The Hill’s Morning Report — House gets to work after Speaker election

by Alexis Simendinger and Kristina Karisch - 01/09/23 6:25 AM ET

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.

After finally clinching the gavel Saturday morning, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Monday begins his first official workday as Speaker witPh the likely adoption of the chamber’s rules.

Parts of the package — which must pass to allow the House to operate — include the concessions McCarthy made to the 20 conservative holdouts whose objections prolonged the election of a Speaker for days. The House rules are center stage because McCarthy’s compromises include changes to the procedure for introducing amendments, a vote on the floor on proposed term limits for House members and a change to lower the bar for motions to oust a sitting Speaker (The Hill).

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that she backs the rules package — with reservations.

“I support it,” Mace said. “But what I don’t support is a small number of people trying to get a deal done or deals done for themselves in private, in secret. … And so I am on the fence right now about the rules package vote tomorrow for that reason.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Sunday predicted the House on Monday will adopt the package while defending the contentious and days long process to elect a Speaker and swear in lawmakers by Saturday. Jordan was one of 200 Republicans who backed McCarthy throughout, although he was briefly nominated for the position himself (Politico and The Hill).

“Sometimes democracy is messy, but I would argue that’s exactly how the Founders intended it,” Jordan said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Whether it’s one vote or 15 votes, Kevin McCarthy is still Speaker of the House.”

Beyond the rules package, this week will put into focus the Republican agenda for the next congressional term, with an expected emphasis on federal spending — especially in tandem with pressure later this year to raise the nation’s borrowing limits — and the U.S. focus on China (The Wall Street Journal). But achieving those goals may prove difficult with a slim majority and a vocal group of often-dissenting conservatives in their own conference, not to mention a Democrat-controlled Senate and White House.

As The New York Times reports, the new dynamic in Congress amid divided government is more likely a prescription for gridlock than progress amid roots of the dysfunction that run deep. Even with single-party control of both chambers, it took lawmakers until the eleventh hour to pass a sweeping government funding bill last month.

The Hill’s Mychael Schnell tees up House plans for its first week of legislative business.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: What’s in Kevin McCarthy’s deal with conservatives.

▪ Vox: McCarthy’s Speaker chaos could make Democrats more powerful.

▪ The New York Times: House Republicans are preparing a broad inquiry into the FBI and security and intelligence agencies, planning a vote this week on a resolution to create a special Judiciary subcommittee tasked to examine “weaponization of the federal government.”

Another commitment McCarthy made to his holdouts was to consider deep spending cuts, including the possibility of slashing defense spending.

“We got a $32 trillion debt, everything has to be on the table,” Jordan said on Sunday. “When you’ve got numbers like that … frankly, we better look at the money we send to Ukraine as well.”

As some Republican lawmakers pledge to curb additional spending to aid Ukraine and probe what’s been authorized by Congress, Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova on Sunday defended U.S. investments in military and humanitarian assistance to her country (The Hill).

“Every U.S. dollar that is given to us, we’re putting it to a good use,” Markarova told CBS’s “Face The Nation” on Sunday. “We’re using it as an investment into our joint fight for democracy.”

Related Articles

▪ The Atlantic: Speaker in name only.

▪ Politico: Inside the House GOP’s Speakership crisis.

▪ The Washington Post: Closest of friends, Mark Meadows and Jordan split over McCarthy.

▪ The Hill’s Memo: Republicans stumble out of the starting blocks.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ ADMINISTRATION

President Biden today is in Mexico City with key members of his Cabinet to meet with other North American leaders about shared issues including energy, border security, migration, drug trafficking and trade.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will host Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for talks through Wednesday during the trio’s first summit since late 2021 (Reuters). The United States and Canada are embroiled in a dispute with Mexico over its push to grant market control to cash-strapped state energy companies, which the U.S. and Canada say violates the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal.

Biden on Sunday stopped in El Paso, Texas, for the first border tour he’s taken since his inauguration (The New York Times and The Hill). Preparing a campaign announcement and State of the Union address within weeks, the president and his team are under pressure from all sides to counter a narrative that his administration’s progressive policies at the U.S. southern border created a “crisis” complicated by lenient enforcement. The administration is also girding for House Republicans’ promised oversight this year amid GOP calls to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The surge in migration is “not unique to the southern border of the United States, nor the border of Mexico,” Mayorkas told reporters on Sunday while traveling with the president. “It’s something that is gripping the entire hemisphere.”

Biden’s announcement last week restricting options for immigrants from three countries points to a shift to the center on immigration politics (The Washington Post).

▪ El Paso Times: Biden toured the border in El Paso.

▪ Bloomberg News: Migrants strain city resources in El Paso.

▪ The Los Angeles Times: A humanitarian crisis looms in Mexico as thousands of people from some of the world’s most oppressive countries are marooned in Mexico under restrictions affecting asylum-seekers.

▪ The Hill: Biden confronts his border problem.

▪ The Hill: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Sunday in El Paso handed the president a letter blasting the administration’s immigration policies as “two years too late.”

▪ Bloomberg News: U.S. rejects oil offers in first attempt to replenish strategic stockpiles.

➤ POLITICS

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who last year tapped his state’s resources to ship migrants from Texas to Massachusetts aboard private planes to protest Democratic policies, is the early frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

The Hill’s Alexander Bolton offers a reminder that leaders in past presidential contests drawn from early polls failed to go the distance. Republican Party examples: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Minnesota Gov. Scott Walker, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the late Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.

DeSantis, who boasts of conservative achievements in governance, on Friday gained media attention by appointing decidedly conservative members to a trustee board at a progressive liberal arts honors college in his state’s university system.

The DeSantis administration recently asked all state public colleges and universities to provide data about resources they use related to diversity, equity, inclusion and critical race theory. Christopher Rufo, a Republican activist, is one of DeSantis’s six appointments to the board at New College of Florida in Sarasota.

In 2020, Rufo caught former President Trump’s eye with an appearance on Fox News in which he declared that critical race theory had “pervaded every institution in the federal government,” The Washington Post reported. Rufo tweeted on Wednesday: “Gov. DeSantis is going to lay siege to university ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ programs.” Critical race theory is a decades-old academic discipline that investigates systemic racism in the United States, which Rufo and other conservatives insist does not exist; they say racism is the act of individuals alone.

As the 2024 presidential race begins to dominate the political landscape for both parties, The Hill reports that Biden and his team are readying details of his reelection campaign ahead of an announcement. One feature to watch: the 80-year-old president’s reliance on a familiar brain trust, writes The Hill’s Amie Parnes.

Ahead of 2024, Republicans are grappling with the challenge of recruiting candidates who can perform better with voters, including independents, than the crop who competed in November, reports The Hill’s Max Greenwood. “If we’re going to win back the Senate and keep the House, we have to have good candidates,” said GOP strategist Alex Conant. “In 2022, that just wasn’t the case.”

The challenge won’t be much different for Democrats in Senate races in 2024, reports The Hill’s Julia Manchester. Michigan will have an open Senate seat following the retirement announcement last week by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D). The jockeying among Democrats who are said to be eyeing that race is intense. But more broadly, the conversation quickly turned to the tough landscape for Democrats who want to hold their narrow majority beyond the next presidential election. The party will seek to defend Senate seats in red states Montana, West Virginia and Nevada and there could be other states where incumbents face headwinds (The Hill).

The Hill: In Kentucky’s gubernatorial contest, Democrats are bracing for challenges.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ INTERNATIONAL

Thousands of radical supporters of Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, on Sunday stormed and vandalized the country’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential office building in Brasilia. The scenes of rioters smashing windows and roaming the halls of the Planalto Palace brought comparisons to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump, who, like Bolsonaro’s supporters on Sunday, claimed the election had been stolen from their candidate.

The attack occurred just a week after the inauguration of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro in a close runoff election in October. Lula condemned the “abominable” acts in Brasilia and said all those involved would be investigated and punished “with all the strength of the law.”

“These vandals, who we could call fanatical Nazis, fanatical Stalinists … fanatical fascists, did what has never been done in the history of this country,” Lula, who was on an official trip to Sao Paulo state, said Sunday. “All these people who did this will be found and they will be punished.”

He announced a federal security intervention in Brasilia lasting until Jan. 31 after capital security forces initially were overwhelmed by the invaders (The Washington Post and Reuters). Late Sunday evening, authorities announced they had cleared all government offices, making about 300 arrests in the process, and Brazil’s Supreme Court removed the governor of Brasilia from office for 90 days due to flaws in security in the capital (The Wall Street Journal and Reuters).

▪ The Washington Post: How Bolsonaro’s rhetoric — then his silence — stoked the assault in Brazil.

▪ Bloomberg News: Brazilian capital reels after anti-Lula rioters storm Congress.

While Ukraine’s military commanders have long said they do not lack soldiers for the war, they have welcomed to their ranks thousands of volunteers, including foreign citizens, The New York Times reports. Chechens, Crimean Tatars and people from the former Soviet republics, all with deep historical grievances against Moscow, are eagerly taking up arms for Kyiv.

The Washington Post: Moscow’s war in Ukraine brought harsh tactics against LGBTQ+ Russians at home.

🌛 Could the next big space race be about control of the moon? Move over Russia, writes The Hill’s Amy Thompson, because China may be the next space superpower and its ambitions could clash with NASA. Both entities want to explore deep space, especially the moon, and both are bound by the outer space treaty, but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson warns that the U.S. space agency should keep an eye on the Chinese.

▪ Reuters: China reopens borders in final farewell to zero-COVID.

▪ The Washington Post: Iran hangs two more people in brutal campaign against protesters.

▪ Bloomberg News: Sweden signals that all of Turkey’s demands for NATO entry cannot be met.

OPINION

■ Time is not on Ukraine’s side, by Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates, contributors, The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/3IuEdxm

■ We need to talk about McCarthy, by Margaret Carlson, contributor, Washington Monthly. https://bit.ly/3Ctz4BV

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.

The House will meet at 5 p.m.

The Senate will convene Tuesday at 10 a.m. for a pro forma session.

The president is in Mexico City on Monday for a two-day North American Leaders’ Summit.

Vice President Harris at 3:45 p.m. will ceremonially swear in Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley as U.S. ambassador to Brazil.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday and Tuesday will be in Mexico City with the president for the North American Leadership Summit to discuss security cooperation, including efforts to combat drug trafficking.

First lady Jill Biden is in Mexico City with the president for the North American Leaders’ Summit on Monday and Tuesday. She will speak about gender equality and girls’ empowerment this morning and join a flag football event with local students in Mexico City at midday. She will join the president at 4:15 p.m. for the official summit welcome ceremony. The first lady at 5 p.m. will join the first lady of Mexico, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, a writer and journalist, for a lecture event. The first lady will join President Biden at an official dinner among the leaders and spouses of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Mexico City to participate in the North American Leaders’ Summit on Monday and Tuesday.

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry is in Mexico City to participate in the North American Leaders’ Summit on Monday and Tuesday.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff is in Los Angeles where he will join Education Secretary Miguel Cardona at 10:30 a.m. PT for a tour of Roybal Film and Television Production Magnet. They will host a roundtable with students and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s advisory board members, including actors George Clooney, Mindy Kaling and Don Cheadle to learn more about teacher support programs and their career and technical programs.

ELSEWHERE

➤ JUSTICE & COURTS

💡 In the spotlight: All eyes are on the Department of Justice’s next moves in the wake of the investigative work of the House select committee on Jan. 6, which wrapped in December. Under scrutiny by department prosecutors are the panel’s lengthy report, criminal referrals that include Trump for his role in the mob attack on the Capitol, and release of witness interviews and evidence, reports The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch.

The attorney general and special counsel Jack Smith will decide on the potential federal prosecution of planners and instigators and not just perpetrators of the attack. Garland has said his team is examining “whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election.”

Former House Jan. 6 committee members made clear last year they hoped Trump and other close associates will be held to account for their actions seeking to block the certification of the Electoral College tally.

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors are expected to open the government’s case against Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the extremist Proud Boys group, and four of its members. The trial, estimated to last more than a month, includes the rarely used charge of seditious conspiracy, an offense punishable by up to 20 years in prison (The Wall Street Journal).

Speaker McCarthy has suggested that Republicans, who in November gained a narrow House majority in this Congress, might opt to launch a probe into the work of the Jan. 6 panel, which Trump, a declared presidential candidate in 2024, continues to criticize as partisan.

Despite being a subject of the Justice Department’s investigation into allegations that he played a role in the Capitol insurrection, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) on Sunday told ABC News that he would not recuse himself from serving on any potential GOP-led committee that may seek to investigate the former House investigators.

“So, should everybody in Congress that disagrees with somebody be barred from doing the oversight and investigative powers that Congress has? That’s our charge,” Perry said when asked about a potential conflict of interest. “And again, that’s appropriate for every single member, regardless of what accusations are made. I get accused of things every single day, as does every member that serves in the public eye,” he added (The Hill).

Biden administration prosecutors last year seized Perry’s cell phone in connection with Jan. 6-related events and obtained email exchanges between Perry and former Trump attorney John Eastman, among others.

Perry introduced Trump to former Justice Department environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump considered appointing as acting attorney general in late 2021 before leaving office in the interest of trying to substantiate his repeated assertions of 2020 election fraud, which were false.

⚖️ High court: The Supreme Court on Monday begins to hear 2023’s first oral arguments, weighing seven cases in the next two weeks that could impact attorney-client privilege, labor laws and foreign nations’ legal immunity. Biden administration policies challenged before the high court, including student loan debt forgiveness and the future of the Trump-era migrant expulsion policy known as Title 42, will be at the forefront later this term (The Hill).

➤ STATE WATCH

Europe’s success in staving off an impending energy crisis this winter has yielded less than desirable outcomes across the Atlantic, where New Englanders are contending with the ripple effects of a global gas crunch, writes the Hill’s Sharon Udasin.

Residents of the six-state cohort have thus far enjoyed a relatively mild winter without the rolling blackouts that experts anticipated this fall. But skyrocketing energy prices — among the highest in the country — are taking a toll on a region accustomed to cranking up the heat. New England had to contend with fierce competition from the European Union over liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies after Russia began curtailing pipeline gas to the bloc amid the ongoing war in Ukraine. With an uncertain winter on the horizon, Europe became a high stakes bidder in the global race to stockpile LNG.

“Natural gas prices have not been this high in New England since 2008 — before the fracking revolution, mortgage crisis and Great Recession caused energy prices to crash,” Tanya Bodell, an energy adviser and partner at consulting firm StoneTurn, told The Hill.

▪ The Washington Post: Germany built LNG terminals in months. Wind turbines still take years.

▪ Bloomberg News: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy gambit fizzles as warm winter saves Europe.

➤ PANDEMIC & HEALTH

The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant has swiftly become the most prevalent COVID-19 mutation responsible for infections in the U.S. in just a matter of weeks, outpacing the timelines of previous subvariants, writes The Hill’s Joseph Choi. This mutation, accounting for 72 percent of COVID-19 cases as of Friday, is responsible for a majority of confirmed cases in the Northeast and is growing in frequency across other regions of the country. Due to its recent ascent, data on XBB.1.5 is limited, but health officials have disclosed some key insights into the strain as well as what information is yet to be determined.

Some are now talking about myalgia as a “top” COVID-19 symptom that can appear as an early indicator of symptoms (Express), but scientists and physicians have been talking about COVID-19 triggering musculoskeletal pain since the beginning of the pandemic, even though they noted that it was less frequently discussed publicly (NIH).

The Washington Post: New variant XBB.1.5 is “most transmissible” yet, could fuel COVID-19 wave.

Information about COVID-19 vaccine and booster shot availability can be found at Vaccines.gov.

The Food and Drug Administration as of Jan. 1 added sesame to a list of nine major food allergens under provisions of a 2021 law. Food manufacturers must identify sesame as an allergen on labels and work to prevent cross-contact in production facilities. According to a 2019 study, about 1.1 million people in the United States have a sesame allergy (VeryWell).

Total U.S. coronavirus deaths reported as of this morning, according to Johns Hopkins University (trackers all vary slightly): 1,096,504. Current U.S. COVID-19 deaths are 2,731 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 … Today is National Clean Your Desk Day. We mention this because half the Morning Report newsletter team tackled this project over the New Year’s weekend and feels smugly virtuous about the decluttered result.

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