Congress
Hill staffers brace for their boss’s ‘TMZ moment’
TMZ has launched an effort to shame members of Congress into ending their recess early and funding the Department of Homeland Security — and many congressional aides are quietly delighting in the celebrity gossip site’s interest in covering Congress.
“I am super stoked,” said one Hill staffer granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I think a lot of offices, particularly ones who aren’t in major media markets, are in for a rude awakening.”
“My attitude is any new press that forces members to be sharper and for comms staffers to be more nimble is a good thing,” the staffer added.
Staffers whose bosses end up splashed across the infamous website are likely feeling less stoked about the spottings. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was seen by a TMZ tipster at Disney World over the weekend, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) was caught on camera at a Las Vegas casino.
Garcia said he was visiting his father who lives in Las Vegas, while Graham followed up Tuesday with photos of himself in his home state.
The publication has been soliciting photos of lawmakers anywhere but Washington as the DHS impasse hurtles toward day 50. Other shots the site has obtained include Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a Florida airport, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) at his son’s basketball game and a slew of House Republicans — including Reps. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), John McGuire (R-Va.) and David Rouzer (R-N.C.) — roaming around Scotland.
Van Orden said in a Wednesday X post that he was participating in “high level” meetings with the Irish government.
“I would like to thank @TMZ for pointing out that even though our US Senate colleagues can’t figure out how to vote to fund our entire government, and that the House voted 4 times to do so, that I will not stop working for the 3rd congressional district of Wisconsin and every American,” Van Orden said.
A second Hill staffer, also granted anonymity to speak candidly, said “there are definitely conversations on how to engage and prepare for your boss’s TMZ moment.”
While TMZ has long had a footprint in Washington, founder and executive producer Harvey Levin said in a statement Monday he is redoubling coverage of national political players — and said the ongoing DHS shutdown was an important moment to pounce.
“Last week, we interviewed a TSA worker who is struggling to survive without a paycheck, and it outraged us so much we wanted to use our platforms to show how Congress — Dems AND Republicans — have betrayed us,” Levin said. “We spontaneously came up with the idea to juxtapose members of Congress on their Spring Break against federal workers who are losing their homes, their cars, their livelihoods.”
“Short story — our D.C. presence will sometimes be fun, sometimes intensely serious,” he added.
GOP lawmakers believe Sen. Mitch McConnell will return to the Capitol this week, ending a three-month health-related absence, according to four people granted anonymity to disclose private conversations.
McConnell’s office is keeping silent about the 84-year-old former Republican leader’s intentions since disclosing last month that he had returned home following weeks in the hospital and rehab. But expectations about a return to the Senate have grown among fellow Kentucky Republicans and his GOP colleagues in the Senate.
The senator’s staff has told senior Republicans that he will be back at the Capitol in time for a Wednesday committee vote on the farm bill, which stalled earlier this summer amid his absence, according to three other people with direct knowledge of the matter who were also granted anonymity.
His vote is needed to get the GOP-written farm bill out of the Agriculture Committee after Chair John Boozman told Blue Light News that he is intending to have another vote this week.
Asked Sunday about the rising expectations of McConnell’s return, a spokesperson pointed back to an August statement that said he would be doing physical therapy from home during the Senate’s five-week summer recess. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on McConnell attending the Agriculture Committee meeting.
McConnell has not voted in person since his office announced on June 14 that he had been hospitalized, but the lack of details had fueled online conspiracy theories and even calls from some fellow politicians, including Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, for more transparency.
McConnell released a lengthy statement in July explaining that he was initially hospitalized for a fall and later developed pneumonia. He indicated at the time he intended to return to the Senate and serve out the remainder of his term, but he didn’t say when that would happen.
Reporters and social media influencers could be seen Monday morning camped outside McConnell’s Capitol Hill home, watching to see if he leaves for the Senate ahead of a scheduled evening vote.
The AI industry’s promise to slow itself down is “not nearly enough,” Sen. Andy Kim said Monday, calling for a binding federal framework and dismissing President Donald Trump’s argument that new rules would hand the race to China.
Kim (D-N.J.), who sits on the chamber’s commerce committee negotiating AI legislation, told Blue Light News that relying on the “voluntary goodwill” of AI companies to rein in their own technologies is unacceptable, given the potential societal risks involved. And he is not fully sold on a proposal to grant outside evaluators access to the labs developing groundbreaking AI technologies, which the AI company Anthropic recently said it would allow.
“We really need a very specific regulatory framework when it comes to AI,” Kim said in a phone interview. “Yes, embedding evaluators is certainly a part of that, but that is not going to be enough to address my concerns about where this technology is headed. We need much more clarity in terms of what level of standards we would want those evaluators to be upholding.”
Kim’s comments came after an artificial intelligence researcher dramatically resigned last week with warnings of global destruction if unfettered development continues. He also spoke of the need to “Mythos-proof our society,” referring to the powerful model developed by Anthropic, saying that he’s “engaged with a lot of different elements of government” to accomplish that goal but declining to elaborate what that might look like.
As concerns over both AI development and data center construction grow throughout the country, there’s been bipartisan momentum in Congress to rein in the industry, though the most prominent bill to do so remains in limbo with just a few weeks to go before an election-season recess. Kim said he’s lately had “good, bipartisan conversations” with senators about AI policies, and he’s hopeful that the Senate’s commerce committee will hold an AI markup in the coming weeks.
Trump, however, has emerged as a major impediment to any potential progress in Congress. In a Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump wrote that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” referencing the need for the U.S. to remain ahead of China in the AI development race.
Kim, though, argued that’s a false choice: Putting AI regulations in place, he said, does not have to conflict with maintaining competitiveness with China.
“Those are not mutually exclusive,” he said. “And I think that comment by Trump was wrong. We can find bipartisan support to show that there is a real and better way that we can do this.”
Speaker Mike Johnson plans to meet with executives for major artificial intelligence companies as early as the end of this week or early next week, with pressure growing on Congress to set guardrails around the expanding technology.
“It will be soon,” Johnson told reporters Monday of his schedule. “I think either end of this week or early next week. But wait and see.”
The potential meetings come after three CEOs of nation’s leading AI labs — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI — all warned over the weekend that there must be mechanisms put in place to slow down the rapid pace of AI advancements or risk catastrophe as severe as eventual human extinction.
Johnson said he has spoken to Amodei and Altman in the past about AI legislation but not in the past couple of days.
Several lawmakers on Capitol Hill have introduced bills to address the current lack of federal regulations on the industry but there’s little consensus on if or how to proceed. Johnson, who has previously said the first order of business would be for President Donald Trump and tech executives to “go in a big room, close the door and sort this out,” was still noncommittal Monday on whether the House would vote on AI safety legislation before the midterms.
“This is a very complex issue that requires a lot of work and bipartisan solutions,” Johnson said, adding that each AI platform provider has different ideas for what guardrails should look like.
“We want to emphasize the necessity of them providing safe products and self-regulating,” Johnson said. “There is also a role potentially for Congress to play, but we have to do this with a balanced approach to ensure that we maintain our edge over China.”
Johnson separately noted he would support legislation on the floor Tuesday aimed at forcing tech companies to bear the brunt of rising energy costs associated with data centers — an issue that has taken on urgency amid voter backlash ahead of the November elections.
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