pay interest on it.

“That was probably one of the worst things we’ve been through,” said Nicole, who still has to report to work during a shutdown.

The stress from the 2013 impasse prompted Rob, who was a federal police officer in Washington, DC, at the time, to leave federal service. He had to work long shifts without knowing when he’d see his next paycheck.

A decade later, Rob decided to return to the federal workforce so he could get a better-paying job than the one he has working security at a local retailer. He is currently behind on his rent and car payments and depends on food stamps to feed his family, including his 4-year-old daughter.

Just last week, he accepted a position as a police officer at a Veterans Health Administration hospital with a tentative start date of November 5. But if the government shuts down, he fears his paperwork and medical reviews will be delayed so he’ll have to wait longer to begin the job he desperately needs.

“This was a light at the end of the tunnel for us,” said Rob, who now lives outside of Boston and did not want his last name used for fear of losing his job offer. “I just want to work. I just want to serve my country, do my job.”

Many federal contractors, meanwhile, are gearing up to give up their paychecks completely until Congress resolves the impasse.

Theresa Springer of Pittsburgh is a senior consultant for a small management consulting firm that works with various federal agencies. During the last shutdown, she and her coworkers were able to take paid time off, so her income didn’t suffer even though it cost her employer hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company is making the same offer again this year, giving her around two weeks of breathing room before she stops being paid.

Though Springer said she has the savings to get her through, she will have to watch her spending and may have to delay some purchases if there is a shutdown. Regardless, she’s irritated at lawmakers’ inability to govern and thinks they should forgo their paychecks.

“My emergency fund is for emergencies, not for the federal government not being able to get their act together,” she said.

The situation is also tough for small businesses that depend on federal employees, like Sue Doyle’s Home Sweet Home Cleaning Services in Columbia, Maryland. Between 10% and 20% of her clients work for the government, and many cancel their appointments during shutdowns.

Not only does that hurt her income, it cuts into the earnings of her seven employees. Doyle tries not to lay anyone off, opting instead to reduce all of their schedules. While most understand, they are frustrated because they also have bills to pay, she said.

“A shutdown has a trickle-down consequence,” said Doyle, who is already talking to a bank about a business loan so she can cover her expenses during the impasse. “Hopefully, my employees won’t have more than one day off a week.”

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August 2, 2023
Kevin McCarthy opens impeachment inquiry without passing budget despite once criticizing Democrats for the same | CNN Politics

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In 2019, then-Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vehemently criticized Democrats for initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump without first passing a budget and securing government funding to prevent a shutdown.

Fast forward four years later and McCarthy, now the House Speaker, is pushing ahead with a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden while in the midst of another budget crisis and an unresolved looming government shutdown.

McCarthy called for the inquiry, even as House Republicans have yet to prove allegations that Biden profited off of his son’s foreign business dealings, to appease far-right members of the Republican caucus who have threatened his speakership.

In 2019, McCarthy said Democrats were prioritizing a politically-driven impeachment of Trump over the government’s basic responsibilities.

“This is the day that Alexander Hamilton feared and warned would come,” he said at a news conference on December 5, 2019. “This is the day the nation is weaker because they surely cannot put their animosity or their fear of losing an election in the future in front of all the other things that the American people want.”

“They don’t even have a budget,” he added. Congress passed a spending package two a few weeks later, averting a government shutdown.

McCarthy did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Now Congress faces a looming deadline at the end of the month to fund the government and some conservative members of the Republican caucus say they will not support a bill that doesn’t contain spending cuts.

In comments made on radio shows and in press conferences in 2019 reviewed by CNN’s KFile, McCarthy repeatedly said Democrats’ actions demeaned the impeachment process to a point that every subsequent president could be impeached – something he said he hoped wouldn’t happen.

“This is exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned us about, that with impeachment, that you would have a party actually grab it and, and not worry about the rule of law, but just the animosity that you have. And I’ve never seen the animosity in our lifetime,” said McCarthy to California local radio station KERN in late December 2019. “I’m sure there’s been animosity like this before, but not to this level. And maybe social media and other things drive it.

“And if you, and if you lower it to this level, when they ended up with just those two articles, every president would’ve been impeached. And what does it mean for the future? Have we, have we now demeaned impeachment so low that everybody’s gonna have this?” he added.

“Sometimes something happens so bad we need to learn from and come back from at this moment in time,” McCarthy continued. “I hope that’s the moment of where we are.”

Trump was impeached for the first time by the House of Representatives in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment proceedings were initiated after allegations that he solicited foreign interference from Ukraine to benefit his 2020 reelection campaign and obstructed the subsequent congressional investigation.

Trump was acquitted by the Senate in early 2020.

McCarthy made similar comments at a press conference in November 2019.

“I think what Republicans are doing is standing up for the constitution,” said McCarthy. “I think it’s the same thing that Alexander Hamilton warned us about, that you would use it for political gain from the same basis of going forward.

“I think what Republicans are standing up for is the idea of what they ran on. First thing, I think a majority should do is pass a budget, which the Democrats have not done. They should actually make sure that they fund the government, which we have not done. We’re working to now have another continuing resolution, so our troops are not being provided the resources they need or the pay raise that they have earned.”

McCarthy also lamented that impeachment has “overtaken every single committee” and emphasized “what is not being done in Congress.”

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August 2, 2023
Expect more rate hikes from the Fed after the latest jobs report | CNN Business

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An interest rate hike later this month was already in the cards for the Federal Reserve. But after the June jobs report, the timing of a second hike remains unclear.

Job gains remain robust, wage growth is still going strong, and unemployment continues to hover near historic lows. That means the job market is still fueling demand in the economy, which the Fed has been trying to slow through rate hikes. And Fed officials have made it clear they think the central bank still has more work to do to bring down inflation, which is still running well above the 2% goal.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago President Austan Goolsbee, a voting member of the Fed committee that decides interest rates, said in an interview Friday that he sees “a decent chance of further tightening down the pipeline” and that inflation “needs to come down more.”

Other Fed officials have struck a similarly hawkish tone on inflation, hinting strongly at a hike in July.

“I remain very concerned about whether inflation will return to target in a sustainable and timely way,” said Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Lorie Logan on Thursday during a meeting hosted by the Central Bank Research Association. “I think more restrictive monetary policy will be needed to achieve the Federal Open Market Committee’s goals of stable prices and maximum employment.”

Fed officials voted last month to hold the key federal funds rate steady at a range of 5-5.25% to reassess the economy after a string of 10 consecutive rate hikes and to monitor the effects of bank stresses in the spring, according to minutes from that meeting released Wednesday.

“We can take some time and assess and collect more information and then be able to act, knowing that we also communicated through our projections that we don’t think we’re done, based on what we know,” said New York Fed President John Williams Wednesday during a moderated discussion in New York. “And obviously we’re absolutely committed to achieving our 2% inflation goal.”

And Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself has doubled down on the need for more rate increases in recent speeches, not ruling out back-to-back hikes, despite economic indicators showing slight progress on inflation.

Financial markets are pricing in a more than a 90% chance of a rate hike later this month, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

The Fed wants to see the labor market slow down broadly, bringing it into “better balance,” as Powell has frequently described it. That means wage growth would need to cool consistently, monthly payroll growth would need to be close to a range of 70,000 and 100,000 — the smallest job gain needed to keep up with population growth — and unemployment would need to rise, according to economists. Job market conditions don’t resemble that just yet.

“This is clearly a very tight labor market, so I expect the Fed to look at this data and say there is justification here for continued small rate increases because the labor market is not cooling enough,” Dave Gilbertson, labor economist at payroll software company UKG, told CNN.

Labor costs are higher because of a persistent difficulty in hiring, weighing on labor-intensive service providers such as hospitals and restaurants, which has put upward pressure on consumer prices since businesses typically raise wages to address hiring challenges.

Powell homed in on that dynamic in recent remarks, and research from top economists argues the Fed will have to slow the economy further to fully address the labor market’s stubborn impact on inflation. Whether that means a full-blown recession or a so-called soft landing remains to be seen, but some Fed officials are optimistic.

“I feel like we are on a golden path of avoiding recession,” Goolsbee told CNBC Friday.

And there has been some progress on bringing the job market back into better balance while inflation has come down. Job openings fell to 9.82 million in May, down from a peak of 12 million in March 2022, though they still greatly exceed the number of unemployed people seeking work. And June’s jobs total of 209,000 is still robust by historical standards.

But Gilbertson said labor shortages have been largely driven by demographic shifts, which might keep the job market tight for the foreseeable future.

Beyond the expected hike in July, the Fed is going to remain laser-focused on wage growth to inform its decision-making later in the year. Central bank officials will pay particular attention to the Employment Cost Index, which recently showed that pay gains picked up in the first three months of the year. The index for the second quarter will be released in late July — after the Fed meets.

“The focus is on the path of wage inflation because of its pass-through to services inflation,” said Sonia Meskin, head of US Macro at BNY Mellon IM.

The June jobs report showed that average hourly earnings growth was unchanged at 0.4% from the month before and also unchanged at 4.4% year-over-year — not a welcome development.

Core inflation hasn’t decelerated as fast as the headline measure because of the tightness in the labor market. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, rose 3.8% in May from a year earlier, down from April’s 4.3% rise; while the core measure edged lower to 4.6% from 4.7% during the same period.

Within the core measure, services inflation also remains sticky and Powell said in last month’s post-meeting news conference that “we see only the earliest signs of disinflation there” and that the services sector’s “largest cost would be wage cost.”

The Fed’s strategy to address services inflation is simply by curbing demand through more rate hikes. So, in addition to the labor market, the Fed is highly attentive to consumer spending, which has cooled in the past several months, according to figures from the Commerce Department.

Other headwinds are expected to weigh on consumers in the months ahead, such as the resumption of student loan payments and the Supreme Court blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Americans are also running down their savings accounts while racking up debt, so US consumers may need to start cutting back soon.

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July 7, 2023
California is about to give Hollywood studios a lucrative tax deal during the writers’ strike | CNN Business

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CNN
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The state of California is about to give movie and TV studios a new lucrative tax perk.

A bill awaiting California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature would the state’s tax incentive program for film and TV productions for five years but with a key update: Studios with more tax credits than they can use will be able to exchange those credits for cash. The bill, part of the state’s overall budget plan, was passed by California legislators on Tuesday, and Newsom is expected to sign it on Friday.

The bill also mandates any production that receives the tax credit to comply with new on-set firearm safety protocols following the 2021 deadly shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin’s film “Rust,” and it implements requirements aiming to meet diversity hiring targets.

The new, refundable tax credits come as competition for film and TV production from other states and countries is on the rise. States like New York and Georgia are gaining share of the TV and film market, thanks to their own tax incentive programs, according to a 2021 report from FilmLA — a nonprofit organization that helps creators with production planning and film permitting.

The bill should be a boon for studios like Netflix. The streaming giant had not previously been able to take full advantage of the tax credit program since it uses a separate research and development incentive from California to significantly reduce its tax liability. In a 2020 SEC filing, Netflix said it had $250 million in California R&D tax credits — far more than it could use.

Disney and Comcast’s Universal Studios were the only two studios that benefited under California’s existing tax incentive program, due to their relatively larger tax bills from theme parks, according to Democratic assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, one of the bill’s sponsors. The new bill could benefit other studios that don’t have theme parks in the state, including Warner Bros, which is owned by CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.

The bill’s safety measures require productions to employ an adviser to oversee production safety and complete detailed risk assessments. Studios must also establish training requirements and standards that focus on the safe handling of firearms. Many of these safety protocols were voluntary before the bill.

Dave Cortese, the Democratic state senator who introduced the safety protocols in the bill, said research for the legislation began soon after actor Baldwin fired a live round of ammunition from what he said he believed to be an unloaded prop gun during a film’s rehearsal. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed.

“Conversations about this legislation started the week after the tragic loss of a cinematographer. Those negotiations have produced the nation’s first and best safety practices for California workers in the state’s vital motion picture industry,” Cortese said.

In addition to refundable tax credits and stricter safety standards, the bill establishes specific diversity requirements. Studios must submit data about the diversity of their workforce to qualify for the full credit. The bill also adds a new member to the state’s film commission with diversity, equity, and inclusion expertise.

The tax perk for Hollywood comes amid ongoing tension between the industry’s workforce and the studios’ bosses. The Writers Guild of America, has been on strike since early May, halting the production of many shows. The association’s more than 11,000 members are fighting over substantial issues like pay, the number of writers staffed on any given project, and whether artificial intelligence can be used in writing material.

Actors may soon stage a work stoppage, as well. Members of the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, have voted to authorize a strike against the major studios if they cannot agree to the terms of a new contract. Similar to the WGA, the actors’ union has voiced similar concerns about pay and the use of AI.

Democratic lawmakers in California celebrated the bill. Carrillo said the plan was a “grand compromise,” and it would help protect jobs in the state.

“These are hundreds of thousands of jobs, most of which impact Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles. They’re good union jobs, they’re production jobs, they’re creative jobs,” she said.

However, the bill has attracted some criticism. Chris Hoene, the executive director of the California Budget & Policy Center, a nonprofit think tank that provides analysis on state budget issues intending to improve outcomes for low-income communities and people of color in the state, called it “bad policy.”

“Refundable tax credits were designed to help low-income households… so to take that refundability structure and apply it to a business tax credit, you would think there are some film companies that struggle to make ends meet and don’t make enough money to owe any taxes, but that’s not how it works,” he said.

Hoene called the new policy a “giveaway that doesn’t have any positive outcomes.”

The refundable credits are designed to help more than just the big studios, Carrillo said. Film and TV productions help support surrounding businesses in the area, including “small restaurants and catering services,” Carrillo said.

“It’s very important that California has a competitive advantage and ultimately keeps these jobs and productions in our state while other states continue to announce more incentives,” she added.

Still, Hoene argued that there were more effective ways to create well-paying jobs in California.

“If we wanted to take scarce state resources to help workers, we could do that in ways that could provide them with assistance directly, rather than giving it to large corporations who are already minimizing their tax bills in other ways,” he said.

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June 30, 2023
Turkey hikes interest rates to 15% as Erdogan reverses policy on fighting inflation | CNN Business

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Turkey’s central bank almost doubled interest rates to 15% Thursday in a dramatic reversal of its unorthodox policy of cutting the cost of borrowing to tame painfully high inflation.

Annual consumer price inflation has come down from a two-decade high of 85.5% in October but was still 39.6% in May.

The central bank said that there were indications that underlying inflation in Turkey was increasing, even as inflation in many other countries trends downwards.

“The strong course of domestic demand, cost pressures and the stickiness of services inflation have been the main drivers,” the central bank said in a statement.

This is the first rate decision by Turkey’s central bank since last month’s reelection of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It is also the first rate increase in more than two years, and the central bank’s first decision since the appointment earlier this month of new governor Hafize Gaye Erkan, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the first woman to hold the position.

In its statement, the central bank said it hiked rates to bring down inflation “as soon as possible,” and that it would continue to do so gradually “until a significant improvement in the inflation outlook is achieved.”

Liam Peach, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a Thursday note that there were “encouraging signs” from the central bank that further rate hikes were ahead.

The London-based research firm expects Turkish interest rates to rise as high as 30% later this year.

Erdogan had ordered his central bank to cut rates nine times since late 2021, taking them to 8.5%, even as inflation around the world started to accelerate and most economies were doing the opposite. In that time, the value of the Turkish lira crashed 170% to a record low against the US dollar.

A weaker lira has aggravated Turkey’s cost-of-living crisis by making foreign imports more expensive, and pushed the government to use up billions of its foreign currency reserves in an attempt to boost the currency’s value.

Erdogan — who has fired four central bank governors in as many years — has since tried to reassure investors that he intends to normalize Turkish economic policy by filling key posts with more orthodox figures such as Erkan.

This month, Erdogan also appointed Mehmet Simsek, Turkey’s former deputy prime minister and finance minister, and a former economist for US wealth management firm Merrill Lynch, as his finance minister.

But the lira weakened further after Thursday’s rate hike news, dropping more than 2% to a new record low of 24 to the US dollar.

Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda, noted that the rate hike had come in at the lower end of market forecasts, and investors couldn’t afford to relax too soon.

“Erdogan hasn’t really hesitated to sack [central bank] governors that raise rates in the past, so investors will never feel fully at ease as long as he’s president,” he wrote in a note.

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June 22, 2023
Freedom Caucus member says hard-line group ‘failed’ with passage of ‘Democratic’ debt limit bill | CNN Politics

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CNN
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House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ken Buck criticized the bipartisan debt ceiling deal reached between House Republicans and the White House as a “Democratic bill,” and said his hard-line, conservative group had “failed” in its efforts to influence legislation more to its liking.

The caucus “still retains a lot of influence in the House,” the Colorado Republican told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “The key is that we use that influence in a way that brings conservative results. And I think that that’s what we tried to do with this case, and we failed, honestly.”

“This bill is a Democrat bill. It is a bill that not only avoided a default but also locked in the progressive gains that the president made in the last two years,” he added.

President Joe Biden signed into law Saturday the legislation to suspend the nation’s debt limit through January 1, 2025, helping avert a first-ever US default. The deal has faced backlash from conservatives and progressives but ultimately won support from a wide array of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, many of them moderates.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday he felt good about Biden signing the agreement “because we’re finally spending less than we spent the year before.”

“We actually got more than you thought in the process you could get at this point,” McCarthy, a California Republican, told Fox News.

Meanwhile, in a separate interview on “State of the Union,” White House budget chief Shalanda Young, a top debt ceiling negotiator, declined to call the new law an outright win for the Democrats despite suggestions from some in the party that they downplayed their initial approval of the bill to garner more Republican support.

Biden budget chief: McCarthy was ‘very professional’ in talks

“At the end of the day, the long view, the short and the medium view is default was not an option. So, not who can win,” Young told Bash when asked about a Democratic congressman saying his party had “rolled” Republicans.

“I have done this a long time, and we had to talk about the budget at some point this year. And this is about what you would expect to see out of a budget agreement with divided Congress,” Young said.

Buck said Sunday that while he believes McCarthy has credibility issues following passage of the debt ceiling deal, he’s not sure a vote to oust the California Republican from his speakership – also known as a “motion to vacate” – would happen “right away.”

“We continue to see the swamp, the folks in Washington, DC, who want to spend more money, winning, and we continue to see the folks who want to spend less money and really act responsibly losing. And so I think that Kevin McCarthy has an issue in a broader sense,” Buck said.

Among the concessions agreed to by McCarthy to secure his speakership earlier this year was that any member can call for a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, making it easier to trigger what is effectively a no-confidence vote in the speaker.

When asked by Bash what would lead him and his colleagues to employ such a move, Buck said that was something that should be done with “consensus” in the House Republican Conference.

“I don’t think it can be used by just a few people,” he said. “I applaud Kevin McCarthy for saying he wants to bring people back together again. Let’s see if he does that in a way that involves spending responsibly in the future.”

CNN has previously reported that while some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics have had private discussions about the motion to vacate, there is less appetite among the Freedom Caucus as a whole to go that route with the group’s chairman calling it “premature” in a caucus call earlier this week.

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June 4, 2023