Congress
Capitol agenda: Trump muddies the GOP shutdown message
One week into the shutdown, Republicans are trying to stay on message — but President Donald Trump is making that difficult.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune want to show Democrats there’s no daylight inside the GOP: Republicans will only negotiate a deal to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies once the government is back open.
But Trump is causing major headaches by going off script. On Monday, Trump pointed to health care negotiations with Democrats that didn’t appear to exist, but would have contradicted Johnson and Thune’s red line about no ACA talks until the shutdown ends.
On Tuesday, the White House further complicated matters by sending a memo stating some federal workers might not receive backpay after the shutdown’s over. Republicans scrambled to refute that message. After all, Trump himself signed legislation in 2019 guaranteeing all federal workers would be paid following a shutdown — and many Republicans voted for it.
“You can’t not pay them for work they’ve done,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told Blue Light News. “I don’t think [Trump] seriously would. I think he’s playing hardball the way he sometimes does: Negotiating on the one hand, flexing leverage on the other.”
Johnson and Thune have also found themselves occasionally out of sync. During a joint news conference Tuesday, the speaker said he was “certainly open” to having the House vote on emergency legislation to pay essential personnel, like military or air traffic controllers, during the shutdown. “Honestly, you don’t need that,” Thune interjected, before reinforcing that Democrats could just vote to reopen the government.
House Republicans are also freelancing their shutdown messaging back in their districts. Rep. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania is rolling out new legislation to bar federal income taxes from being collected during the shutdown, per a release shared first with Inside Congress. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona has introduced a bill that would repeal Obamacare completely. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called on the Senate to get rid of the 60-vote threshold to reopen the government — a nonstarter for Thune.
Some rank-and-file senators are taking matters into their own hands. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), leaving the Senate floor Tuesday, said she had just talked to New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, one of the lead Democrats facilitating bipartisan conversations. And a bipartisan group was scheduled to meet over Thai food last night, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.).
Mullin has been tapped by the administration to serve as a conduit to Democrats amid government funding talks, according to one person close to the White House. Asked if he had been given an informal role, however, he shrugged: “I don’t have a badge.”
What else we’re watching:
— Shutdown action for the day: The Senate will vote for a sixth time on dueling stopgap funding bills at 11:20 a.m. Meanwhile, the House is out and its leaders plan to hold press events. Speaker Mike Johnson, joined by other GOP leaders and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), will hold a news conference in the Rayburn Room at 10 a.m. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, joined by other Democratic leaders and the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, will host a forum at noon on health care.
— War powers vote: Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Tim Kaine of Virginia will force a vote Wednesday on a resolution that would terminate the use of the U.S. Armed Forces for hostilities in the Caribbean Sea.
— Government censorship hearing: The Senate Commerce committee, chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), will hold a hearing Wednesday morning on how the Biden administration allegedly pressured Big Tech into censoring speech protected by the First Amendment.
Democrats on the panel plan to turn the tables on Republicans by drilling into “the censorship that happened the last few weeks” under the Trump administration, according to ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).
Dasha Burns and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
The federal government’s internal watchdog told Congress Tuesday that it has concluded President Donald Trump acted unlawfully in unilaterally canceling $810 million in federal funding.
In a letter to congressional leaders obtained by Blue Light News, the Government Accountability Office’s top lawyer panned Trump’s declaration Friday that he is nixing money Congress appropriated through a controversial budget maneuver called a “pocket rescission.”
“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse,” GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote,
adding that “Congress did not cede this important power” by enacting the 1970s impoundment law intended to stop presidents from withholding money Congress approves.
“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Perez added. “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”
It is unclear what practical effect, if any, the letter will have on the interbranch funding fight. Outside groups sued the administration last year over a prior pocket rescission, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling that they did not have standing to challenge the matter. The Trump administration has argued that only the head of the GAO is able to sue under the 52-year-old law governing rescissions.
Sen. Eric Schmitt thought he caught Jack Smith in a lie. Instead, he outed him as a fan of former Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark.
In a quest to frame former special counsel Jack Smith as a liar during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Schmitt asked him if he was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, for an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks — amid mounting drama around the Atlanta-based criminal investigation into Donald Trump led by prosecutor Fani Willis.
Smith clarified that he didn’t go to that game. But he did go to a different one on the same day: He was in College Park, Md. to see the Maryland Terrapins women’s basketball team play the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by phenom Caitlin Clark, who dropped 38 points that night in a win over the Terps.
It appeared that Schmitt misinterpreted a text message reference to the “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who discussed reserving a seat for Smith in the front row.
“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” the Missouri Republican asked, intimating that he was about to get Smith to perjure himself.
Schmitt also tried to connect the NBA game Smith did not attend in Atlanta to Feb. 2, 2024 — the date Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was also investigating Trump, acknowledged a personal relationship with another prosecutor on her team.
“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that,” Smith said, as he initially struggled to recall the time frame.
After reviewing the messages more closely, Smith said he recalled going to the Iowa-Maryland game and being flanked in the crowd by U.S. marshals. His testimony prompted Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to lash out at her colleague’s erroneous attack, saying Schmitt owed Smith an apology.
Speaker Mike Johnson called Tuesday for more “oversight” and “transparency” of the artificial intelligence industry —including “external auditing” — while expressing a preference that those steps would be taken voluntarily by leading AI firms.
Johnson made the comments on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” just hours before he is expected to meet at the White House with President Donald Trump and top AI executives.
“There’s corporate responsibility here. Of course these folks have to provide safe products,” Johnson said. “But I think a little oversight, a little transparency, a little external auditing of what’s going on would calm the nerves of a lot of people.”
It’s a more measured tone than Johnson struck earlier this month, when he joined Trump in playing down the warnings made by some AI insiders of existential threats to humanity and emphasizing the need to beat China in the race to superintelligent models.
He reaffirmed Tuesday his belief the U.S. needs to strike the “right balance” between staying competitive globally and keeping the technology safe.
“I have resisted the siren song to jump in and do these blanket moratoriums and all of this, you know, hyperregulation, because we cannot lose our edge to China,” Johnson said. “I think we’ve got to make sure we do this well. We need to keep America ahead in this, you know, transformational technology, but also do it in a safe way.”
Several of the prominent executives who have called for a voluntary slowdown in AI development, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, will be at the meeting. Also attending is Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, which said Monday it was canceling the release of its latest model due to safety concerns.
Johnson said Tuesday he was counting on the executives, not the government, to take the lead, saying of the implementation of guardrails, “I hope it’s voluntary.”
“We’ll find out what comes out of the meeting today,” he said. “I think that that’s where they’re headed. I think they see the handwriting on the wall, and I think they want to ensure investors, consumers, the American public that they’re going to do this in a very safe way. And that will, I think, put us in the right place.”
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