Congress

Republican leading AI effort has ambitious timeline for getting his bill through the House

Published

2 months ago

June 9, 2026

Rep. Jay Obernolte has an aggressive timeline for getting his new bipartisan Artificial Intelligence proposal taken up in the House — and a path for getting a congressional hearing on a major part of the plan.

In an interview Monday night, the California Republican said he hoped to turn the draft framework he unveiled last Thursday into multiple bills, with the first expected to be introduced in the coming weeks. Each bill would be considered by its committee of jurisdiction.

“One of the challenges that we have is that the bill crosses so many different policy committee jurisdictions,” he said. “So I think we’ve got to divide it up into different titles that are in the jurisdiction of various policy committees and hear those individually.”

He said that the majority of the provisions contained in his 269-page blueprint for regulating AI — including the authorization for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation and the National AI Research Resource — would fall under the purview of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Incidentally, Obernolte said the Science panel — of which he is a member and chairs the Subcommittee on Research and Technology — was aiming to convene a hearing on AI at the end of the month, where his proposal could take center stage.

Obernolte ambitions, however, could quickly run up against reality: He and the Democratic co-architect of the proposal, Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, still need to sell their ideas to their respective party leaders and their colleagues, who are themselves sharply divided over what role the federal government should play in regulating the emerging technology.

But Monday night, Obernolte insisted he was continuing to talk to the White House about his effort, saying he was “cautiously optimistic” the administration would eventually back his bill, which would among other things override some state AI laws and require top developers to disclose the safety and security risks of their new models.

He also said he and Trahan were continuing to seek out additional co-sponsors beyond the original four who have committed to signing onto a formal piece of legislation: Reps. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.), Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Scott Franklin (R-Fla.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.)

Asked about feedback so far, Obernolte called it “pretty thoughtful,” and said criticism from both ends of the ideological spectrum has been fairly split.

“I would say that there’s a broad swath of people in the middle of the issue that are respected and thoughtful on the issue that have been praising the framework,” he said. “And then you’ve got voices on both sides — some that say that we’re not doing enough, some that say we’re doing too much — and the volume on both of those points of view have been about the same. So I think that’s an indication that we got it right.”

Congress

SLF launches $17 million ad campaign in North Carolina

Published

4 minutes ago

July 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate’s top GOP super PAC is launching a $17 million summer ad campaign in North Carolina — its largest reservation anywhere in the country so far this cycle, underscoring the state’s importance to Republicans’ hopes of defending their Senate majority.

The investment, shared first with Blue Light News, is the first tranche of Senate Leadership Fund’s previously announced plan to spend $71 million in North Carolina this year. It comes as early public polling shows Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s popular former governor, with a lead over GOP nominee Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair.

Cooper, a fixture of North Carolina politics, has a higher name ID and a larger campaign war chest than Whatley. But Republicans have long argued — and even some Democrats fear — that the contest will tighten considerably once outside money starts pouring in.

The SLF ad buy signals the beginning of more national resources to come. A person familiar with SLF’s plans in North Carolina, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the investment reflects the party’s growing confidence that a sustained advertising blitz will expose vulnerabilities in Cooper’s record.

Just days earlier, their Democratic rival, Senate Majority PAC, announced $11 million in ad reservations in the state, increasing the reservation to $42.5 million in what could become one of the most expensive races of the cycle.

The SLF ad, which will air across broadcast, cable and streaming, centers on Cooper’s record on crime, an issue that is quickly becoming Republicans’ biggest line of attack in the race. The 30-second spot slams Cooper over early prison releases during his time as governor, arguing that some of those prisoners later committed additional violent crimes. Along with the ad, SLF launched a website, “40YearsIsEnough.com,” which also criticizes Cooper’s record on crime.

Cooper’s campaign has already tried to neutralize the crime attacks: They released an ad last month highlighting the Democrat’s public safety record as governor and attorney general.

Congress

Rand Paul’s about to get his chance to settle his feud with Anthony Fauci

Published

12 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Rand Paul’s said Anthony Fauci belongs in prison. The Kentucky Republican will get his chance to make the case Wednesday when the former Covid czar is slated to appear under subpoena before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Paul chairs.

Paul reiterated his objective on X Monday, saying the pardon President Joe Biden gave Fauci — Biden said to shield him from a vindictive Trump administration prosecution — would not protect Fauci if he lies to Congress.

The two have a feud dating to the pandemic, when Paul accused Fauci of lying to Congress about funding risky research in China that Paul believes unleashed Covid-19. Fauci responded to Paul by accusing him of lying. Now 85, Fauci retired from federal service at the end of 2022.

In April, a federal grand jury indicted Fauci’s former senior adviser, David Morens, on three felony charges for allegedly circumventing federal public records laws by concealing Covid-related communications. Federal agents arrested Morens at his home in Maryland, reportedly putting him in handcuffs and making him disrobe.

Paul’s goals go beyond incriminating Fauci. He also wants to show that Fauci funded risky virus research in China.

“The goal is the truth,” Paul told reporters on Monday about Fauci. “I’d like to hear him say he’s sorry.”

The origin of Covid remains a fraught debate, with no scientific consensus on whether it was a lab accident or whether an animal infected a human. But most Republicans and President Donald Trump have embraced the lab leak theory.

Fauci has rejected Paul’s accusations and defended himself vigorously, including in some of the five previous hearings in which they’ve faced off.

He declined to comment.

The debate over Fauci’s legacy has long broken on party lines, and Democrats are expected to defend him against GOP attacks on Wednesday.

“They got a longstanding vendetta against Fauci. He seems to be almost obsessed,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee member, said of Paul on Monday.

Both Paul and Democrats on the committee have supported stricter oversight of gain-of-function research, which aims to make viruses more virulent or more transmissible in order to devise defenses against them. The panel has twice approved Paul’s Risky Research Review Act, which would take funding decisions away from Fauci’s old agency, the National Institutes of Health, and give them to a new Life Sciences Research Security Board appointed by the president. The White House also released Tuesday a new policy stopping high-risk biological research.

Congress

Big Ten, SEC are on the clock as new college athletics bill is circulated

Published

12 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee are making changes to their big college sports overhaul in a bid to garner support from the nation’s two most powerful athletic conferences as they look to build Republican support ahead of a potential vote on the Senate floor.

Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking member, made several concessions to the Big Ten and Southeastern Conferences in the latest draft of their Protect College Sports Act. They include protections against certain legal challenges and a new $20 million pool of funds that schools can use for retaining athletes, according to three people close to the negotiations.

It’s unclear whether the changes will be good enough to win over the two conferences. A senior Commerce Committee staffer asked the conferences to schedule a call with their general counsels and staff “ASAP” to discuss the text and gave them a 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline to decide whether they support the latest version of the bill, according to an email reviewed by Blue Light News.

Two lobbyists directly engaged on the bill said Tuesday that weeks of negotiations had not meaningfully addressed a litany of concerns the SEC and the Big Ten had with earlier versions of the bill.

The conferences demanded, for instance, that a provision allowing universities to jointly negotiate their media rights make clear that schools cannot be coerced into participating. The updated text includes a provision shielding schools who do not participate in media pooling from potential litigation, according to a copy of the draft obtained by Blue Light News.

The bill, however, leaves out another key demand of the conferences: a provision clarifying that postseason tournaments and contests would be excluded from media pooling.

It also retains a prohibition on conferences with over $700 million in revenue participating in mergers and acquisitions, which would impact both power conferences along with the Atlantic Coast Conference. That threshold was brought down from an earlier $1 billion limit, but the SEC and the Big Ten had hoped to see it stripped from the bill altogether.

The new text also includes a newly added section titled the “Ignite HBCUs Sports and Media Act.”

That section, which is still in flux, deals with “extraneous topics of broadband,” per the email sent to the conferences on Tuesday. The $20 million athlete retention pool also remains subject to change “as we discuss how to align the proper incentive for spending on women’s NIL,” according to the email.

Cruz remains determined to get the bill onto the floor before the Senate heads out of town for a scheduled recess next week. But time is running short, and he and Cantwell still need to win over wary senators on both sides of the aisle.