Key Takeaways
  • President Trump set to be indicted, but there should be no immediate impact on policy.
  • The far-right Freedom Caucus is angry at the debt-ceiling deal Speaker McCarthy negotiated with President Biden — and showing its displeasure.
  • In the coming months, the legislative priority will shift to passing 12 different pieces of budgetary legislation and avoiding a government shutdown.

Before I get into my thoughts on the past week, it is impossible to write about Washington today without mentioning the elephant in the room – the indictment of former President Trump. In the coming weeks, I will write about the issue as it impacts policy, with expected tensions between the two parties. But there should be no immediate impact.

The big DC policy news this past week was the collapse of the working majority Speaker McCarthy has with his narrow Republican margin. A group mainly comprised of Freedom Caucus members remained angry over the debt/budget deal the Speaker made with President Biden, and they retaliated by blocking a Republican bill that would have stopped the Administration from issuing rules that banned gas stoves.  This would have been an innocuous messaging bill by House Republicans, but the Freedom Caucus wanted to show their strength by stopping action on the House floor.

Using parliamentary roadblocks, the group of conservative Members stopped all action on the House floor. After several negotiating sessions, the Speaker threw up his hands and sent the House home on Wednesday.  Not a good omen for things to come.

The centerpiece of the far right’s concerns over the debt/budget deal is that it strayed too far from the House-passed bill that cut spending by $4.5T and kept the baseline spending at 2022 levels.

As part of the effort to appease his right flank, Speaker McCarthy and his team put forward the idea that the House budget could be lower than the caps; but this will raise issues with the Senate, which wants to see more money for defense, border protection, and Ukraine.

For Congress, the next step to move on with the Biden/McCarthy deal is getting the 12 government budgets passed prior to the end of the current fiscal year on September 30th.  Failure to pass the spending bills raises the threat of a government shutdown, and disunity in the ranks of House Republicans increases that risk.

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