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RNC chief on criticism of early voting: 'We need to stop that'
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Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Tuesday urged members of her party to stop discouraging early voting and vote by mail.
“Our voters need to vote early,” McDaniel told Fox News. “I have said this over and over again. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early.’ And we have to stop that and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in one day.”
Former President Trump was among the leading voices that questioned the security and validity of early and mail voting in 2020, baselessly claiming they allowed for fraud and rigged the election against him.
An RNC spokesperson later sought to clarify that the chairwoman was not speaking about the former president in her comments to Fox News.
“The discussion was about Democrats having a month to bank votes while Republicans expect to get it done in one day,” RNC spokesperson Nathan Brand told NBC News. “We were not talking about the former president, who has encouraged his base to vote early and has himself voted by mail.”
However, the former president has continued to rail against early and mail voting. When Trump launched his third bid for the presidency last month, he called for “same-day voting” and a ban on early voting.
McDaniel’s comments came as voters in Georgia headed to the polls on Tuesday in the state’s Senate runoff election, where Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) defeated his Trump-backed Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.
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Zelensky named Time magazine 'Person of the Year'
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” on Wednesday after being one of 10 individuals or groups placed on a shortlist earlier this week.
Zelensky has led Ukraine as it has worked to hold off a full-scale Russian invasion of the country since late February, becoming a leader on the world stage. He has overseen a series of victories in the war that has largely halted Russia from advancing and allowed Ukraine to retake captured territory.
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The Hill's Morning Report — Georgia Senate victory caps strong midterms for Dems
Editor’s note: The Hill’s Morning Report is our daily newsletter that dives deep into Washington’s agenda. To subscribe, click here or fill out the box below.
Georgia voters narrowly elected incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) in Tuesday’s runoff, giving President Biden and Senate Democrats a majority in the Senate next year and a sense of momentum as they survey 2022’s history-defying midterm elections (The Hill).
Warnock defeated GOP challenger Herschel Walker, whose loss compounded a day of woe for former President Trump, who had endorsed the Heisman Trophy winner in the primary and general election. Rural turnout for Walker, 60, was not enough to offset a strong Atlanta-area performance by Warnock, 53, a well-known pastor in the city.
An estimated 3.5 million Georgians voted in the runoff, slightly down from the 3.9 million ballots cast in the general election (The Washington Post). It was the fifth time Warnock was on a ballot since November 2020 — and the fifth time he finished in first place (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
“I am Georgia,” Warnock said Tuesday night. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together.”
Biden tweeted late Tuesday that he phoned Warnock to congratulate him on his victory. “Tonight Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected Ultra MAGAism, and most importantly: sent a good man back to the Senate. Here’s to six more years,” he wrote.
▪ Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal: Biden after the holidays will likely announce he’s seeking reelection, White House chief of staff Ron Klain said on Monday during a Wall Street Journal newsmaker event.
▪ Quartz: Biden is the first Democratic president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 to increase his majority in the Senate while losing the House.
The contest in the Peach State concluded a disappointing midterm cycle for Republicans, who expected a red wave but fell short of retaking the Senate and captured a majority in the House by just a few seats. Walker, a first-time candidate criticized for gaffes, accused of serious misconduct and elevated by Trump, embodied broader Republican concerns that their nominees — and the involvement of the former president who is now a 2024 candidate seeking to return to the White House — undermined their chances. Walker’s loss spurred calls inside the Republican Party to rethink its direction and strategy, the Post reported.
Walker conceded Tuesday night without mentioning Warnock. “There’s no excuses in life and I am not going to make any excuses now because we put up one heck of a fight,” he told supporters at the College Football Hall of Fame, adding, “the best thing I‘ve ever done in my whole entire life is to run for this Senate seat right here” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
▪ The Hill: Five takeaways from the Georgia runoff.
▪ The New York Times: An astonishing $1.4 billion was spent on just four contests in Georgia since the beginning of 2020.
Separately on Tuesday, two Trump Organization entities were convicted in New York of criminal tax fraud, punishable by a fine of up to $1.6 million; only the company’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, will go to prison. The illegal tax scheme, which did not directly implicate Trump, is a repudiation of financial practices at the former president’s business as he mounts another run for the White House (Bloomberg News and CNN).
Trump increasingly is viewed by leaders within his party as seriously weakened but still strong enough to tear down his chief political rival, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, creating a potential opening for any number of dark-horse candidates. Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Trump has presented a “golden opportunity” to his rivals, reports The Hill’s Alexander Bolton.
Trump also remains under investigation by a newly appointed federal special counsel and by the House Jan. 6 committee, whose chairman said on Tuesday that members expect to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department. The target or targets are unclear.
Trump faces five major probes, recaps lawyer and legal analyst Ankush Khardori in a New York Times opinion article.
▪ The Hill: Trump complicates the GOP’s position as the party of the Constitution.
▪ The Washington Post analysis: Trump will go away slowly, then all at once.
Related Articles
▪ NBC News: House Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) on Tuesday said he expects the panel to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department building on its investigation. Thompson did not say who the panel might recommend for prosecution or how many referrals he anticipates.
▪ The Hill: Lingering divisions from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot were on display Tuesday when legislative leaders presented the Congressional Gold Medal to law enforcement personnel who protected the Capitol during last year’s attack.
▪ The Washington Post: Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin officials for Trump communications.
LEADING THE DAY
➤ POLITICS
Pundits and pollsters already have their eyes on the 2024 election, but there are a host of 2023 political contests to watch too, The Hill’s Julia Manchester reports.
In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) is slated to defend the governor’s mansion in the red state, while Democrats will seek to keep the governor’s mansion in deep-red Louisiana blue as incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) is term-limited. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, the ideological balance of power on the state Supreme Court will be determined in a race for a seat on the court. And out east in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans and Democrats are set to race for control for the state legislatures.
President Biden’s new primary plan, meanwhile, is reigniting old tensions between the Biden and Sanders presidential camps, writes The Hill’s Hanna Trudo, with a former top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ripping the plan to put South Carolina as the first contest in the 2024 primary as a fatal flaw.
But Biden’s primary shake-up could be his biggest contribution to national politics, MSNBC reports. Black Democrats helped propel Biden to the 2020 presidential nomination, and his plan for a new primary schedule, with South Carolina at the starting line, would increase Black voter power in the party.
▪ WMUR: “An absolute joke”: Gov. Chris Sununu (R), GOP blast Democratic National Committee demand that New Hampshire change its primary law.
▪ The Washington Post: Georgia official doubts Democratic plan for 2024 presidential primary.
House conservatives want their party to go big on impeachment next year — targeting Biden or a top member of his Cabinet — but across the Capitol, Senate Republicans are not ready to convict. Some Republican senators are openly signaling that even if impeachment managed to squeak through the House, it would quickly die in the upper chamber, and not because of the Democratic majority (Politico).
➤ CONGRESS
On Capitol Hill, it may be a bit early to conclude it’s too late for lawmakers to fund the government for another year or too iffy to clear a must-pass military and security blueprint before House and Senate members jet out of town later this month.
But it’s not too early for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to publicly describe Plan B when some of the basic building blocks of legislative momentum seem to be missing, such as consensus about the basic goalpost.
“We’re at a pretty significant impasse,” McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. “Time is ticking. We have not been able to agree on a top line yet, and I think it’s becoming increasingly likely that we might need to do a short-term CR into early next year,” he added, using the shorthand for a continuing resolution (The Hill).
In January, the GOP will control the House, which in most circumstances might cheer McConnell. However, he and other leaders fear that House conservatives are so allergic to any compromise with Democrats that the government could wind up shutting down as battles continue. McConnell’s practiced viewpoint: A shutdown would be harmful economics, bad optics and, of course, is avoidable.
▪ Politico: Lawmakers labor to break impasses stalling a massive spending bill.
▪ The New Republic: Some Democrats hope to get a revived version of the popular child tax credit into a government funding package. “We’re going to keep at it until the end of the year. That’s the deadline,” House Appropriations Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), said on Monday. “Every day is a new day in which to make the case.”
▪ The Hill: Activists push for the child tax credit.
Then there’s the blueprint for military policy known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). A draft of the bill was released late Tuesday by the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Leadership proposes to add $45 billion to the Biden administration’s initial budget request.
The bill customarily clears Congress every year but has sagged in 2022 under the weight of legislative ornamentation and errata. The defense bill text released Tuesday night includes repeal of the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate for the military, a policy change championed by some Republicans and opposed by the White House, and it did not include federal regulatory permitting changes for fossil fuel companies, favored by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who will return to the House in January as a backbencher and cede her leadership gavel to a new GOP House majority, is tasked before the end of December to navigate demands from both conservatives and progressives in order to clear House passage of the final NDAA bill (The Hill and Breaking Defense).
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is running for Speaker but still trying to scare up enough votes on Jan. 3, has not found it easy (Forbes).
Former leader of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), on Tuesday revived a challenge to the GOP colleague who worked his way up the House ladder since 2007. “I’m running for Speaker to break the establishment,” Biggs tweeted. “Kevin McCarthy was created by, elevated by, and maintained by the establishment” (The Hill).
House lawmakers have dozens of questions for former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, whose cryptocurrency empire collapsed last month amid allegations of fraud, writes the Hill’s Sylvan Lane. The first question? Whether he’ll actually show up to answer them.
A House panel is pushing Bankman-Fried to testify at a hearing about the FTX collapse on Dec. 13. But Bankman-Fried has suggested he won’t be there, raising questions about when he’ll finally make an appearance before angry lawmakers.
Roll Call: Republican Ben Sasse is vacating his Nebraska Senate seat to become a university president in Florida on Jan. 8. Outgoing Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska confirmed Tuesday that he is applying for appointment to fill the impending vacancy.
➤ ADMINISTRATION
The White House continues today to host Democratic state lawmakers from 31 states as legislatures prepare for their upcoming sessions, aiming to strategize about climate change, gun violence, abortion rights, voting rights and other prominent issues important to the party (The Washington Post).
Biden, a devout Catholic, has clashed with U.S. Catholic bishops over legislation to codify same-sex marriage. “I disagree,” he said on Tuesday, referring to the bishops’ objections. During the president’s first year in office, bishops said Biden should be denied Holy Communion because of his support for reproductive and abortion rights (The Hill).
IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES
➤ INTERNATIONAL
A third Russian airfield was ablaze on Tuesday from a drone strike, a day after Ukraine demonstrated an apparent new ability to penetrate hundreds of kilometers deep into Russian airspace with attacks on two air bases.
Officials in the city of Kursk, around 60 miles north of the Ukraine border, released pictures of black smoke above an airfield in Tuesday’s early hours after the latest strike. The governor said an oil storage tank had gone up in flames but there were no casualties. While Kyiv celebrated the strikes, it did not directly claim responsibility for them.
“If Russia assesses the incidents were deliberate attacks, it will probably consider them as some of the most strategically significant failures of force protection since its invasion of Ukraine,” Britain’s ministry of defense said on Tuesday (Reuters).
▪ The New York Times: Germany arrests dozens of people who are suspected of planning to overthrow the government. Many detained by police had military training and were believed to belong to a recently formed group that operated on the conviction that the country was ruled by a so-called deep state.
▪ Reuters: In France, minority communities decry a surge in police fines.
▪ The Washington Post: Indonesia’s parliament votes to ban sex outside of marriage.
Conserving 30 percent of Earth for nature would be equivalent to the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase climate target and is key to helping solve the biodiversity and climate crises, Canada’s environment minister Steven Guilbeault said in advance of the United Nations (U.N.) COP15 conference, which gets underway today in Montreal.
“We’re a big country with big ambitions,” Guilbeault said Tuesday. “We’ve committed as a country to protect 30 percent of land and waters by 2030. We’re working in full partnership with Indigenous peoples, as well as provinces and territories. One might argue, and I guess I am, that our 1.5 degrees is protecting 30 percent of lands and oceans by 2030. It is the biodiversity equivalent of the 1.5 degrees on climate change.”
The target, known as “30×30,” is the most high-profile proposal under consideration by governments for this decade’s agreement to protect biodiversity. Led by the United Kingdom, Costa Rica and France, it has the backing of more than 100 countries but faces significant concerns from some Indigenous peoples and human rights campaigners, who warn it could legitimize land grabs and violence against communities (The Guardian).
▪ Vox: World leaders have two weeks to agree on a plan to save nature.
▪ The Guardian: “We are at war with nature”: The U.N. environment chief warns of biodiversity apocalypse.
China on Wednesday announced the most sweeping changes to its tough anti-COVID rules since the pandemic began, loosening restrictions that curbed the spread of the virus but had hobbled the world’s second largest economy and sparked protests.
The relaxation of rules, which include allowing infected people with mild or no symptoms to quarantine at home and dropping testing for people traveling within the country, are the strongest sign yet that China is preparing its population to live with the coronavirus (Reuters).
OPINION
■ Walker, Trump’s celebrity pick, underscores Trump’s fall, by Charles Blow, columnist, The New York Times. https://nyti.ms/3BgBXFH
■ What a horrible way to run a country, by Catherine Rampell, columnist, The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/3VBJuqL
WHERE AND WHEN
👉 The Hill: Share a news query tied to an expert journalist’s insights: The Hill launched something new and (we hope) engaging via text with Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. Learn more and sign up HERE.
⭐ INVITATION: Join a newsmaker event hosted by The Hill and the Bipartisan Policy Center on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 10 a.m. ET (hybrid), “Risk to Resilience: Cyber & Climate Solutions to Bolster America’s Power Grid,” with Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Energy Department Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response Director Puesh Kumar and more. Information for in-person and online participation is HERE.
The House will convene at 2 p.m. and resume work on U.S. immigration policy legislation.
The Senate will convene at 10 a.m.
The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 9 a.m. Biden has no public events on his schedule, but that could change later today.
Vice President Harris will meet with Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė of Lithuania in the vice president’s ceremonial office at 1:45 p.m.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with the U.S. Global Business Alliance CEO Leadership Council.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will lead White House aides and U.S. officials to meet with Jewish leaders for a roundtable at 11 a.m. to discuss the rise of antisemitism and efforts to combat hate.
The White House daily press briefing is scheduled at 2 p.m.
Editor Text
ELSEWHERE
➤ ECONOMY
It is a year of watershed moments in real estate, and not the good kind, writes The Hill’s Daniel de Visé. The Housing Market Index, a closely watched industry metric, dipped to 33 on a 100-point scale in October — its lowest level in a decade, save for the first dystopian month of COVID-19. Experts say anything under 50 is worrisome. Mortgage rates, meanwhile, are hitting 7 percent, marking a greater increase in the 30-year mortgage rate this year than at any time since 1972, when the feds began tracking it.
The good news: Experts don’t see a 2008-style meltdown coming. Most U.S. homeowners have sensible fixed-rate mortgages and robust stockpiles of equity. They’re fine, as long as they don’t try to move.
▪ WTOP: 4 in 10 consumers expect the housing market will crash, survey finds.
▪ Fortune: These 49 housing markets to see home prices fall over 15 percent — this interactive map shows Moody’s updated forecast for 322 markets.
➤ SUPREME COURT
Today before the Supreme Court, conservative attorneys hope to advance a controversial legal idea that would give state legislatures more control over elections.
The court is being asked to decide whether state election laws and political maps passed by state legislatures — specifically, a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina that the state’s Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this year — should continue to be subject to judicial review in state courts (Politico and The New York Times).
The Washington Post: The Supreme Court thrives on hypotheticals. Justice Samuel Alito’s latest sparked a backlash.
➤ PANDEMIC & HEALTH
Difficulty getting care for COVID-19 has become an increasingly common problem for lower-income and uninsured Americans. After paying about $25 billion to health care providers over the course of the pandemic to reimburse them for vaccinating, testing and treating people without insurance, the federal government is running low on funds for coronavirus care for the nearly 30 million people who are uninsured.
The Biden administration is asking Congress for more funding, so far unsuccessfully. The White House asked Congress last month for more than $9 billion in additional funding for the pandemic response. Some of that money would go toward ensuring that Americans, including those without insurance, continue to have access to vaccines and treatments — but congressional Republicans have resisted the requests, accusing the administration of spending pandemic relief money in a wasteful way (The New York Times).
▪ The Atlantic: China’s COVID-19 wave is coming.
▪ CNBC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encourages people to wear masks to help prevent spread of COVID-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) over the holidays.
A new modeling study by the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute concludes that a $6 billion federal investment over a decade for drugs that prevent HIV infections, such as through the Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) program (UCLA Health), could reduce new HIV infections by 75 percent. The institute is lobbying Congress for additional HIV funding, arguing that taxpayers could eradicate the virus in the United States, achieving an estimated medical cost savings of $2.27 billion annually.
Information about the COVID-19 vaccine and booster shot availability can be found at Vaccines.gov.
Total U.S. coronavirus deaths reported as of this morning, according to Johns Hopkins University (trackers all vary slightly): 1,082,246. Current U.S. COVID-19 deaths are 1,780 for the week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The CDC shifted its tally of available data from daily to weekly, now reported on Fridays.)
THE CLOSER
And finally … It’s Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress the following day. “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
The attack killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including 68 civilians, and destroyed or damaged 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. By Dec. 11, 1941, the United States had entered World War II.
Stay Engaged
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The Hill's Top Lobbyists 2022
Welcome to The Hill’s annual list of top lobbyists
Lobbyists played a key role in shaping an avalanche of legislation in 2022, including Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act and several bipartisan bills — ranging from the CHIPS and Science Act to the Respect for Marriage Act — that brought sharply divided lawmakers together.
This list honors the corporate lobbyists, hired guns, association leaders and grassroots activists who leveraged their expertise and connections to make a difference in the nation’s capital this year.
Grassroots advocates won hard-fought battles to secure some of this year’s most significant bipartisan measures, including the first gun violence bill in decades and legislation to expand benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits.
K Street influencers helped their clients unlock huge sums of government funding authorized by the bipartisan infrastructure law and navigate a slew of regulatory proposals. Lobbyists at corporations and trade groups made last-minute changes to key measures while also staving off legislation to crack down on tech giants and other industries.
Not all of those on this list are registered lobbyists. But they all demonstrated a track record of success in the halls of Congress and the administration during a critical year for policy.
Corporate
Gina Adams and Lance Mangum, FedEx Corp
Molly Ahearn Allen, 7-Eleven
Angela Ambrose and Jesse Tolleson, GM Defense
Bryan Anderson and Jeanne Wolak, Southern Company
Kevin Avery, ConocoPhillips
Valerie Baldwin, Leidos
Ken Barbic, Farmers Business Network
Andrew Barnhill, IQVIA
Virgilio Barrera, Holcim US
Jana Barresi, Lowe’s
Gabrielle Batkin, Northrop Grumman
Scott Bennett, Boehringer Ingelheim
Karan Bhatia and Mark Isakowitz, Google
Laricke Blanchard, USAA
Mike Boyd and Chuck Clapton, Gilead Sciences
Mark Broadhurst, Chobani
Dan Bryant and Sara Decker, Walmart
Sean Callinicos, Sonova USA
Jim Carlisle, Bank of America
Anais Carmona, T-Mobile
Dave Cetola, Solvay America
Stephen Ciccone, Toyota Motor Corp.
Peter Cleveland, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Nicole Collier, Procter & Gamble
Kevin Cummins, Zscaler
Tim Daly and Jillian Pevo Coughenour, Western Union Co.
Steve Danon, Restaurant Brands International
Franklin Davis, American Beverage
Marjorie Dickman, BlackBerry
Jim Dodrill, Progressive
Josh Dover, JetBlue Airways
Jason Eberstein, Enviva
Terri Fariello, United Airlines
Kate Farr, Occidental Petroleum
Bob Filippone, Merck
Camille Fleenor, Atlas Air Worldwide
Tucker Foote, Mastercard
Nichole Francis Reynolds, ServiceNow
Kathryn Fulton, BlackRock
Maggie Gage, One Main Financial
Christopher Gahan, Northwestern Mutual
Noe Garcia, Avisa Partners
Rosemary Garza and Steve Haro, TelevisaUnivision
Tom Geier, 3M
Kate Geldaker, Alaska Airlines
Ed Gillespie, AT&T
Phillip Goldfeder, Cross River Bank
Daniel Grattan, Regions Bank
Sohini Gupta, Global Medical Response
Sharon Hardie and Chelsey Thomas, Booz Allen Hamilton
Rich Haselwood and Shashrina Thomas, Reynolds American
James Hayes and Jill Shapiro, Tenable
Kim Hays, Intuit
Ed Hill, Kira Alvarez and Keith Murphy, Paramount
Bridget Hogan and Hilary West, JPMorgan Chase
Donald Horton, Labcorp
Fred Humphries, Matt Gelman and James Farrell, Microsoft Corp.
Brian Huseman and Steve Hartell, Amazon.com
Cindy Jimenez Turner, Raytheon Technologies Corp.
Jace Johnson, Adobe
Francesca Jordan, Dell
Samantha Joy Fay, Southwest Airlines Co.
Michael Kennedy and Jay Cho, VMware
Karen Knutson, Chevron
Kent Knutson, Tractor Supply Co.
Maryam Khan Cope, ASML US
Keagan Lenihan, Philip Morris International
John Lepore, Moderna
Liz Lopez, Constellation Brands
Maria Luisa Boyce, United Parcel Service
Regina Luzincourt and Lucia Lebens, Navient
Kevin MacMillan, U.S. Bank
Downey Magallanes, BP
Christian Marrone, Lockheed Martin
Jessica Marventano, iHeartMedia
Rebecca McGrath, Cardinal Health
Waldo McMillan, Cisco
Jeanne Mitchell, ExxonMobil
John Monsif, Carrier
Chandler Morse, Workday
Ed Mortimer, NextNav
Mara Motherway, Peraton
Phil Musser, NextEra Energy
Ziad Ojakli, Boeing
Shawn O’Neail, Eli Lilly and Co.
Christopher Padilla, IBM Corp.
Michael Paese and Michael Thompson, Goldman Sachs Group
Jeff Pannozzo, Qurate Retail Group
Mike Parrish, Bayer
Jason Park, Expedia Group
Holly Pataki, Samsung Semiconductor
Chuck Penry, Tyson Foods
Matthew Perin, Kroger
Emily Pfeiffer Weems, Capital One
Luis Pinto, Alcoa
Amy Plaster and Gabe Terry, CMS Energy
Tim Powderly, Apple
Louis Renjel, Duke Energy Corp.
Crystal Riley, AbbVie
Nathan Robinson, Fluor
Robert Rose, MetLife
Bahar Sahajwalla, MoneyGram International
Ibn Salaam, Waste Management
Melissa Schulman, CVS Health
Christopher Smith, Ford Motor Co.
Brian Smith, Mike Lee and Sanders Adu, Wells Fargo & Co.
Jennifer Smoter and Tricia Purdy, UnitedHealth Group
Will Stafford, CHS
Lynn Starr, Ericsson
Zolaikha Strong, Last Energy
Sam Tatevosyan and Genna Gent, McDonald’s
Al Thompson, Intel Corp.
Tyler Threadgill, LKQ Corp.
Nate Tibbits, Qualcomm
Omar Vargas, Hollyn Schuemann and Guillermo Godoy, General Motors
Pete Wallace, Viatris
Dan Walsh, DirecTV
Jennifer Walton, Pfizer
Christopher Wenk, Kia Worldwide
Molly Wilkinson and Stephen Neuman, American Airlines
Brendan Williams, PBF Energy
Heather Wingate and Cherie Wilson, Delta Air Lines
Ken Wingert, Zillow Group
Candida Wolff, Citigroup
David Woodruff, Andrea Niethold and Stacey Lyons, Canadian National Railway
Marcela Zamora and Robert Fisher, Verizon Communications
Associations
Craig Albright, BSA | The Software Alliance
Mark Ames, American Industrial Hygiene Association
Adrian Arnakis, Association of American Railroads
Todd Askew, American Medical Association
Meredith Attwell Baker, CTIA
James Balda, Argentum
Brian Banks, American Counseling Association
Linda Bauer Darr and Steve Hall, American Council of Engineering Companies
Kenneth Bentsen Jr., Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association
Rhonda Bentz and Mike Liptak, Consumer Brands Association
Joshua Bolten and Matthew Spikes, Business Roundtable
Manuel Bonilla, American Society of Anesthesiologists
Jessica Bowman, Plant Based Products Council
John Bozzella, Alliance for Automotive Innovation
Anne Bradbury and Troy Lyons, American Exploration and Production Council
Steve Caldeira and Michael Gruber, Household & Commercial Products Association
Nicholas Calio and Christine Burgeson, Airlines for America
Dwayne Carson, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
Brian Caudill, Allison Cunningham and George Lowe, American Gas Association
Cindy Chetti, National Multifamily Housing Council
Wayne Chopus and Paul Richman, Insured Retirement Institute
Suzanne Clark, Neil Bradley and Evan Williams, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Bryan Corbett, Jillien Flores and Erik Johnson, Managed Funds Association
Lee Covington, Surety & Fidelity Association of America
Francis Creighton and Eric Ellman, Consumer Data Industry Association
Greg Crist, AdvaMed
Pearce Crosland, Building Owners and Managers Association International
Chip Davis and Patrick Kelly, Healthcare Distribution Alliance
Jeffrey DeBoer, The Real Estate Roundtable
Tim Donovan, Competitive Carriers Association
John Downs and Brian McKeon, National Confectioners Association
Quardricos Driskell, Autoimmune Association
Kip Eideberg, Association of Equipment Manufacturers
Tori Emerson Barnes, U.S. Travel Association
Dan Fabricant and Kyle Turk, Natural Products Association
Paul Feldman, General Aviation Manufacturers Association
David French, National Retail Federation
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Tallman Johnson, Mortgage Bankers Association
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Greg Hynes and Jared Cassity, International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers
Frederick Isasi, Families USA
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Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD
Mary Kay Henry, Service Employees International Union
Kristina Keenan, Veterans of Foreign Wars
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Lisa Lacasse, American Cancer Society
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Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform
Paolo Mastrangelo, Humanity Forward
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Janet Murguía, UnidosUS
Matthew Myers, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
Brendan Mysliwiec, Appalachian Trail Conservancy
Josh Nassar and Desiree Hoffman, United Auto Workers
Jason Ouimet, NRA Institute for Legislative Action
Melinda Pierce, Sierra Club
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Sam Ricketts, Evergreen Action
Tom Rodgers, Global Indigenous Council
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Ted Stiger, Rural Community Assistance Partnership
Zack Tatz, Transport Workers Union
Rosie Torres, Burn Pits 360
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Elise Wirkus, Issue One
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Biden’s South Carolina move reignites tensions with Sanders camp
President Biden’s move to make South Carolina the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary has reignited old tensions between his camp and allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the man he defeated in that state in the 2020 contest.
The fight is dredging up a proxy war within a party still wounded from the last presidential election, when debates over the relative importance of different states raged between moderates and progressives.
The resentments came into full view on Monday, days after Biden lobbied to push the Palmetto State ahead of Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada.
“The Biden nomination calendar contains a fundamental, dooming flaw: the replacement of Iowa with South Carolina as the first state,” former Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times.
“The change would be comical if it weren’t tragic,” Shakir wrote, sending roars through Biden World and corners of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Shakir’s criticism opened up conversations about the nominating process that many Democrats had hoped were buried in past elections.
The critique hit DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison particularly hard, who countered on Twitter that he has “zero tolerance” for anyone seeking to discount the importance of Black voters.
“Zero tolerance- ZERO for any disrespect or dismissal of Black voters,” Harrison tweeted.
“These voters are always pragmatic & clear-eyed. Their knees have never buckled. Their spines have been stiffened in the perpetual fight for freedom and equality for ALL of US! #RESPECT.”
Shakir rejected those views in remarks to Politico, saying, “It’s a very insulting approach to suggest that somehow we don’t care about Black voters because we think South Carolina shouldn’t go first. Come on. Get real.”
The nascent back-and-forth, which played out largely online and in the press, came after members of the DNC’s rules committee voted to approve Biden’s South Carolina suggestion last week. And while Shakir’s op-ed escalated the debate, it did not happen in isolation.
Behind the scenes, progressives have been grumbling about Biden’s motivations for the new calendar.
Many on the left believe the move was a not-so-veiled attempt to reward the state that delivered Biden a victory and offer a thank you to Harrison, the former state party chair, and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), whose endorsement was critical to Biden winning the nomination in 2020.
“It’s purely a nod to Biden and they rejected Bernie,” said Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins, who has called for more progressive candidate representation in 2024. “Biden clearly set the table [to] protect himself for a second run for president.”
Other Democrats see the infighting as a sign of the lingering power struggle between the party’s two wings as attention shifts from the midterms to the presidential election.
“I totally think this is a fundraising ploy,” one Democratic operative speculated over the Shakir op-ed. “We need to continue to raise money, so let’s be the anti-establishment.”
Progressive and moderate Democrats alike have floated the idea of elevating Georgia — where voters are currently casting their ballots in one of the Senate’s most important contests — to a higher position than South Carolina. North Carolina has also been mentioned as an alternative.
Georgia was moved up to a top-five slot under the Biden-preferred plan. Georgia has been more of a swing state than South Carolina, which has been reliably GOP in statewide Senate and presidential races.
Stacey Walker, a former Sanders endorser from Iowa, agreed with the broad criticism that his home state should not have the opening position because the party is shifting away from caucuses. But he was also critical of the choice of South Carolina.
“It’s understandable as far as the spoils of political victories go, but it does little to nothing for the party as a whole,” said Walker, the first Black official to represent Linn County’s Board of Supervisors. “We may find ourselves constantly evaluating which state goes first, as we’ve seen the political winds change throughout the states over time.”
Walker, like others on the left, noted that South Carolina is a Republican state in the general election for president. He and others suggested it would be better to reward a state where Democrats are competitive.
“It would be an act of political negligence if you didn’t concentrate all of that political spending in swing states,” said Cenk Uygur, a progressive media host.
It’s not hard to see why Biden, who won convincingly in South Carolina after losses in
Iowa and New Hampshire, views things differently than those close to Sanders, who won both states in 2016 and New Hampshire again in 2020.
Biden has argued that the decision to move up South Carolina is a nod to the importance of Black voters in the primary process.
“For decades, Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process,” Biden wrote in a letter to the DNC. “We rely on these voters in elections but have not recognized their importance in our nominating calendar. It is time to stop taking these voters for granted, and time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”
But progressives critical of Biden’s South Carolina position say there are other states where Black voters can have an important say, including the state with record early voting turnout.
“Having Georgia as an early round state is a more logical and powerful way to represent African American voters,” Uygur said. “Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that the Biden team is doing this on purely selfish grounds is doing a disservice to the truth. This is political machinations dressed up as diversity.”
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GOP smells blood with wounded Trump
Senate Republicans who want to move on from Donald Trump are smelling blood after a series of self-destructive errors by the former president that they think is opening the door for GOP rivals to challenge and defeat him in a 2024 presidential primary.
The GOP lawmakers say Trump looks increasingly vulnerable in a primary after what they describe as his erratic behavior in recent weeks, which has raised new doubts about his ability to beat President Biden or any other Democrat in a general election.
Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) said Trump’s most recent self-inflicted wound — in which he spoke about suspending the Constitution — creates “a huge opening” for other Republicans weighing presidential bids.
“This was another level or another realm in terms of things the former president has said. This one goes so far beyond the pale that if there is somebody who has aspirations to run, this sure teed it up for them,” Thune said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who usually avoids commenting on Trump’s behavior, criticized the former president for a second time in just over a week, asserting that Trump “would have a very hard time” being sworn in as president again if he doesn’t support upholding the Constitution.
“Anyone seeking the presidency who thinks that the Constitution could somehow be suspended or not followed, it seems to me, would have a very hard time being sworn in as president of the United States,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.
Trump over the weekend proposed to “terminate” all “rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” in response to a report about Twitter’s content moderation discussions during the 2020 election.
The former president committed that own goal as he was still being criticized for holding a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks.
The controversies have even supporters of Trump shaking their heads.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who was a reliable Trump ally while he was president, said the comments about suspending the Constitution and Trump’s meeting with Fuentes are potentially “fatal” to his political aspirations.
“I do think this recent behavior … these are foibles that are approaching fatality among the group that loves Donald Trump,” he said. “That’s the head-scratcher.
“Now when you’re talking about suspending the Constitution, that becomes language that’s confusing to the traditional Trump patriot,” he said.
Cramer said he never thought that Trump would clear the Republican field by announcing his intention to run for president again in 2024. But he finds it baffling that Trump appears to be giving powerful ammo to his Republican rivals.
He called Trump’s behavior “peculiar,” adding “these are just not good tactics.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also said Trump’s recent stumbles could very well encourage Republican rivals to view him as eminently beatable in the 2024 primary.
“I’m sure half the Senate [is] actively considering it,” he quipped of colleagues weighing potential White House runs.
“I would think that if it’s going to be two or three people in the primary, it probably could be just as easily 20,” he said. “I imagine that if people feel like the ex-president is truly vulnerable and they want to get in, my guess is if one or two people get in, 10 more will say, ‘Heck, why not me?’ ”
Hawley and two other Senate Republicans who were thought to be considering presidential bids, Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.), have ruled out running for president.
But two other high-profile conservatives, Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), aren’t taking runs for president off the table.
They both challenged Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary and finished in second and third place, respectively. Cruz won 551 delegates and Rubio won 167 by the time Trump clinched the nomination.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is also viewed by Senate colleagues as a potential candidate for president in 2024.
Trump announced his new White House bid just days after a disappointing midterm election season for the GOP in general and some of his favored candidates in particular.
Since then, Trump’s run of bad news has only continued.
On Tuesday, he suffered another blow after a New York jury found the Trump Organization guilty of 17 counts related to what prosecutors say was a 15-year tax fraud scheme.
Trump’s dinner with Fuentes had Senate Republicans declaring last week that white supremacy and antisemitism had no place in their party and questioning Trump’s ability to win the GOP nomination in 2024.
McConnell publicly questioned Trump’s ability to be elected president again after that misstep.
“There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, [is] highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States,” McConnell told reporters last week.
He has been more willing to criticize Trump in recent weeks than immediately after the disappointing midterm elections, when the GOP leader only predicted to reporters that the 2024 Republican presidential primary would be fiercely competitive and that he planned to stay out of it.
“The way I’m going to go into this presidential primary season is to stay out of it. I don’t have a dog in that fight. I think it’s going to be a highly contested nomination fight with other candidates entering,” he said last month.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said a candidate’s perceived electability in the general election will be a critical factor in 2024.
“I think the American public recognizes, on the Republican side, if we want to win a general election, we have to have someone who can beat Joe Biden or another Democrat, and clearly there are better choices out there that have a better chance of actually winning a general election” than Trump, he said.
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Economists: A US housing recession has already arrived
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This has been a year of watershed moments in real estate, and not the good kind.
The Housing Market Index, a closely watched industry metric that gauges the outlook for home sales, declined to 33 in November on a hundred-point scale, its lowest level in a decade, save for the first dystopian month of the pandemic. Anything under 50 spells trouble.
A month earlier, interest rates on a standard 30-year mortgage passed 7 percent, capping the largest single-year increase in at least 50 years.
“Just to give you a sense of how far we’ve come, we started the year around 3 percent,” said Michael Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. “It has just been a wild ride.”
The difference between a 3 percent interest rate and a 7 percent rate amounts to $1,000 more in a monthly mortgage payment on a mid-priced American home, according to Nadia Evangelou, senior economist at the National Association of Realtors.
Interest rates have retreated to 6.3 percent this month, seeding fresh hope for the few remaining buyers on a diminished housing market.
After an unprecedented campaign of rate hikes, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has signaled that the central bank will ease up.
That’s one reason mortgage rates are ticking down. The other is more sobering.
“We, others, many market participants are forecasting a recession in the United States and many other places around the world,” Fratantoni said. “That puts downward pressure on the rates.”
The housing market is already in recession and has been since midsummer, according to the National Association of Home Builders, which publishes the Housing Market Index with Wells Fargo.
“The index has declined for 11 straight months,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist for the homebuilders group. “This is going to be the first calendar year in 11 years where single-family starts,” a measure of new home construction, “will total a smaller volume than the prior year.” He predicts a double-digit decline.
Where the housing market goes, the broader economy follows. Dietz, Fratantoni and others in the industry expect the nation to tip into recession, a state of economic malaise generally defined as two successive quarters of decline.
“The housing market leads the U.S. into recession, and it’s likely to pull it out,” Fratantoni said, with recovery arriving around the middle of next year.
And what does all this mean for homeowners?
For most: Staying put. The vast majority of homeowners are blessed with fixed-rate mortgages secured at historically low interest rates, under 4 percent. There’s little incentive to sell.
“Anybody with a fixed-rate mortgage who got their mortgage before the middle of this year is in really good shape,” Fratantoni said.
A small percentage of homeowners, around 1 in 10, may be in trouble. They hold adjustable-rate mortgages that will shortly adjust to current rates, if they haven’t already.
“Those people are gonna get hit,” said Steven Carvell, professor of finance at Cornell University.
In the years before the Great Recession of 2008, adjustable-rate mortgages made up as much as 35 percent of the home-lending market. When prices tumbled, many borrowers owed as much as their home was worth, if not more.
Economists expect no such meltdown in 2023. Nearly half of all current mortgages are “equity rich”: The borrowers owe less than half of what their home is worth, according to ATTOM, a real-estate analyst.
Things could get ugly if home prices plummet. But economists don’t expect that to happen in the current downturn.
“To be sure, we’re going to see an uptick in foreclosures,” Dietz said. “But we’re not expecting it anywhere on the scale of last time.”
More than 6 million families lost their homes to foreclosure in the Great Recession. That slump followed years of overbuilding, Dietz said, yielding a housing surplus and plummeting home values.
Recent years, by contrast, have seen “a tremendous amount of underbuilding,” he said, leaving a deficit of available housing.
Mortgage delinquency rates, a measure of looming foreclosures, stand at historic lows, Fratantoni said.
In the present housing recession, Fratantoni said, “if you have an owner who sees the market weakening, they just pull their property off the market.”
The Fed raised interest rates, in part, to seed a “correction” in an overheated housing market. Home prices rose more than 40 percent from the beginning of 2020 to June 2022, according to the Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index.
It worked. The index has declined for three consecutive months, the steepest dip in a decade.
Home prices remain higher now than they were a year ago, but that could change. Redfin, the real estate brokerage, predicts prices will decline by 4 percent in 2023, to a median value of $368,000.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone’s home value is starting to decline,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin. “Luxury homes will decline in price the most. Affordable homes will likely maintain their value a bit better.”
A Redfin analysis suggests home prices may hold up better in areas of the Midwest and Northeast where values rose less dramatically in the pandemic years. Prices could fall farther in pandemic boomtowns such as Phoenix; Austin, Texas; and Boise, Idaho.
Housing analysts expect a much steeper decline in home sales: a 15 percent drop in 2022 and a 7 percent decline in 2023, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“We saw a record share of houses being taken off the market in the last 12 weeks,” Fairweather said. Prospective sellers “are not willing to go down in price. They would rather keep the home and wait.”
For the nation’s real estate agents and home sellers, “last year was the best year since 2006,” Evangelou said.
This year is one of the worst.
Interview requests by The Hill to several prominent real estate agents on Monday went unanswered or were politely declined. One Chicago agent explained in an email that her sellers “are mostly waiting to list until next year.”
Buyers are suffering, too, buffeted by high interest rates, inflated asking prices and a vanishing inventory of homes for sale.
First-time homebuyers face particularly steep odds. They cannot tap a reservoir of equity to finance a large down payment. Rents have risen, complicating the task of saving any down payment.
First-time buyers now make up only 26 percent of all home purchasers, the lowest share in recent years, according to a national survey by the National Association of Realtors.
As 2022 turns to 2023, all eyes will be trained on interest rates. Many observers say the highest rates are yet to come.
“Our forecast has them peaking around 7 1/2 percent,” Dietz said.
But Redfin forecasts rates will eventually decline, sliding to 5.8 percent by the end of 2023.
At a 5.8 percent interest rate, a prospective buyer with a $2,500 monthly budget could afford a $406,250 home. At a 6.5 percent rate, the same buyer could spend only $383,750. Just a year ago, with a 3 percent rate, the buyer could spend $517,000.
And yet, for all the tumult unleashed by the recent rate hikes, a 6 or 7 percent interest rate is not particularly high, historically speaking.
“That’s not in the crazy range,” said Carvell of Cornell. “We’ve been in the crazy range. That’s the fact.”
Source: TEST FEED1
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Five takeaways from the Georgia Senate runoff
Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D) victory over Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia’s Senate runoff Tuesday night wrapped up the 2022 midterm election season and set the stage for the 2024 presidential election.
The Democrat’s victory also gives his party more leverage with their majority in the Senate and signifies yet another midterm loss for a candidate endorsed by former President Trump.
Here are five takeaways from Georgia’s Senate runoff.
Dems get breathing room in the Senate
While Warnock’s win does not dramatically alter the balance of power in the upper chamber, it does give Democrats some much-needed leverage with a 51-seat majority.
Currently, Democrats and Republicans are tied 50-50 in the Senate. Vice President Kamala Harris serves as the breaking vote for Democrats, but there is a power-sharing agreement that evenly splits the committees. With a 51-seat majority, Democrats will hold majorities on those committees. Crucially, that dynamic will allow the party to quickly confirm President Biden’s judicial and executive branch nominees over the next two years.
Democrats will also be able to more easily conduct oversight investigations that Republicans disagree with. This could prove handy for Senate Democrats as House Republicans gear up to launch a host of oversight investigations in the lower chamber.
And a Warnock vote could help offset the impact from more centrist Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who have sometimes gone against key legislative priorities.
Trump dealt another blow
Walker’s loss marks another blow to Trump as he wages another campaign for the White House.
The former president saw many of his high-profile endorsed candidates lose this midterm cycle, putting a dent in his once-formidable reputation among Republicans. Walker’s loss will be especially bruising to Trump, who pushed for the former NFL star to jump into the race and appeared with him on the campaign trail in the run-up to Election Day.
Trump was noticeably absent from the campaign trail over the past month in a sign of his damaged brand following the loss of other endorsed Senate candidates like Blake Masters and Mehmet Oz.
Meanwhile, Trump’s impact on the two 2021 Senate runoffs in Georgia, which handed Democrats the majority in the upper chamber, has continued to haunt Peach State Republicans. The former president was largely blamed for the losses due to his touting of unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rigged, which likely drove down GOP turnout. Warnock seized on Trump’s endorsement of Walker, rolling out a campaign ad tying the two to each other.
Walker’s loss is just the latest bad news for Trump over the past week. He has also been grappling with backlash over his meeting with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, at Mar-a-Lago last month. Trump has also gotten blowback for saying he would like to terminate parts of the Constitution in the wake of revelations about Twitter’s handling of a controversial story about Hunter Biden.
Warnock delivered on expectations
While the full results were still coming in when multiple networks called the race for Warnock, the Democratic senator appeared to meet expectations with his win.
Polls showed a close race in the days leading up to the runoff, but consistently favored the Democrat.
An Emerson College/The Hill poll released last week showed Walker leading Warnock 49 percent to 47 percent. Democrats for their party were largely expressing optimism in the final days of the runoff campaign, citing Walker’s weakness as a candidate. The party also pointed to Warnock’s past successes, including his 2020 runoff win in which he received more votes than Walker this Election Day.
Tuesday night largely validated their optimism. While the race remained close throughout the night, Warnock consistently performed well in the areas he needed to in order to win, and even appeared to flip one county, Baldwin, that went for Walker in November. His Republican opponent, meanwhile, slightly underperformed in many counties he carried last month.
Turnout remained high
Turnout was high across the board, with both candidates getting voters out early and on Election Day.
According to Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, over a million ballots had been cast on Tuesday by the middle afternoon, bringing the total number of ballots cast in the runoff to more than 2.89 million voters. The turnout was lower than the Election Day turnout last month, but it did surpass past Georgia runoffs.
Warnock benefitted from the early vote and mail-in turnout, which tend to favor Democrats. Walker was largely dependent on in-person turnout on Election Day, which tends to favor Republicans. In the end, solid turnout in blue urban areas and lower-than-expected turnout in a number of red counties worked against Walker.
All eyes now shift to 2024
With the last midterm contest of 2022 in the rearview mirror, attention will turn to the 2024 presidential election.
Republicans mulling a 2024 bid will likely use Walker’s loss, along with other Trump-endorsed candidates’ defeats, against the former president. The GOP will also likely look to recalibrate its strategy when it comes to early and mail-in voting, as well as candidate recruitment.
This was reflected in comments from one close ally of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who called for introspection in the party following Walker’s defeat.
“Rs need honest evaluation of party’s problems,” Josh Holmes said on Twitter. “Not taking points that rile up loud voices. Nothing is unfixable but this is not a winning product from an infrastructure standpoint.”
Democrats, including Biden, have expressed newfound optimism going into 2024. The party largely defied midterm expectations, tempering its losses in the House and growing its majority in the Senate. Democrats credit Biden’s message during the midterms, but others argue that GOP candidate quality played a role in sinking Republicans and boosting Democrats.
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Defense bill text includes vaccine mandate repeal, nixes permitting reform
The text of the annual defense policy bill includes language to repeal a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the military and dropped permitting reform backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), according to a draft of the legislation released by the House Rules Committee on Tuesday.
The National Defense Authorization Act, which will determine how the Defense Department’s $847 billion will be distributed during fiscal year 2023, could receive a vote in the House by Thursday.
The release comes after House Democrats agreed to include language in the NDAA to repeal the vaccine mandate for service members one year after it was put in place.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had made including the repeal of the mandate a top priority in the legislation and said on Sunday that the bill “will not move” unless it includes language to repeal it.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration had supported maintaining the mandate.
McCarthy celebrated the inclusion of the repeal in a statement on Tuesday but said the Biden administration should go further. He said the dismissal of thousands of service members over their refusal to comply with the mandate hurt the military and put national security at risk.
“These heroes deserve justice now that the mandate is no more,” he said. “The Biden administration must correct service records and not stand in the way of re-enlisting any service member discharged simply for not taking the COVID vaccine.”
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said the removal was necessary for the bill to advance, The Associated Press reported.
“This was gas on the fire exacerbating our existing problem,” Rogers said. “And the president said, you know, the pandemic is over. It’s time for us to recognize that and remove this unnecessary policy.”
In a blow to Joe Manchin, his push for policies intended to speed up the construction of energy infrastructure was not included in the text that was released.
Manchin had been pushing for the inclusion of his so-called permitting reforms, which Democratic leadership had agreed to pass in exchange for his vote on their major climate, tax and healthcare bill.
Manchin had previously tried to attach the slate of policies to a stopgap government funding measure but failed to do amid opposition from both Republicans and progressives.
He has been working in recent weeks to get Republicans on board, but still faced some resistance, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday calling the effort reform “in name only.”
Progressives had also mobilized against the effort once again, vowing to vote against the procedural rule to bring the NDAA to the floor if it included the permitting provisions.
Typically, regardless of their support for the underlying bill, the minority party doesn’t vote for a rule issued by the majority party, so only a few Democrats would probably be needed to block the NDAA rule even if there are enough Republicans who will support the effort.
Manchin on Tuesday night released a written statement condemning the exclusion.
“Failing to pass bipartisan energy permitting reform that both Republicans and Democrats have called for will have long term consequences for our energy independence,” he said.
“The American people will pay the steepest price for Washington once again failing to put common sense policy ahead of toxic tribal politics. This is why the American people hate politics in Washington,” he added.
Meanwhile, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who spearheaded the push, celebrated its exclusion.
“House Democrats can now close out the year having made historic progress on climate change without this ugly asterisk,” he said in a written statement.
Among the policies that Manchin has pushed for would aim to speed up the timeline for environmental reviews, bolster the deployment of transmission lines, require the president to expedite priority fossil and renewable projects and secure the approval of a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia.
Source: TEST FEED1