When Kevin met Joe: A good start or early posturing?

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In today’s edition … Bipartisan bonhomie on China and covid cooperation … Hunter Biden’s lawyers target critics, Matt Viser reports … Paul Farhi writes that Karine Jean-Pierre is frustrating reporters … Bill to criminalize Supreme Court leaks is reintroduced … Dentons hires McCarthy ally Jeff Denham … but first…

When Kevin met Joe: A good start or early posturing?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden had their first — and probably not their last — White House meeting Wednesday to discuss lifting the country’s borrowing limit.

McCarthy returned to the Capitol after the meeting in a great mood and optimistic that this was the beginning of a negotiation.

“I felt as though we had a very good conversation. And we left it by saying we will continue the conversation,” McCarthy said in a 31-minute gaggle at the Capitol with reporters. “That doesn’t mean we have an agreement. I think, though, we have a better perspective where each of us are and I truly believe we can come to an agreement.”

Both Biden and McCarthy went into the meeting with clearly stated positions. Biden’s was that he would not negotiate spending cuts to lift the debt limit and McCarthy’s was that he wouldn’t lift the debt limit without commitments to spending cuts.

• McCarthy said he emphasized two points at the White House: Biden doesn’t have the votes to pass a clean debt limit and the trajectory of spending must start to go down.

“I was very clear that we’re not passing a clean debt ceiling,” McCarthy said. “We’re not spending more next year than we spent this year. [We’ve] got to find a way to change this and I want to sit down and work with you.”

McCarthy is under pressure from his party to insist on steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the government’s debt cap to avoid a default that could deeply wound the economy.

While McCarthy played the role of happy warrior Wednesday, the White House maintained a more cautious approach. Officials also didn’t publicly lob any criticisms at McCarthy, in a sign the conversation went well enough.

A readout from the meeting from the White House said Biden made clear he’s happy to talk about deficit reduction, but not as part of debt limit talks.

“The President welcomes a separate discussion with congressional leaders about how to reduce the deficit and control the national debt while continuing to grow the economy,” the White House said.

The government isn’t expected to need to raise the debt limit until the summer, so much of what is said until that point may be meaningless posturing.

One thing stood out to us: McCarthy said that any debt limit increase doesn’t have to pass with just Republicans, an acknowledgment that he will have to rely on Democrats to lift the debt limit.

“I don’t think what comes out will have to be just 218 Republicans,” McCarthy said. Ceding that point early on may not be well received by some members in the House GOP conference.

The two agreed to meet again, McCarthy said.

“I left after having this discussion; it wasn’t, ‘Okay, bye,’” McCarthy said. “It was, ‘Okay, I’m going to follow up again for our next one.’”

Bipartisan bonhomie on China

As Congress feuds over the debt limit, border security and whether to kick Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, there’s one issue that is bringing Democrats and Republicans together: China.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) indicated Wednesday that he would bring legislation to the floor that would bar the sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China — one of the first bills to pass the Republican-controlled House last month — and add more countries to the list.

“What about Iran?” Schumer said. “What about Russia? We may think of adding some new countries.” 

And Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the chairman of the House committee set up last month to investigate the United States’ relationship with China, said he was “thrilled” that Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) was named the committee’s top Democrat. 

• Gallagher was overheard on the House floor Wednesday telling House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) that he made good picks for the committee.

Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi have worked together before. They introduced a bill in December that threatened to ban TikTok, the Chinese social media app, in the United States unless it’s restructured or sold so that it’s outside the Chinese government’s control.

“We share a common viewpoint that the Chinese Communist Party poses a challenge that we have not seen or dealt with before in the United States,” Krishnamoorthi said in an interview Wednesday evening.

Still, they have some differences.

Gallagher often says that the United States is locked in a “new Cold War” with China, while Krishnamoorthi said he’s unsure if the two countries are in a cold war.

“I’d like to think that we are not, but at the same time, a cold-eyed view of the situation shows CCP aggression in a number of different areas that might indicate that perhaps they think they are in some kind of a cold war with us,” Krishnamoorthi said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “I would like to avoid a cold war.”

While Gallagher and McCarthy have called for the committee to come up with ways to bar state and local pension funds from investing in China, Krishnamoorthi said he wanted to study the issue before taking a position.

Gallagher and McCarthy wrote in an op-ed in December that the committee “will make the urgent case for aiding Taiwan in its self-defense and build relationships with our other Indo-Pacific allies.” Asked whether he supported such an approach, Krishnamoorthi said he wanted “to make sure Taiwan is strong enough to defend itself and to deter aggression.”

“We want the status quo to remain,” Krishnamoorthi said. “We do not want a situation such as what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to bring about, which is basically almost a coerced annexation or takeover of Taiwan and erasure of its democracy.”

Only one of the 11 Democrats named to serve on the committee — Rep. Shontel M. Brown (D-Ohio) — voted against creating it last month. Krishnamoorthi was also among the 113 House Democrats who voted with Republicans for the bill prohibiting the strategic petroleum reserve from selling oil to China.

Meanwhile, Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), whom Democrats named Wednesday as the ranking member of a new subcommittee investigating the pandemic, also sounded optimistic about working with committee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).

“He’s a physician, as I am, and we have co-introduced legislation together in the past,” Ruiz said in an interview. “So one thing for sure that I made clear, and he agrees, is that we should take a physician, public health approach to elucidate lessons learned” from the pandemic.

But Ruiz did not endorse one idea that House Republicans have bandied about in recent weeks: using unspent covid relief funds to help reduce the deficit. Those funds are need to bolster infrastructure and protect the country from future pandemics, he said.

“The moneys that have not been used but that will be going towards programs and necessary infrastructure development to protect us in the long term is money that will be well spent,” Ruiz said.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers target critics

Attack mode: “Hunter Biden’s lawyers, in a newly aggressive strategy, sent a series of blistering letters Wednesday to state and federal prosecutors urging criminal investigations into those who accessed and disseminated his personal data — and sent a separate letter threatening Fox News host Tucker Carlson with a defamation lawsuit,” our colleague Matt Viser reports. “The new strategy marks a calculated risk that it is better to forge a combative path and take on Biden’s longtime critics, even if it means inviting more news coverage of a dark chapter in his life.”

The House is scheduled to vote to remove Democratic Rep. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee today. The four-page resolution would condemn Omar for a 2019 tweet that suggested some Jewish people are motivated by money over principle.

McCarthy told reporters he has the votes to pass the resolution. Our colleague Marianna Sotomayor reports that McCarthy has persuaded at least two Republican skeptics to back the resolution by amending it:

• Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) was convinced to vote for the resolution Tuesday after a provision was added that provides due process to Omar. Although Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) admitted the resolution has a “vanishingly small amount” of due process but that it “may have been enough to get somebody’s vote” on the matter.
• Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) also said Wednesday he would now support the measure after McCarthy signaled a willingness to work on instituting a new rule that would make “it clearer and more difficult to remove people” from committees in the future. Senior Republican aides said the agreement-in-principle with Buck could sway Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to also vote for the resolution.

Biden and Vice President Harris, meanwhile, will meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the White House this afternoon to discuss how to move a policing bill forward following Memphis police officers’ deadly beating of an unarmed Black man, Tyre Nichols.

That was fast: Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who is running for the open Senate seat, seems to have locked up all critical support for what was expected to be a contested primary. Since former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels announced he’s not going to run, the party is getting behind Banks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) met with him last week, and a source familiar with the meeting said it went very well. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and former president Donald Trump have endorsed him. 

And this morning, Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the chair of the Senate Republican conference, is throwing his support behind him.

Karine Jean-Pierre frustrates reporters

No comment: “Almost from the day news broke that classified documents had turned up in the home and former office of Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has responded to questions about the matter by essentially not responding,” our colleague Paul Farhi writes. “Jean-Pierre’s wariness on the subject has brought the sharpest scrutiny of her eight-month tenure as press secretary — and has, in some ways, made her the unintentional face of the White House’s uneasy saga … It has also raised questions, at least among reporters, about how clued in Jean-Pierre is.”

Bill to criminalize Supreme Court leaks is reintroduced in wake of failed investigation

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) is reintroducing a bill today that would criminalize leaks at the Supreme Court.

The legislation comes after a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, was published by Politico. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. launched an investigation to find the leaker but the probe came up short.

Cassidy’s bill would impose a $10,000 fine and up to a 10-year prison sentence on a person who leaks certaom information at the court. The bill, the Stop Supreme Court Leakers Act, categorizes that information as internal notes on cases, communication between the chief justice and other justices on a matter before the court, a draft of a final opinion and anything else the chief justice determines to be confidential.

The criminalization of leaking was one of the recommendations by the court-hired investigators. The leak has been pilloried by conservatives and some court watchers who say it is a violation of long-standing trust at the court. (Some, however, challenge the assumption that the court should be revered as immune to politics and the ways of Washington, including leaks.)

There are no Democratic co-sponsors of the bill.

Dentons snags a McCarthy ally: Jeff Denham, the California Republican who lost his House seat in 2018 and landed at the law-and-lobbying firm K&L Gates, is leaving for a rival firm. He’s joining Dentons as a senior policy adviser.

Denham was recruited another by another former lawmaker who lost his seat in 2018: Joseph Crowley, who was the No. 4 Democrat in the House when he lost his primary to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in an upset. Crowley went to work at the law-and-lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs after leaving Congress and decamped last year for Dentons.

Denham is close to McCarthy, which Crowley said in an interview was “an important factor” in the decision to recruit him. He also has relationships with Republicans and Democrats alike on the Hill — and, crucially, he is no longer subject to House ethics rules that restrict former lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues for one year after they leave office.

“He comes right out of the bullpen ready to pitch,” Crowley said.

• Voters could tip Wisconsin Supreme Court left on abortion, gerrymandering. By Patrick Marley.
• The gas industry is under fire. It’s hiring Democratic politicians to help. By Maxine Joselow.

Thanks for reading. You can also follow us on Twitter: @theodoricmeyer and @LACaldwellDC.