Contained in the McCarthy-McConnell relationship
By the point House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) arrived in Washington in 2007, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had been in office for a long time. By the point McCarthy became the House Republican leader in 2019, McConnell had been the highest Senate Republican for 12 years.
Now that they’ll lead Republicans of their respective chambers, the 2 leaders’ styles and goals could diverge this Congress.
McCarthy will steer the GOP agenda and face pressure from his right flank to pass conservative bills which are unlikely to make it through the Senate. As Senate minority leader, McConnell will play the role of foil or negotiator — probably each — within the Democratic-led Senate.
The flexibility of the long-serving Senate Republican leader and the newly elected speaker — “who associates say have an excellent, skilled but not close, personal relationship — to work together takes on latest significance as a series of high-stakes fiscal showdowns loom in Congress,” our colleagues Liz Goodwin and Marianna Sotomayor report.
- “The duo’s colleagues say they might not be more different. McCarthy, a prolific fundraiser and Californian leading a majority for the primary time, is a ‘cheerleader,’ backslapping type, said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who has served in each chambers with each men. But McConnell, who recently became the longest-serving Senate party leader in history, keeps his cards notoriously near his chest and has a status as a master strategist.”
- “’Mitch is more of an enigma,’ said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). ‘I saw him smile once back in 2017.’”
- The common denominator: their relentless determination to win elections: “I feel they’re kindred spirit in a political sense,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who also has served in each chambers with each men. “They’re just in a special spot.”
McConnell met weekly with John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan during their tenures as House speaker.
However the sphinx-like Kentuckian’s “meetings with McCarthy have been less frequent, as each men have been within the minority of their chambers and covid disrupted the congressional schedule, based on former and current aides, who, like others in this text, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about internal matters,” Liz and Marianna report. “They plan to fulfill more continuously now that McCarthy is speaker.”
- Ryan “and McConnell became personal friends after they ran the House and Senate, respectively, going out to dinner with their wives continuously and having fun with a mutual trust that got here partially from how intertwined their staffs were. (Ryan’s chief of staff on the time had worked for McConnell previously.)”
- “McConnell and McCarthy are less close, but a former Senate aide said the minority leader doesn’t need a detailed personal connection to work well along with his counterparts.”
- “‘People get way too hung up on buddy movies in Congress and with McConnell that’s just not a thing,’ the previous aide said. ‘He desires to get the work done, he desires to win.’”
McConnell served for twenty-four years within the Senate with President Biden and recently appeared with him in Kentucky at an event celebrating the infrastructure law that McConnell helped pass in 2021 and that Biden signed into law.
Biden and McCarthy have less of a relationship.
While the 2 men used to fulfill for breakfasts on the Naval Observatory while Biden was vice chairman, they found their relationship strained by McCarthy’s support of challenges to Biden’s 2020 election victory, our colleague Michael Scherer reports.
Biden mentioned McConnell at the beginning of his inaugural address in 2021, but not McCarthy — and McCarthy noticed. (A White House aide told Scherer the omission was unintentional.)
“McCarthy’s closest Democratic working relationship has been with former House majority leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who he has called ‘a superb friend,’” Michael writes.
- “Hoyer said he knows McCarthy is a pacesetter who Democrats can work with, though he’s unsure whether McCarthy will have the opportunity to achieve out for Democratic support as [Boehner and Ryan] did given the narrow GOP majority within the House and the demands of McCarthy’s most conservative members.”
- “’Biden’s inclination, as everyone knows, is to work in a bipartisan way and to achieve out to the opposite side and check out to work to a mutually agreed compromise,’ Hoyer said. ‘I feel McCarthy is ready to do this, but he has a really difficult time inside his own party, each within the Congress and out of doors groups, in pondering that that’s an excellent thing for the country.’”
Perhaps the largest difference between McCarthy and McConnell is their relationship with former president Donald Trump.
“McCarthy publicly thanked Trump for helping him secure his Speaker’s bid with phone calls to holdouts after a historic 14 failed votes earlier this month,” Liz and Marianna write. “In contrast, McConnell has not spoken to the president in greater than two years, since Trump’s refusal to simply accept his 2020 loss, and has said he believes Trump’s influence boosting more extreme Senate candidates contributed to Republicans’ underwhelming performance within the midterms.
- McCarthy was skeptical of McConnell’s selection to chop Trump off entirely and believes that he ended up with higher candidates within the midterms than McConnell did because he continued to work with the ex-president and shape his influence on GOP primaries, based on an individual aware of McCarthy’s pondering. (Several more extreme House Republican candidates lost in competitive seats, as well, nevertheless, including Joe Kent in Washington and John Gibbs in Michigan.)”
- “McConnell needs to grasp the difficulties McCarthy faces within the House keeping his small majority together, Ryan said. ‘His job is harder than mine [was],’ Ryan said of the Speaker. ‘No two ways about it.’”
Also of note: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is joining the Senate Republican leadership team as counselor. Read Liz’s profile of the Republican who desires to be a bipartisan dealmaker.
The difficult task of filling out committee rosters
Though the Home is out this week, Republicans and Democrats are working to populate their committees.
On the Democratic side, some members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are sending out warning signals. Democrats may have fewer slots now that they’re within the minority, meaning some lawmakers will lose committee assignments. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) could lose his spot on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, our colleague Marianna tells us, leaving potentially only one Latino lawmaker on the Democratic side, Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (Calif.).
A House Democratic aide said no committee assignments are yet final. Democrats hope to fill the seats “soon.”
Meanwhile, the Republican Steering Committee, which makes committee assignments, met on Monday, a federal holiday, to work on committees and can proceed their work today.
Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Tex.) announced subcommittee chairs on Monday, noting that Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) might be the panel’s vice chairman. Cole, a key McCarthy ally, can be head of the Rules Committee, giving the veteran lawmaker major influence this Congress.
Granger and the Appropriations subcommittee chairs may have a ton of pressure on them to fulfill conservatives’ spending reduction demands — including rolling back spending to fiscal 12 months 2022 levels (which is a large spending cut, by the best way).
What the Jan. 6 probe discovered about social media, but didn’t report
On the cutting-room floor: “The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning latest details on how social media corporations failed to handle the web extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot,” our colleagues Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Drew Harwell report. “But ultimately, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics intimately of their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold within the Republican Party and anxious concerning the risks of a public battle with powerful tech corporations.”
- What ‘Team Purple’ discovered: “Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — didn’t heed their very own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Donald Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms didn’t take ‘dramatic’ steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the web.”
- Why it matters: “Understanding the role social media played within the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol takes on greater significance as tech platforms [such as Twitter] undo among the measures they adopted to forestall political misinformation on their platforms.”
Drip, drip, drip: House Republicans seek information on classified material at Biden residence
Meanwhile, the fallout continues after classified documents were discovered in Biden’s home and the Penn Biden Center office. “The White House on Monday said it doesn’t keep visitors logs for President Biden’s personal residence in Wilmington, Del., where his lawyers have discovered not less than six documents with classified markings,” our colleague Yasmeen Abutaleb reports.
- The response got here after “Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the White House over the weekend in search of an accounting of who can have had access to the property.”
- “President Biden’s mishandling of classified materials raises the problem of whether he has jeopardized our national security,” Comer wrote in his letter to the White House. “With out a list of people who’ve visited his residence, the American people won’t ever know who had access to those highly sensitive documents.”
- “President Biden’s mishandling of classified materials raises the problem of whether he has jeopardized our national security,” Comer wrote in his letter to the White House. “With out a list of people who’ve visited his residence, the American people won’t ever know who had access to those highly sensitive documents.”
- “The demands by Republicans for transparency within the case of Biden’s classified documents highlight the political danger for the president, who criticized Trump when boxes of classified records were found at his Florida residence,” the Latest York Times’s Michael D. Shear writes. “But Biden’s Republican critics, like Comer, are in search of transparency in ways they’ve not for Trump.”
On the agenda: Biden will meet with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands this morning within the Oval Office. Rutte may have lunch with Vice President Harris, who will stick around to welcome the Golden State Warriors to the White House this afternoon in recognition of the 2022 championship. (Recall that Stephen Curry and the Warriors didn’t go to the White House to rejoice their 2017 and 2018 wins.)
Biden is ready to go to California’s Central Coast on Thursday to see the devastation wrought by recent storms. He’ll be back on the White House on Friday to fulfill with mayors attending the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Pentagon’s top general meets Ukrainians training with U.S. troops
Our colleague Dan Lamothe was certainly one of three American journalists who got to shadow Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Germany on Monday as he spoke to Ukrainian troops. Read his dispatch:
- Milley “visited two sites in Germany utilized by the U.S. military to reinforce the fighting skills of their Ukrainian counterparts, offering encouragement to those on the training field and directing the American soldiers instructing them to squeeze as much as possible into the newly established program before the Ukrainians return to war.”
- “In temperatures hovering under 40 degrees, Milley bantered with the Ukrainian soldiers and asked about their backgrounds and experience in combat, sometimes in English and sometimes through an interpreter. Their mission is urgent, Milley noted, and has international support. The conversations were punctuated by occasional gunfire, as Ukrainian soldiers nearby honed their skills with rifles and the M240B machine gun.”
The American-made combat vehicle headed to Ukraine, visualized: “Ukraine’s Western allies announced this month plans to offer the country with latest fighting vehicles, the primary of that are slated to reach in the approaching months,” our colleague Claire Parker reports.
- The USA will send 50 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, an American-made combat vehicle utilized in the Gulf and Iraq Wars. It’s “designed to hold a three-person crew and 6 soldiers as passengers, especially across open terrain” and “could be armed with an antitank TOW (‘tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided’) missile launcher.”
- Latest details link George Santos to cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch. By Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rosalind S. Helderman.
- Recent shootings raise stakes for pro-gun lobbyists in Richmond. By Gregory S. Schneider and Laura Vozzella.
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