The House clears a key spending package and ACA subsidy extensions

Guest:	Mitchell Miller
Title:	Capitol Hill Reporter, WTOP
Summary:	The House has passed the Commerce Justice Science minibus, but lawmakers face a packed agenda before the January recess. Appropriators aim to release text for the next bundle including State Foreign Ops, Financial Services and Homeland Security soon, even as DHS funding hangs in the balance after a fatal ICE shooting. We’ll also track ACA subsidy talks in the Senate, war powers votes brewing on both sides of the Capitol and how Republicans plan to regroup after their retreat.

The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton provides expert insights on current events in the federal community. Read more interviews to keep up with daily news and analysis that affect the federal workforce. Reach out to Terry and the Federal Drive producers with feedback and story ideas at FederalDrive@federalnewsnetwork.com.

Terry Gerton Last week maybe felt like a dog year in terms of congressional activity as Congress came back to town after the holidays. Let’s start at the beginning because the Republicans in the House started their week with a retreat. What did you hear about that and what’s shaping up to be the Republican House strategy?

Mitchell Miller Well, this was kind of a rally that President Trump, of course, threw out a lot of different ideas, whether they’ll actually become legislation really remains to be seen. But of course the big talk is about affordability and a lot of ideas have been thrown out, but are they going to actually become bills? We’ll have to see. A lot of Republicans, frankly, are already kind of getting ready for the post-Trump era, even though we’re moving into this second year of President Trump. But the big part of their strategy is definitely going to be selling the Trump tax cuts. They, of course, approved these as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other lawmakers went down to the border this past week to stress that. And you’re going to see a lot of that from Republicans as they try to get their messaging across while they’re dealing with all these other issues like health care and Venezuela, etc. That’s going to be tough though, because Democrats also found that difficult, as remember when they were trying to do everything related to the Inflation Reduction Act, selling these huge bills that have so many different things in them and actually getting them to resonate with voters before an election and in this case, before the midterms, it’s really difficult.

Terry Gerton Well, they’re complex and they cover so much ground. But in addition to that, the Republican margin has gotten really tight.

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Mitchell Miller Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), it really surprised everybody that he had died at the age of 65 last week, and that brought down the margin in the House to 218 to 213. So you quickly do the math, and that means House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) can only afford to lose two votes on any particular piece of legislation. And then there are also a couple of special elections with Democrats likely to pick up two seats that are now vacant. So it is going to be a very, very thin margin. I know we’ve been talking about this for years, but this will be actually the thinnest margin that Speaker Johnson will have. And we saw some of that play out with the legislative action that occurred last week.

Terry Gerton Let’s dig into that because the first thing, maybe a good news piece, is that the House did pass the first of the minibus appropriation bills. Tell us more.

Mitchell Miller Right. And related to that thin margin, even that had a little bit of a mini drama on the minibus because once again, you had conservatives saying that they didn’t like some of the earmarks in part of the legislation. So they broke it up, which is kind of rare that they do that even with a minibuss. So, they basically took Commerce, Justice and science, took that as a vote separate from Interior, environment and energy, water bills. And they both passed narrowly initially. At least on the rule, and then they easily passed. So that’s a big step. As we both know, January 30 is right around the corner, and that’s the deadline for when, essentially, the federal funding will run out and we’ll be up against a potential government shutdown. But right now, I’m not hearing a lot about the possibility of a shutdown, because this week they are going to take up another minibus. That one is likely to include Homeland Security, State foreign operations and financial services. One hiccup in there could be Homeland Security, however, as we all know, a lot of controversy related to the shooting in Minneapolis last week with the ICE officer. And so that could be tripped up a little bit because a lot Democrats have concerns about how things are being moved around with Homeland Security. So we’ll see if they shift. They could actually potentially instead take up a different minibus, but the Senate meanwhile plans to take up the one that was passed last week. So. We could get to the point where we’re at least halfway through the 12 appropriations bills that need to be passed by the 30th, which in congressional terms, that’s a lot of progress.

Terry Gerton But these minibusses are sort of ordered in degree of difficulty, aren’t they? So getting the CJS and Interior bill through is one step. The next one’s a little harder. The last one is defense and some other big topics.

Mitchell Miller Yeah, that’s a great point. That literally is how it works. You know, they work through the easiest things first and leave the hardest ones for last. And definitely, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, that is going to be the toughest one. And that’s going to the one that probably pushes us right toward that January 30th deadline, because they know that they just can’t get agreements right away on these things. But Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), one of the top appropriators on the Republican side in the House. He increasingly though sounds pretty confident that they’re going to just keep cutting away at this and making sure that they get through these appropriations. By the way, just a little bit of detail on the environmental and Interior bill, the cuts that were made were actually much less than what the Trump administration wanted. For example, the EPA would be cut by $320 million. That compares to $4 billion that the administration had sought. And then the National Park Service would go down a much lower level than the almost 40% cut that the White House had sought.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Mitchell Miller. He’s the Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. All right, Mitchell, we’re gonna take the good news there and run with it and we’ll tackle a different topic because the House also made some surprising progress on the ACA subsidies vote.

Mitchell Miller Right. This was something that a lot of people were really skeptical about at the end of the last year, as you know, whether or not they would actually get this vote. But the discharge petition went ahead. You had four Republicans joining Democrats to get that to the floor, much to the chagrin of House Speaker Mike Johnson. And it did pass. And in fact, it passed easier than expected with 17 Republicans joining Democrats to Get this three-year extension passed. That shows that there is some nervousness among the GOP. About health care costs as we talk about moving toward the midterm elections. Now this bill will not pass in the senate, however, it does show that there is momentum for some type of health care legislation and what the talk is right now and there’s been some very encouraging developments on the senate side is that they, on a bipartisan basis, could potentially get an extension of the ACA, perhaps maybe two years And then they’re also talking about extending open enrollment to March 1. And then there will be a variety of reforms, potentially, that Republicans have been pushing for, a new income eligibility cap, a minimum monthly premium, and then potentially stiffer fines for insurance companies that sign people up without their consent, essentially going after fraud. So I think we are going to continue to see progress on this front. So another piece of good news.

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Terry Gerton Maybe a little silver lining to the shutdown. The other big topic this past week was operations in Venezuela and the interest that that generated around war powers resolutions.

Mitchell Miller Yeah, this has been a pet project of Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine for a long time. And he really kind of outdid himself this time around. Last time, this came up to limit any kind of military action that the president could take against Venezuela without the consent of Congress, it did not move forward. It only got two Republicans. This time, it got the Republicans it needed to move forward, it get five Republicans. President Trump made it very clear he did not like that. He singled out all of those republicans saying they should not be reelected. But what this did was moved forward this legislation so it will likely be discussed again this week before a final vote, we’re not sure exactly when that’ll take place, but they’ll do a vote-a-rama where lawmakers will have a chance to add a lot of amendments to this. But this is pretty significant given all the support that the president has had initially at least related to Venezuela on the Republican side, the fact that congress is starting to assert itself a little bit more in connection with the War Powers Act so we’ll have to see where that goes

Terry Gerton We also heard that Ruben Gallego may be teeing up a War Powers Act [resolution] on Greenland.

Mitchell Miller That was really interesting because amid all the discussion related to Venezuela last week, Greenland was just popping up all over, and who would have thought that would be on your bingo card a few years ago? But clearly there is concern among Congress, members of Congress, about what is going to happen with Greenland and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), as you mentioned, his War Powers Act would essentially say that the president could not take any military action to take Greenland, if he so desired. Now, the administration has had kind of a set of conflicting pieces of information related to Greenland, the president wanting to keep pumping up the potential threat, a lot of other members of the administration and some Republicans in Congress saying, wait a second, no, there’s no way that there’s ever going to be military action. But there is serious talk about some kind of negotiations or purchase. And by the way, if Greenland were somehow to be bought by the United States, that funding would have to come from Congress. Or, If there were some kind of deal that was cut with Denmark which of course controls Greenland then there would have to be a two-thirds majority of the Senate to approve a new treaty and those usually take quite a while so I think this may actually be something percolating obviously in connection with what happened in Venezuela. We’ll just have to see where that that goes

Terry Gerton You’re absolutely right, I did not have Greenland on my bingo card. One other thing, and this is a topic you and I have talked about and I know you’re watching, is retirements from Congress and this week Steny Hoyer (D-MD) announced that he’s going to retire. What does that mean for the leadership positions in the House?

Mitchell Miller Well, this is really interesting because Steny Hoyer is just one of those lawmakers who has seemingly been around forever. And he has been in Congress now for 45 years, longest serving member from Maryland ever. And this really signifies the changing of the guard in the U.S. House of Representatives, at least on the Democratic side, because for 20 years, Steny Hoyer was part of the Democratic leadership. He was the number two under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she was the speaker, much to his chagrin because he wanted to be speaker at one point. But at any rate, he was the House majority leader twice during his tenure, but now they are moving on the Democratic side to a much more younger Leadership in the waiting, if you will, if they are able to retake the House. Democrats still remain pretty bullish on the fact that they might be able to do that because of gerrymandering and all the things related to redistricting, there’s not really probably going to be another wave type election for either side moving forward. But Democrats, if they picked up the seats, then you’re looking at somebody like Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who’s been the House minority leader now for a while. He has the backing of Steny Hoyer and some of the old guard, if you will, of the Democratic Party. But you have more than 40 members of the House who are leaving to either run for other office or to retire. In this case, Steny Hoyer is not leaving because, obviously, he wants to go to another job, he’s 86 years old, or necessarily because he’s so bitter about the way things are in the House. He just feels that he has had an incredible legislative career, which is no question about it. This is a person who is respected on both sides of the aisle. In fact, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy actually issued a nice statement related to Steny Hoyer. So, it was good to see a little bit of bipartisanship. I’ll leave you with this little anecdote, you know, with all the acrimony here on the Hill, but when he gave his final floor speech, the current House speaker, Steve Scalise (R-La.) and the whip, Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) on the Republican side, were both there on the floor and personally congratulated him. So it’s nice to see little bit of bipartisanship here and there on The House floor.

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