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The Hill's Morning Report — House GOP begins uphill budget quest

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It is possible, even likely, that the pledge by House and Senate Republicans to “cut federal spending” translates into a maze of GOP rancor, Democratic taunts and Wall Street finger-pointing.

If budgeting with scalpels amid the narrow House majority was easy, it would be the go-to annual fiscal cure. The House GOP must first pass a budget resolution to increase its leverage and there are Republicans who don’t want to reduce Pentagon funding and conservatives such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who say military cuts must be on the table (Politico).

There are Republicans who believe Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, nearly half of the federal budget, must shrink and change because the costs look unsustainable alongside rising federal debt. Recognizing the political implications of those programs heading toward the 2024 election year, former President Trump, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and top GOP overseers, including House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), say entitlements are off the table. So, what’s on the chopping block? Unclear.

It is almost impossible to balance the budget within a decade — a goal of many conservative lawmakers — unless entitlements are on the table. 

“We can cut spending without cutting Social Security and Medicare,” Comer said on Monday at the National Press Club. “We’re sincere about trying to be the leader in Congress in coming up with proposed cuts” (Nexstar).

McCarthy will meet with President Biden on Wednesday at the White House, a meeting the Speaker sought and the president initially resisted. According to Biden, it will be a conversation, not a negotiation. McCarthy wants to discuss possible off-ramps as the country bumps up against the $34 trillion limit of how much it can borrow without congressional approval.

CNN reports that McCarthy is gathering ideas from his members but has not settled on any individual proposal and is unlikely to make a specific offer during his meeting with the president. Privately, Republicans have floated a range of ideas, including capping domestic spending at fiscal 2019 levels and bringing defense programs down to 2023 spending levels for an estimated savings of $1.7 trillion over the next decade, according to CNN sources.

Politico: Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the debt ceiling fight: “I think we’ll win.”

Meanwhile, Comer promises to investigate Biden and his family. “Nothing that Joe Biden’s done with respect to mishandling these classified documents is normal,” the chairman told Fox News on Monday. Comer accused Biden, his son Hunter Biden and his brothers of “shady dealings with our adversaries around the world.” 

The Hill: House GOP to begin investigative hearings this week to probe COVID-19 relief spending and administration policies on migration and the U.S. southern border.

Related Articles

▪ The Hill: Here are the GOP senators who signed a letter to Biden last week warning they will oppose a debt ceiling increase in the absence of GOP-sought spending reforms.

▪ The Washington Post: Some Democratic party activists are unsure that Vice President Harris has shown she is up to winning the top job. 

▪ Bloomberg News: China urged McCarthy not to repeat former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) visit to Taiwan.

▪ The New York Times: Burn bags and tracking numbers: How the White House handles classified files.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ POLITICS

New calls for Congress to pass police reform put Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) in the spotlight as the past Republican negotiator who worked on the issue. He’s now eyeing a run for president in 2024. The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports that Scott is seen as key to getting any deal in the Senate, but he proved to be a tough negotiator on policing reforms during the last Congress. Theoretically, Scott could raise his national profile significantly by brokering a deal, which could boost his fundraising and media coverage.

But any proposed compromise that runs afoul of the party’s conservative base could spell an early end to his White House ambitions, or his chance of being picked as a running mate. One major question: Would McCarthy sign off? 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says he has an idea that might jump start police reform legislation when it comes to the partisan roadblock over qualified immunity (The Hill). Such immunity, which Democrats oppose, shields law enforcement from liability in civil lawsuits unless accusers can prove that the allegations amount to a violation of constitutional rights and those rights are “clearly established.” 

“I oppose civil lawsuits against individual officers,” Graham said on Twitter. “However, holding police departments accountable makes sense and they should face liability for the misconduct of their officers.”

▪ CNN: Public outrage over Tyre Nichols’s beating in Memphis, Tenn., collides with Washington bureaucracy on police reform.

▪ Forbes: Lawmakers will renew police reform push — here’s why negotiations stalled in the previous Congress.

▪ The Independent: Congressional Black Caucus pushes Biden to restart police reform talks.

Truth & Consequences? Another day, another headline about Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.).

Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly’s vow to investigate the lawmaker launched her from relative obscurity into national headlines. Her prosecutorial experience, the desire of fellow Republicans to rid themselves of Santos and the unique powers of the district attorney’s office put her in a prime position to pounce on the fact-challenged Santos.

“This fell into her lap. It’s in her backyard. I think she is more than capable of handling it, and she has the will of the people to do something,” Vito Palmieri, a Long Island attorney who worked in the Nassau County DA’s office in the 1990s told Politico. “That the party wants him gone and she is a Republican doing her job — let’s put it this way — I don’t think that hurts her at all.”

And despite Democrats’ strong protests against the Long Island Republican, perhaps no one wants Santos out of office more than his own constituents, the Republicans of Nassau County.

Santos, meanwhile, has opened a local office in Queens, but it has largely attracted gawkers and news media rather than constituents (The New York Times).

The long-simmering tension between former Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is reaching a boiling point amid signs that DeSantis and his team are actively moving toward a 2024 presidential run, writes The Hill’s Max Greenwood. DeSantis’s national ambitions have long irked Trump, who sees himself as the Florida governor’s political benefactor and the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee, but his frustration became more apparent when he called out DeSantis during his first major campaign swing. 

▪ Politico: Meet DeSantis’s inner circle. These are the people advising the Florida Republican as he weighs whether to run for president.

▪ The New York Times: Manhattan prosecutor begins to present Trump case to grand jury.

➤ ADMINISTRATION

🛤 It’s infrastructure week. The president today will be in New York City to herald $292 million in federal investments in the long-delayed Hudson River Tunnel project. “The new Gateway rail tunnel is vital to New York, New Jersey, and the entire northeast. It has been a passion of mine for a decade,” Schumer told The New York Post recently.  

On Monday, Biden traveled to Baltimore to tout a planned overhaul of a major rail tunnel he remembers as a go-slow bottleneck during his decades commuting from Delaware to the U.S. Capitol (The Hill). “I know how much it matters to the entire Northeast corridor, from here to Boston,” Biden said. “It matters a great deal. For years, people talked about fixing this tunnel.”

New York and Maryland are among beneficiaries of the recently enacted $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure law. Baltimore plans to replace the decrepit 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel by providing up to $4.7 billion of the project’s estimated $6 billion price tag (The Washington Post).

⚕️The administration wants to make it easier for people to access contraceptive services under the Affordable Care Act. On Monday, the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury unveiled a proposed new rule that would remove an exemption to the mandate that allows employers to opt out of providing such care because of moral convictions. It would also create an independent pathway for individuals enrolled in plans offered by employers with religious exemptions to access contraceptive services through a willing provider without charge (CNN). The public can comment on the proposed regulation for the next few months, which means the rule could be “many months” away from going into effect.

Reuters: The U.S. has stopped granting export licenses for Chinese firm Huawei Technologies Co., whose U.S. suppliers include Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ INTERNATIONAL

Russia said on Monday that continuing supplies of weapons from the West to Ukraine would lead to further escalation of the war. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added members of the Western NATO alliance were becoming more involved in the conflict but that their provision of arms to Ukraine would not change the course of events. 

“It’s a dead-end situation: it leads to significant escalation, it leads to NATO countries more and more becoming directly involved in the conflict — but it doesn’t have the potential to change the course of events and will not do so,” he said (Reuters).

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, meanwhile, said Russian President Vladimir Putin once threatened him with a missile strike, but Peskov called Johnson’s anecdote a “lie,” an “awkward” understanding of what Putin actually said (Yahoo News).

▪ Reuters: Pro-Kremlin activists in Germany gave money for Russian army gear.

▪ MarketWatch: Biden says U.S. won’t send F-16s to Ukraine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in a turbulent Jerusalem on Monday as the Biden administration tries to contain a new surge of Israeli-Palestinian violence and navigate relations with Israel’s new right-wing government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Blinken’s visit comes at a potentially explosive moment in the conflict, after several bloody episodes over the past week that have officials in Washington concerned about a potential major escalation.

Blinken on Monday condemned the violence and offered sympathy for the victims of shootings last week in Jerusalem, saying an attack outside a synagogue was “especially shocking” for having occurred by a place of worship (The New York Times).

“Calls for vengeance against more innocent victims are not the answer,” he added. “And acts of retaliatory violence against civilians are never justified.”

▪ Vox: Why violence in Israel and Palestine has spiked.

▪ CNN: Blinken visit reaches new urgency as Israeli, Palestinian tensions boil.

▪ BBC: Jerusalem shooting: Israel to speed up gun applications after attacks.

▪ CNN: Israel was behind drone attacks at a military plant in Iran, U.S. media report.

The United States Embassy in Turkey issued a new, updated security warning, alerting U.S. citizens of “possible imminent retaliatory attacks by terrorists” that could take place in the locations frequented by Westerners, particularly Istanbul‘s Beyoglu, Galata, Taksim, and Istiklal districts. Turkish authorities have been informed about possible attack dangers and are investigating the matter, the embassy added. Turkey, in turn, warned its citizens over the weekend about “possible Islamophobic, xenophobic and racist attacks” in the United States and Europe (eTurboNews). 

Bloomberg News: Pakistan’s worst suicide bombing in years kills 92 at mosque.

OPINION

■ Is Israel’s democracy America’s problem? by James Traub, columnist, Foreign Policy. https://bit.ly/3jhkC9G 

■ The cracks in the GOP are growing into gaping holes, by Douglas E. Schoen and Carly Cooperman, opinion contributors, The Hill. https://bit.ly/3jiULya 

WHERE AND WHEN

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

The House will convene at 10 a.m. toconsider a measure that would end the U.S. COVID-19 public health emergency and another that would end the federal COVID-19 vaccination requirement for staff members working at health care facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid.

The Senate meets at 10 a.m. 

The president will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 9 a.m. Biden will travel to New York City to the West Side Yard to speak at 12:30 p.m. about the importance to East Coast transit and commerce of federal investments in the Hudson River Tunnel project. The president at 3:30 p.m. will headline a Democratic National Committee event for donors. Biden will return to the White House this evening. 

The vice president will ceremonially swear-in Jessica Davis Ba as U.S. ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire at 1:55 p.m. Harris will award the Congressional Space Medal of Honor at 4:25 p.m. to two recipients during a ceremony in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. 

The secretary of State began his day in Jerusalem and headed to the West Bank. He met this morning with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, with opposition leader Yair Lapid and separately with Israeli “emerging leaders.” In the afternoon, he held a press conference. As the secretary concludes his Middle East trip this week, he travels to Ramallah today in the West Bank and meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and senior officials (The New York Times).

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen this afternoon will meet with the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee as part of the quarterly refunding process.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is in Europe as part of U.S. efforts to fight antisemitism (Jewish Insider published an interview with him on Sunday),is in Berlin, where he will participate in a roundtable with Jewish, Muslim and Christian faith leaders. He will visit Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue and meet with Ukrainian refugees there. Emhoff will visit sites honoring history’s persecuted, including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, where he is scheduled to meet with some survivors. He will return to Washington.

ELSEWHERE

➤ PANDEMIC & HEALTH

🦠 The administration will end the COVID-19 national and public health emergencies on May 11, the White House said Monday. The announcement will mark a major signal that the crisis era of the pandemic is over. The declaration would restructure the federal government’s coronavirus response and unwind a sprawling set of flexibilities put in place nearly three years ago that paved the way for free COVID-19 treatments and tests. As Politico reports, the White House disclosed its plan in response to two House Republican measures aimed at immediately ending the emergencies, calling those proposals “a grave disservice to the American people.” 

“This wind-down would align with the Administration’s previous commitments to give at least 60 days’ notice prior to termination of the PHE,” the White House said in its statement.

The World Health Organization also is weighing an eventual change in its posture with the coronavirus.

It’s been three years since Jan. 30, 2020, when WHO declared a new virus spreading worldwide from China a global health emergency and eventually labeled its spread as a pandemic. “Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed the emergence of a previously unknown pathogen, which has escalated into an unprecedented outbreak,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at the time.

Scientists named the virus SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, noting the year, 2019, when it infected humans. It has killed nearly 7 million people. NPR has rounded up some early COVID-19 coverage from its beginning to now.

🚽Airplane bathrooms — those tiny, sticky, often odd-smelling lavatories in the sky — might turn out to be a data gold mine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection. This month, the agency has been speaking with Concentric, the public health and biosecurity arm of the biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks, about screening airplane wastewater for COVID-19 at airports around the country. Airplane-wastewater testing is poised to revolutionize how we track the coronavirus’s continued mutations around the world, along with other common viruses — and public health threats that scientists don’t even know about yet (The Atlantic).

Information about the availability of COVID-19 vaccine and booster shots 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): 1,107,855. Current U.S. COVID-19 deaths are 3,756 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.)

▪ Forbes: Healthcare paradox: How the industry designed to keep us well is also making our planet — and our bodies — sick.

▪ The Hill: U.S. fertility went up for the first time since 2014.

▪ Politico EU: Europe is running out of medicines. Common medications including antibiotics and children’s painkillers are in short supply across the bloc. Here’s what’s being done about it.

▪ The Washington Post: TIAs, or transient ischemic attacks, are emergencies, not just “mini-strokes,” a group says.

➤ STATE WATCH

The major storms that hit California earlier this winter dumped more than 32 trillion gallons of water on the state, helped boost some of the region’s reservoirs and increased snowpack in key mountains throughout the West, The Hill’s Gianna Melillo reports. But despite this temporary reprieve, weather variability due to climate change and persistent drought in several western states underscores the ongoing need for continued water conservation and reduced demand throughout the region.

California has been getting drenched. So why can’t it save water for the drought? (NPR).

Leaders in state legislatures across the country have turned to cross-party alliances and power-sharing agreements as they seek to avoid the political deadlock that has hindered lawmakers in Congress, writes The Hill’s Amee LaTour. Legislatures in Alaska, Ohio and Pennsylvania started off their sessions this year by blurring partisan divides. In Alaska, both chambers’ majority caucuses include members of the minority party. In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, members of the opposing parties banded together to elect a Speaker. Yet tensions are already bubbling to the surface in some statehouses, underscoring the fact that while these coalitions may enable lawmakers to avoid political paralysis at least temporarily, they aren’t a cure-all for the hyperpartisanship plaguing the country as a whole. 

“The political dynamics aren’t gone just because states were able to have some bipartisan action here,” said Daniel Mallinson, assistant professor of public policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University, regarding the elections in the Keystone State and Ohio of state Speakers. 

▪ The New York Times: “Granny flats” are popping up in backyards across the country, affording Americans a new housing option. Some communities are not happy about it.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: The U.S. consumer is starting to freak out as flush savings accounts and cheap credit dry up.

THE CLOSER

And finally … 🐻 If you need tips on selfies in the wild, look no further than … a Colorado black bear with impressive camera instincts. Last week, the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks department posted four of the nearly 400 selfies made possible in November by a curious local bear. As The Washington Post reports, the bear’s work is a master class in vacation photos, featuring chin tilts, smoldering eyes and a coy look over the shoulder. Marvel at the selfies HERE.

“She definitely knows her angles,” Los Angeles fashion photographer Amanda Sophia Rose told the Post. “She’s really catching you, bringing you in, having direct eye contact to the camera … like she’s done it before.”

The parks department in Colorado set up nine motion-detecting cameras in its 46,000-acre land system to study the local wildlife population. When an animal is in a camera’s path, it triggers a still photo and shoots 10- to 30-second videos. The cameras have recorded images of bobcats, coyotes, eagles, mountain lions and prairie dogs.

Stay Engaged

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Statehouse efforts to avoid partisan gridlock hit obstacles

Leaders in state legislatures across the country have turned to cross-party alliances and power-sharing agreements as they seek to avoid the political deadlock that has hindered lawmakers in Congress — but signs are emerging that some of those efforts might be in vain.

Legislatures in Alaska, Ohio and Pennsylvania started off their sessions this year by blurring partisan divides. In Alaska, both chambers’ majority caucuses include members of the minority party. In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, members of the opposing parties banded together to elect a Speaker.

Yet tensions are already bubbling to the surface in some statehouses, underscoring the fact that while these coalitions may enable lawmakers to avoid political paralysis at least temporarily, they aren’t a cure-all for the hyperpartisanship plaguing the country as a whole.

“The political dynamics aren’t gone just because states were able to have some bipartisan action here,” said Daniel Mallinson, assistant professor of public policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University, regarding the Speakers elections in the Keystone State and Ohio.

In Pennsylvania, sixteen Republicans in the state House joined Democrats in supporting consensus candidate Mark Rozzi (D) in the Jan. 3 Speaker election. Democrats had won a 102-101 majority in November, but Republicans were left with a slight majority after one Democrat died and two resigned. (Democrats are favored to win special elections on Feb. 7 and reclaim the majority.)

Seeking to move beyond the impasse in an effort to elect a Speaker, lawmakers backed Rozzi under the promise he would govern as an independent. Despite this, the chamber is now at a political standstill.

House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler told The Hill he voted for Rozzi based on commitments that he’d be independent “both in terms of his registration and the way he would operate the office, and the fact that his timeline for his constitutional amendment coincided with the timeline that we had for two that we were hoping to get on the ballot as well.”

Tensions came to a head earlier this month over a proposed constitutional amendment related to victims of childhood sexual abuse.

On Jan. 6, Rozzi said the House wouldn’t consider any legislation until the statehouse advanced the amendment, which would create a two-year window for abuse survivors to file suits. A Department of State error in 2021 reset the lengthy ballot referral process for this amendment.

Outgoing Gov. Tom Wolf (D) called a special session for the legislature to consider it for inclusion on the May 2023 ballot. But on Jan. 9, the House couldn’t agree on rules.

Rozzi said that some lawmakers were “using survivors of sexual assault as pawns to try to force the passage of another constitutional amendment that would make it harder for everyone to vote.” The Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill on Jan. 11 to advance the statute of limitations amendment alongside two others, including one to establish a voter ID requirement.

Rep. Jim Gregory (R), who nominated Rozzi for Speaker and has been his ally on the statute of limitations amendment, later called on Rozzi to step down, saying Rozzi indicated he might not change his affiliation to Independent.

Rozzi said he formed a bipartisan workgroup in line with his pledge of independence and launched a listening tour to get Pennsylvanians’ input on how to move forward. The chamber is adjourned until late February.

The Ohio House, meanwhile, was able to pass rules on Jan. 24 with a bipartisan vote. But things aren’t exactly copacetic in that chamber either.

The Democratic minority joined 22 Republicans in electing Rep. Jason Stephens (R) Speaker over Rep. Derek Merrin (R). Merrin had majority support in the November GOP caucus election and has since claimed to be the caucus leader, with Stephens rejecting that claim.

Merrin supporters wanted rules changes, some framed as decentralizing power and others to allow guns on the House floor and require a Christian prayer at the start of sessions. Stephens didn’t recognize their calls to propose amendments.

“It is beneficial to us at times that they are divided,” Minority Leader Allison Russo (D) told News 5 TV earlier this month. She said Stephens is “a strong supporter of public schools” and that she believed “culture war” bills wouldn’t be as prominent in a Stephens-led House.

Nancy Martorano Miller, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, told The Hill that there’s fracturing within the GOP caucus, and it’s not exclusively along ideological lines. She noted that among Republicans who backed Stephens, “you’ve got some of the more moderate Republicans in the chamber, but you also have some of the most conservative.”

Rep. Bill Seitz (R), majority floor leader and member of the legislature since 2001, told The Hill he backed Stephens in the three-candidate November election because he thought Stephens was best-suited temperamentally and had impressive credentials.

“It’s not unlike what’s going on in D.C., where you’ve got the conservatives and then you’ve got the ultra-conservatives,” Seitz said. “We differ only in the tone and timing of” achieving objectives.

In Alaska’s legislature, both chambers have majority coalitions including members of the minority, and members of different affiliations hold committee chair posts.

Cross-party coalitions have an established history in Alaska. While the legislature “maybe would have been unable to do even the bare minimum had they not formed these types of groups,” Northern Journal newsletter author Nathaniel Herz told The Hill, “it’s not like … these coalitions took them to the legislative Promised Land.”

In recent sessions, the Alaska House’s coalition-forming was a drawn-out affair. The process this year was complete on the second day of the session, with Republican Cathy Tilton being elected Speaker.

In the state Senate, where Republicans have an 11-9 majority, nine Democrats and eight Republicans make up the governing majority.

State Sen. Bill Wielechowski (D), chair of the powerful Rules Committee, told The Hill the coalition is reminiscent of ones that existed before the 2010 redistricting cycle. “It was probably a golden era in Alaska politics,” he said, adding that they focused on economic issues and not social issues that divided members.

Wielechowski said “the agreement that we have is no bill goes to the floor unless you have 11 votes” and that the chamber this session isn’t likely to see movement in either direction on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage or “bathroom bills,” referring to legislation that restricts access to public bathrooms for transgender people. Tilton and Senate President Gary Stevens (R) have made similar comments.

The Senate has had an informal bipartisan coalition for years, Wielechowski said, as majority Republicans haven’t had sufficient votes to pass the budget themselves.

Herz said the budget has been a difficult issue for years. While the 2017 House made some big moves, including passing a bill to institute a state income tax, “it wasn’t able to overcome partisan divisions and gridlock in the broader institution of the Alaska Capitol,” Herz said.

The House had a Democratic-dominant majority coalition since 2017. This session, the 23-member majority coalition includes 19 Republicans, two Independents and two Democrats.

Asked how the Senate will work with the House, Wielechowski said, “[T]here are definitely many more Republicans in that coalition, but the reality is, they can’t pass anything that goes too extreme in either direction on their side. … [T]here’ll be some issues that we have disputes over, obviously, but I don’t know that the House is a whole lot different in reality than the Senate.”

Source: TEST FEED1

If ‘Independent’ were a party, it could dominate American politics

If the nation’s political independents somehow formed a party, polls suggest, they could dominate American politics.

Two-fifths of Americans identified as independent in 2022, far more than stood with either party, according to Gallup. As a political identity, “independent” has polled better than Democrat or Republican since 2009.

It wasn’t always so. Going back to the era of former President Reagan, voters have generally identified as Democrat, Republican or independent in roughly equal measure. Independents pulled ahead in the Clinton ‘90s, faded in the Bush ‘00s, then surged anew after the election of former President Obama in 2008.

The rise of the independents comes at a time of widespread public disillusion with both parties: the polarization, the vitriol, the sheer illogic of a binary system so broad that it puts Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the left-wing New York congresswoman, and Joe Manchin, the right-leaning West Virginia senator, under the same Democratic tent.

And consider the word itself. “Independent” sounds so empowering, so liberating, so … American.

“As things get really nasty, it feels kind of virtuous to be above it all,” said Richard Arenberg, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  

Independents outnumber Republicans and Democrats in many states that report party affiliation. (Not all do.) As of October 2022, according to Ballotpedia, independents made up roughly 35 percent of the electorate in North Carolina and Oregon, 40 percent in New Hampshire and Connecticut, 45 percent in Colorado and Rhode Island, 60 percent in Massachusetts and Alaska, and 90 percent in Arkansas.

The share of registered independents is rising at a time when more than two dozen states offer open primaries, enabling unaffiliated voters to cast ballots for either party. North Carolina, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Colorado, Rhode Island and Arkansas are all among the states with open primaries.

As a voting bloc, independents can be hard to pin down. In a nation with two broad — and broadly unpopular — political brands, “independent” describes a growing swath of the public that chooses not to identify with either one.

“We slap the label of ‘independent’ on anybody and anything that isn’t a registered Democrat or Republican,” Arenberg said. “There’s all sorts of dogs and cats in that category.”

Across nearly three decades of polling, Pew Research has found that most self-proclaimed independents lean Democrat or Republican, in roughly equal shares.  

Most independents, in fact, are Democrats or Republicans in all but name. They vote for their party as reliably as the party faithful.

“They’ll often say, ‘I don’t vote for the party, I vote for the candidate, and I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life,’” said Samara Klar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy.

A small subset of independents, representing less than one tenth of the voting public, claim no partisan leaning at all. These true independents tend not to care much about politics — they’re not big on C-SPAN.

Energize them, political scientists say, and you can turn an election.

“We’ve been locked into a very long era of close political contests between the parties,” said William Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. In a nail-biter election, “a change in the behavior of even a small percentage of the population can have a huge impact on the outcome.”

Independents skew slightly male. They tend to be young. Gallup polling finds that a majority of both Generation Z and millennials identify as independent, with boomers and the Silent Generation gradually shedding the label as they age.

“Younger voters, you know, they haven’t made up their mind yet,” said Timothy Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. “Over time, folks will usually pick a party.”

Or not. Gallup found millennials and Gen Xers clinging to political independence as they age. Among millennials, some of whom are entering their forties, the share who identify as independent has risen steadily over the past two decades, from 42 percent in 2002 to 52 percent in 2022.

In Generation X, a cohort now firmly ensconced in midlife, the share of independents rose from 39 percent in 2002 to 44 percent in 2022.

That trend, coupled with a strong independent streak in Generation Z, could explain why independents are rising as a share of the full electorate.

And why are middle-aged Americans rebuffing the nation’s political parties?

Simply put, they don’t like them. Only two-fifths of Americans have a favorable opinion of Democrats or Republicans, as of 2022, according to Gallup. The last time both parties enjoyed majority favor was 2005.

“The record of the two established political parties in governing the country over the last two decades has not been a great one,” Galston said. “If that’s your formative political experience, then your willingness to affiliate with the political parties that contributed to this mess is not going to be very strong.”

Countless surveys show the American public eyeing the political sphere with growing disdain. Most Americans disapprove of how Congress is doing its job. Each of the past two presidents, Biden and Trump, has struggled with low approval ratings. Partisan squabbling dominates the daily news cycle. Both parties have an image problem.

“There’s been a growing stigma about partisanship among the American public,” said Klar, coauthor of a recent book on independent politics.

“We’ve seen a lot of open hostility among our leaders, and that doesn’t convey how Americans themselves feel. Most Americans are moderates. Most Americans don’t like to talk about politics a lot. Most Americans don’t want to think about politics a lot.”

If “Democrat” and “Republican” carry a partisan stigma, “independent” surely does not. Voters may identify as independent in an act of electoral defiance, or simply to assert that they are capable of independent thought.

“In American culture, when you call something ‘independent,’ it’s a moral category,” Galston said. “It’s a term of praise: ‘I’m thinking for myself. I’m not an automaton.’”

Such is the allure of the independent label that 36 percent of New Jersey voters chose not to affiliate with either party, as of last fall, even though the state has closed primaries.

“It’s kind of the ideological mood of the state,” said Ashley Koning, assistant professor and director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. “It’s kind of an expression of their belief that there needs to be some kind of change, that they’re not satisfied with the status quo.”

Roughly 70 percent of Americans wish they had more than two parties to choose from, according to Pew surveys.    

Third parties and alternative candidates haven’t made much of a dent in American politics since the 1800s. One recent challenge comes from the Forward Party, formed in 2021 and identified with former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, both centrists.

Forward Party leaders advocate for open primaries and ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference and might help third-party candidates compete.

If every self-proclaimed independent joined the Forward Party, the two-party system might soon be history. But that’s not how most independents operate.

“At the end of the day,” Koning said, “independent voters just kind of go back to the parties to which they lean.”

Source: TEST FEED1

House GOP set to rev engine with first investigatory hearings 

House Republicans will push their long-planned investigations into the spotlight this week with hearings on the U.S.-Mexico border and COVID-19 relief spending programs, providing a first glimpse of how GOP leaders will use the biggest tools they have against Democrats and the Biden administration — and how they will set the tone for the 2024 election cycle.

The House Judiciary Committee’s first hearing of the new Congress will be on “The Biden Border Crisis: Part I,” led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee, led by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), will have a hearing on waste, fraud and abuse in federal pandemic spending.

“I don’t think history will be kind to the PPP loan program,” Comer said at a National Press Club event on Monday, referring to a program that provided businesses with forgivable loans. “I think it’ll be eventually viewed in the same manner that the big bank bailouts were when people find out where a lot of that money was going.”

And the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee will hold a hearing titled “Challenges and Opportunities to Investigating the Origins of Pandemics and Other Biological Events” as a part of its probe into the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the virus’s origins.

They’re just the tip of the iceberg for planned investigatory hearings and actions. 

Republicans had been plotting extensive investigations into the Biden administration for more than a year before the midterm elections. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), in preparation for taking the House majority, organized GOP members into “task forces” to come up with oversight and legislative priorities. Republican members of committees started investigations last year when they were in the minority.

Republicans now have control over committee hearing topics, a better chance of getting answers from administration officials, and are armed with subpoena power to compel testimony and documents — though no committee has used it yet.

Next week, the Oversight panel is set to hold a hearing on the U.S.-Mexico border and a hearing with former Twitter employees about the platform’s suppression of the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden hard drive in 2020.

The Oversight panel is also taking action on an extensive probe into the business dealings of President Biden’s family, with a large focus on Hunter Biden. And a revived Oversight subcommittee on the COVID-19 pandemic is also planning to probe the origins of the virus.

The House Oversight, Judiciary and Intelligence committees have also sought information relating to President Biden’s handling of classified information. The House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees are expected to revisit the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021. 

The ultimate showstopper may be the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government under the House Judiciary Committee, a panel created after those who had opposed McCarthy for Speaker demanded a “Church-style” committee, in reference to a 1975 Senate select committee named for former Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) that investigated intelligence agencies.

In anticipation of aggressive Republican investigations, several outside groups have popped up to push back on the GOP narrative.

“Congressional Republicans today have no other calling than to engage in character assassination that distracts from real issues, creates a false perception of corruption, runs up legal bills and threatens the livelihoods of those caught in the web of their lies,” former Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said at an event this month for Facts First USA, one of those groups.

Comer, for one, is hoping that his handling of the hearings will bring a sense of legitimacy to his probes. His panel is packed with right-wing GOP firebrands such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (Pa.).

“If I wanted to have a big political hearing that was full of red meat, we would have victims’ families that lost their lives to fentanyl. We would have people that have been human trafficked. But we’re not. We just asked four Border Patrol bosses,” Comer said, referring to his request to have four Border Patrol agents testify in a Feb. 6 hearing.

Comer said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is refusing to allow those agents to testify and has accused DHS of “obstructing congressional oversight.”

The Judiciary panel, in contrast to Comer’s thinking, on Wednesday will bring as a witness Brandon Dunn, the stepfather of a teen son who died from a fentanyl overdose and co-founder of an organization to raise awareness about fentanyl.

Other Republican witnesses for Wednesday’s Judiciary hearing will be Terrell County, Texas, Judge Dale Lynn Carruthers and Cochise County, Ariz., Sheriff Mark Dannels.

Republican witnesses for the Oversight hearing will be Michael Horowitz, chair of a pandemic oversight committee under the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency; Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general at the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and David M. Smith, Assistant Director in the Secret Service Office of Investigations.

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Trump-DeSantis rivalry approaches boiling point

The long-simmering tensions between former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) are nearing a boiling point amid signs that DeSantis and his team are actively moving toward a 2024 presidential run. 

DeSantis’s national ambitions have long irked Trump, who sees himself as the Florida governor’s political benefactor and the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee. But Trump’s frustration became more apparent over the weekend, when he called out DeSantis during his first major campaign swing. 

“If he runs, that’s fine. I’m way up in the polls. He’s going to have to do what he wants to do, but he may run,” Trump told The Associated Press in an interview after a campaign appearance in South Carolina on Saturday. “I do think it would be a great act of disloyalty because, you know, I got him in. He had no chance. His political life was over.”

It wasn’t the first time that Trump took direct aim at DeSantis, but his latest comments come amid signs that the Florida governor’s presidential ambitions may be taking on a more tangible form.

Advisers to DeSantis have begun reaching out to potential hires, including several veteran Republican staffers and operatives, according to a person familiar with the moves. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that two top DeSantis campaign veterans — Phil Cox and Generra Peck — were involved in discussions about a 2024 run. 

DeSantis, who has largely avoided talking about any potential 2024 plans, hasn’t yet made a final decision on a run, though Republicans almost unanimously believe that a presidential campaign is a near-certainty, with a potential announcement expected later this year after the Florida state legislative session wraps up.

That belief has put him and Trump on an almost-inevitable collision course as they vie for dominance within the GOP. 

“I do think DeSantis is going to run. Ninety-eight percent chance,” one Florida Republican operative said. “If you’re DeSantis, I think you’d love to wait until 2028. But you have a particular window. You have to keep the name ID up.”

“On the other hand, I think Donald Trump knows this is his last chance to run,” the operative added. “The idea of trying again in four years — that’s just too much of a reach, even for him.”

Regardless of whether DeSantis eventually launches a campaign, Trump’s patience appears to be wearing thin. 

In addition to criticizing DeSantis’s loyalty over the weekend, Trump also accused him of “trying to rewrite history” when it came to his response to the COVID-19 outbreak, telling reporters that “Florida was closed for a long period of time” at the onset of the pandemic.

DeSantis’s laissez faire approach to the pandemic and stiff opposition to public health mandates and restrictions have been at the center of his rise to national prominence. He has also been openly skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines, drawing scorn from Trump, who accused DeSantis of flip-flopping on the issue.

DeSantis’s campaign did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment on Trump’s remarks.

While Trump has brushed off the notion that DeSantis could pose a serious threat to his 2024 ambitions, it’s hard to overlook some of the challenges the former president is facing as he looks to claw his way back to the White House.

Trump is only now beginning to ramp up his 2024 campaign after a relatively sleepy start back in November, and he’s still facing criticism from some Republicans over the party’s lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms.

At the same time, early polling suggests that his support within the GOP may be softening. Several recent surveys have shown DeSantis leading him in a hypothetical head-to-head primary match-up, and a growing number of Republicans say that Trump shouldn’t run for president again.

“I think there’s the sense that you have a lot of Republicans who like Trump but have a sense it’s time to move on, either because they think he can’t win or the drama has worn them down, as well,” said Dallas Woodhouse, a longtime Republican operative and the executive director of the South Carolina Policy Council.

Woodhouse’s group commissioned a poll earlier this month that showed DeSantis leading Trump by 19 points in a hypothetical match-up. That poll also found that only 37 percent of likely South Carolina Republican primary voters want the GOP to nominate Trump again, while 47 percent said they would prefer someone else.

Another poll released last week by the University of New Hampshire found that 46 percent of Republican voters in the critical first-in-the-nation primary state believe that Trump should be running for the presidency again, while 50 percent said he should not.

Trump, meanwhile, has pushed back on the notion that his 2024 campaign is floundering. On Saturday, he rolled out his campaign’s state leadership team in South Carolina — a list that included prominent Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Gov. Henry McMaster (R) — and swung through New Hampshire for a speech to state GOP officials.

He also hinted that he soon plans to return to holding massive rallies — something that has so far been absent from his campaign.

“They said: ‘He’s not doing rallies, he’s not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost that step,’ ” Trump said during his stop in New Hampshire. “I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than I ever was.”

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Tim Scott is pivotal figure as Tyre Nichols beating rekindles talk of police reform

Presidential politics are hanging over efforts to rekindle police reform in Congress after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of police in Memphis.

The lead Republican negotiator in the talks, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), is widely believed to be exploring a presidential bid and Republican strategists warn any deal with Democrats could set him back.  

Senate Republicans are expecting Scott, the only Black member of the Senate GOP conference, to take the lead in negotiating with Democrats after he spent months during the last Congress trying to hammer out a police reform deal with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and former Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.).  

GOP aides and strategists are doubtful that any reform deal can be passed by Congress that won’t become a political liability for Scott given demands by Democrats to open individual police officers to personal legal liability for alleged misconduct.  

That’s a potential concern for Scott, who is viewed as a top prospect to become the GOP’s vice presidential nominee if he doesn’t win the presidential nomination.

Scott has to be careful he doesn’t sign off on a sweeping reform bill that puts him at odds with the Republican base, something that happened to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) after he endorsed a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013.  

“I see this as something that can turn into a Gang of Eight situation for Tim Scott in the way that it did for Marco Rubio,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. He was referring to the bipartisan negotiating group that agreed to create a pathway to citizenship for more than 10 million illegal immigrant in exchange for tougher border security and other reforms.  

Political experts, however, say that Scott could boost his national profile ahead of a presidential run by achieving a legislative breakthrough on an issue that rose to prominence after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.  

The clamor for reform has grown more intense after the graphic videos released Friday night that showed police beating Nichols. Five police officers face criminal charges.

“There’s reason to think he would be serious about and he would be looking for a way to maybe package what we’re calling police reform with a larger law enforcement package that might include a lot more money for training,” Steven S. Smith, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis, said of Scott.

Smith said if Scott “is looking for a niche in what is likely to be long list of Republican candidates” running for president, “this might be it.”  

He acknowledged “there’s a pretty serious risk” for Scott if he cuts a major police reform deal with Democrats but argued he has to balance that potential downside with the need to break out in what could be a crowded presidential primary field.  

“The question is whether or not there’s a place for him in the contest for the presidency without distinguishing himself in some way,” Smith said. “Maybe this would be a way he could do that.”  

Scott declined to comment when asked about police reform Monday afternoon.  

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) said Monday that he expects Scott to again take the lead in any potential talks but raised doubts whether Democrats would agree to anything that most Republicans could support.  

“He did a lot of good work the last time around until the Democrats torpedoed it,” he said.  

 GOP senators are already warning that Democrats shouldn’t expect Scott to make any big concessions beyond the legislation he introduced in 2020 to end the use of chokeholds, increase the use of body cameras and provide more federal resources to hire and train new officers. 

“Tim Scott proposed an incredible bill … and frankly Democrats turned it down,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a centrist who has worked with Democrats on other issues. “Tim had a great bill, they wouldn’t accept it. 

“We can go back to Tim Scott’s bill,” Cassidy said, asserting that some of the demands being made by Democrats are “disingenuous.”  

Cassidy said there might be a better chance of striking a deal on police reform in a non-election year, before next year’s presidential politics scuttle any chance of getting something done.  

“We’re in the first year of a two-year cycle and sometimes people actually look at policy as opposed to have an eye toward politics and may be that will change” the dynamic of the talks, he said.  

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday floated the idea of protecting individual police officers from lawsuits but making police departments liable for misconduct, an idea he raised two years ago during the final stretch of police reform negotiations.  

“I oppose civil lawsuits against individual officers,” Graham posted on Twitter. “However, holding police departments accountable makes sense and they should face liability for the misconduct of their officers.”  

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an advisor to the Senate Republican leadership, noted that Senate negotiators discussed this possible compromise two years ago and it didn’t go anywhere.  

The Texas senator predicted that police reform has less chance of passing now that Republicans control the House than it did in the last Congress, when there was a Democratic House majority.  

“I think it’s probably less likely to happen now with divided government,” he said.  

A senior Democratic aide said any police reform bill that has a chance to get to President Biden’s desk will likely have to originate in the Senate given that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) didn’t show much interest in passing a comprehensive bill in the last Congress.  

Only one House Republican voted for the sweeping George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in March of 2021.  

The House passed four other crime and policing-related bills with varying bipartisan support in September.  

They were the Invest to Protect Act to provide federal grants to small law enforcement agencies; the Break the Cycle of Violence Act to provide grants for community violence initiatives; the Mental Health Justice Act to train and assign mental health professionals to situations with people suffering mental health crises; and the VICTIM Act to give local investigators more access to crime-solving technology.  

The biggest accomplishment on the police reform front in the last Congress was passage of the Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training Act of 2022, which Biden signed into law in late December.  

It provided $124 million in grant funding to pay for law enforcement agencies to develop new curricula for officers.  

Cornyn on Monday said these types of reforms only work when police officers follow their de-escalation training, something that didn’t happen in Memphis the night Nichols died.  

He said the de-escalation tactics funded by the bill, which he cosponsored, “if used, would have avoided this tragic result.”  

“We talked about the George Floyd Act for a couple years and [de-escalation training bill] was the only thing we could come to agreement on so I don’t know what other options are on the table,” he said, dismissing the chances of passing a broader police reform bill.  

Mychael Schnell contributed to this story.

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Biden administration plans to end COVID public health emergency in May

The Biden administration on Monday announced that the COVID-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, is set to end on May 11.

“The COVID-19 national emergency and public health emergency (PHE) were declared by the Trump Administration in 2020.  They are currently set to expire on March 1 and April 11, respectively.  At present, the Administration’s plan is to extend the emergency declarations to May 11, and then end both emergencies on that date,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.

The current renewal for the national PHE was declared on Jan. 11.

DEVELOPING…

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DOJ declines to release communication on Biden docs to House Judiciary

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday rebuffed a broad request from the House Judiciary Committee to provide further details about the special counsel investigation into the mishandling of documents during President Biden’s time as vice president, saying that doing so would risk releasing information central to the case.

The response follows a request from the panel, now led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), seeking all documents and communications related to the investigation, including correspondence with Biden’s attorneys and those related to the appointment of a special counsel.

“Your letter also requests non-public information that is central to the ongoing Special Counsel investigation. The Department’s longstanding policy is to maintain the confidentiality of such information regarding open matters,” the DOJ says in the letter obtained by The Hill and first reported by Politico.

“Disclosures to Congress about active investigations risk jeopardizing those investigations and creating the appearance that Congress may be exerting improper political pressure or attempting to influence Department decisions in certain cases.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month appointed Robert Hur to serve as the special counsel in an investigation into classified records that were found in an office Biden used following his tenure in the Obama administration as well as in his Delaware home and garage.

Garland has similarly appointed a special counsel to review the mishandling of classified records recovered from former President Trump’s home during the execution of a search warrant after authorities determined there could still be materials on site despite multiple requests to return them.

The request from Jordan would require a significant disclosure during an ongoing investigation, something the DOJ says clashes with its internal policies as well as special counsel regulations limiting what information can be shared with Congress.

“Disclosing non-public information about ongoing investigations could violate statutory requirements or court orders, reveal road maps of our investigations, and interfere with the Department’s ability to gather facts, interview witnesses, and bring criminal prosecutions where warranted,” the department continued, noting it needs to protect the confidentiality of those “implicated by, or who assist in, our investigations.”

Russell Dye, a spokesman for Jordan, couched the response as a lack of cooperation from the DOJ.

“Our Members are rightly concerned about the Justice Department’s double standard here, after all, some of the Biden documents were found at a think tank that’s received funds from communist China. It’s concerning, to say the least, that the Department is more interested in playing politics than cooperating,” he said in a statement.

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Senate Judiciary mulls action amid fallout from Durham probe

The Senate Judiciary Committee is pledging to review the actions of former special counsel John Durham following reports of inappropriate handling of his probe into the investigation of former President Trump.

Recent reporting from The New York Times detailed ethical concerns during the probe prompted numerous staff departures, including concerns over former Attorney General Bill Barr’s involvement in the investigation as well as proceeding to trial with insufficient evidence.

The report also revealed that the Justice Department obscured the nature of the criminal aspect of the probe, failing to disclose that it was Trump’s financial dealings rather than misconduct related to the initial investigation into the former president’s ties to Russia.

“These reports about abuses in Special Counsel Durham’s investigation — so outrageous that even his longtime colleagues quit in protest — are but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the Justice Department,” committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.

“The Justice Department should work on behalf of the American people, not for the personal benefit of any president.  As we wait for the results of ongoing internal reviews, the Senate Judiciary Committee will do its part and take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to request for comment and Durham and Barr did not respond to the Times story.

According to the report, after connecting with Italian officials who denied any involvement in relaying information for the Russian investigation, Barr expanded Durham’s authority to include criminal prosecution powers after receiving a credible tip about possible financial crimes related to Trump.

But Barr’s vague commentary left it unclear that the criminal component of the investigation was not focused on those who initiated the probe of the former president. 

In other cases, subordinates questioned Durham’s efforts to gain evidence on the leader of a George Soros-connected organization and Barr’s public comments about the investigation.

“The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here,” Barr said in April of 2020.

Staff also bristled as Durham prepared to prosecute Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who represented Democrats as they met with the FBI during the probe into Trump’s Russia dealings. Two employees said Durham didn’t have enough solid evidence to bring charges, and ultimately left the team. Sussman would later be acquitted in a court defeat for Durham.

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