Congress
House members release bipartisan ‘principles’ for extending Obamacare subsidies
A bipartisan quartet of House lawmakers released a “statement of principles” Monday for a potential compromise on an extension of Obamacare subsidies, which would include a two-year sunset and an income cap for eligibility.
The compromise framework from Republican Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Jeff Hurd of Colorado, and Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi of New York and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, is the first public tangible offering on health care policy since the government shutdown began 33 days ago.
Democrats are continuing to insist that any deal to end the shutdown involve an agreement around extending expanded tax credits for Affordable Care Act subsidies that are due to expire at the end of the year. But GOP leaders and President Donald Trump have refused to negotiate on health care until after the government is reopened.
The new blueprint is a sign the partisan freeze is thawing among some factions on Capitol Hill — and that frustration over the impasse is growing. Moderate Republicans in the House are especially losing patience, eager to address the health care issue while Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the chamber out of session since September.
“Congress is gridlocked, and too many Americans have lost faith that we can work together,” Bacon, Hurd, Suozzi and Gottheimer said in a statement. “Our hope is that this shared statement of principles will inspire bipartisan collaboration across Washington and help get Congress back to work for the American people.”
Bacon, in an interview Monday, said he hopes that senators — especially appropriators working on bipartisan talks around full-year government funding bills — will use this plan as fodder to negotiate an ACA extension framework.”I’m all for breaking the logjam,” Bacon said. “A lot of Republicans don’t want to see these premiums go up either.”
The four lawmakers are endorsing a two-year extension of the enhanced tax credits and an income limit on who can qualify for them, which would range from $200,000 to $400,000.
In a bid to appease conservatives who believe that the credits are wasteful and rife with fraud, the bipartisan coalition calls for both parties to identify ways to crack down on agents and brokers who engage in fraudulent practices when enrolling people in Obamacare health plans.
The lawmakers also want to ensure that enrollees are notified of the value of the premium tax credits and that ACA marketplaces track down “ghost beneficiaries” who may be improperly enrolled in the plans.
Bacon has hammered Democrats for not supporting the House-passed stopgap spending measure but said Monday the minority party needs an off-ramp over their ACA demands amid the shutdown, and his proposal with Hurd, Suozzi and Gottheimer could offer that path. He added that such a plan would likely need to be attached to the long-term government funding bills members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee are continuing to work through along the sidelines of shutdown talks.
But it’s unlikely the proposal would go far enough for hard-liners who want deeper reforms as part of any ACA extension — not to mention those who are opposed to any subsidy extension at all. The compromise plan is silent on whether it would restrict the ACA plans from covering procedures that would end pregnancies — a major demand of the anti-abortion lobby.
And while all four lawmakers are part of the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, the plan failed to receive the official support of that full caucus, according to two people granted anonymity to share private deliberations. Members of the group had been discussing pieces of the reforms — including a $200,000 income cap for the full subsidies — for several weeks, as Blue Light News has reported.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, the GOP co-chair for the group, said in an interview in late-September he wanted an ACA deal before open enrollment started last Saturday, a deadline that came and went without Democratic and Republican leaders even talking about the topic. In some states, enrollees are now seeing theirout-of-pocket premiums for 2026 skyrocket by more than 100 percent.
Notably, however, Fitzpatrick didn’t sign onto the plan released Monday, whereas the Democratic co-chair, Suozzi, forged ahead with Bacon, Hurd and Gottheimer. Fitzpatrick has yet to fully review the plan, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Senate Republicans, including Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, have also been quietly workshopping their own ideas for a compromise on the subsidies, but have yet to indicate they are close to anything that could be made public.
Other vulnerable House Republicans, like Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia, is a co-sponsor with Suozzi and others on legislation they introduced prior to the start of the shutdown that would extend the subsidies for one year.
House Oversight Chair James Comer has introduced legislation that would ensure survivors of sexual abuse can speak freely about their experiences, even if they signed a nondisclosure agreement.
The measure comes the day after the Kentucky Republican’s panel voted to recommend the House hold billionaire investor Leon Black in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over all of his non-disclosure agreements related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s also the first piece of legislation Comer has produced as a direct result of the committee’s ongoing Epstein investigation. Members have been working for over a year to collect information about the web of powerful people who may have enabled Epstein to prey on young women and girls for years without consequence.
In all, the Oversight Committee has facilitated 19 depositions and transcribed interviews of individuals with ties to Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now in federal prison.
“The federal government for decades failed the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes,” Comer said in a statement. “We sadly cannot undue the harm and abuse inflicted upon these women. However, we have an obligation to take action to reform our laws to ensure survivors are protected and abusers can be held accountable.”
Comer also said members have, through their investigation, “learned how powerful men weaponized nondisclosure agreements to silence survivors of sexual abuse,” inspiring him to introduce legislation called the Survivor’s Voice Protection Act.”
The bill would, specifically, render a non-disclosure agreement “void and unenforceable” in instances where it would prevent people, including victims of alleged sexual abuse, from disclosing information about it. It would apply retroactively to any non-disclosure agreements entered into prior to the bill becoming law.
The legislation also would establish a fiduciary responsibility to report grooming of a minor to law enforcement and defines the term as behavior directed toward a minor that is, among other things, “intended to establish an emotional connection with a minor through manipulation, trust building, or influence to facilitate future acts of sexual conduct or normalize or desensitize the minor to acts of sexual conduct, even if no in-person meeting or act of sexual conduct is completed, and includes directing or conspiring with another person to engage in such a course of conduct.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he is canceling planned Thursday votes and sending members home for a seven-week recess a day earlier than expected.
The decision lops another day off a pre-election legislative schedule that Johnson had already truncated by two weeks. It also allows members to avoid having to take a vote on an impeachment resolution introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) targeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which would have hit the floor no later than Thursday under House rules.
Leadership staffers indicated in a notice to members that other votes expected Thursday, on overturning some EPA regulations, would now take place Wednesday evening.
A key House Democrat involved in developing an artificial intelligence framework for his party called Wednesday for committee consideration of a bipartisan bill to regulate the most advanced AI models — even as he has held off on endorsing it.
Rep. Ted Lieu of California is a co-chair of House Democrats’ AI commission, as well as vice-chair of the House Democratic Caucus. He has previously taken a careful approach to the FRONTIER Act, which is the only comprehensive AI safety legislation that has bipartisan support.
“I absolutely believe that the Energy and Commerce Committee needs to do a markup of that bill, but we’re going to go on vacation in a couple days because that was Speaker Johnson’s choice,” Lieu said at a news conference Wednesday.
It’s the first time Lieu has said that the bill should move forward, explaining that he wants to “support the legislative process” as the commission works to release its own policy recommendations in the coming weeks.
Lieu appeared alongside other Democrats Wednesday, including FRONTIER Act co-author Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts. They gathered to demand Republican leaders facilitate a process for members to come together to discuss an AI regulatory framework amid growing threats that the technology is developing faster than humans can control it.
But Democrats have been divided over whether the answer on AI safety is to put guardrails on the technology or ban certain advancements altogether. They’ve also sparred internally over whether to preempt states from setting their own AI guardrails.
The FRONTIER Act, led by Trahan and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), would establish tiered requirements for AI labs that would include independent audits, incident reporting and risk-management frameworks.
Trahan made the case for her bill at the news conference as the product of many meetings with industry and members.
“Incident reporting — that’s mandatory, which by the way, we don’t have today,” she said, saying it would have required transparency around this summer’s hacking incident by a rogue swarm of AI agents: “The only reason why we know about the Hugging Face incident is because OpenAI chose to tell us.”
She responded to concerns from others in her party who say her efforts with Obernolte simply do not go far enough to protect Americans from runaway AI technology, saying it was a meaningful compromise bill that has a path to become law.
“In a perfect world, if I had my way writing that bill, would it look different? Absolutely,” she said. “I chose to legislate in the reality that we’re in right now, which is, we’re going to need this to be bipartisan. If we’re going to pass it tomorrow we will likely need it to be bipartisan.”
Republicans have also been slow to galvanize around the Obernolte-Trahan proposal. In an interview Wednesday during the Blue Light News Decoded Summit in Washington, Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) would not commit to putting the bill up for a markup but gave the bipartisan duo some credit: “Everybody says we need to do something and nobody has put a product on the table except for Jay and Lori.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic AI Commission that is likely to recommend more aggressive controls on frontier models is still working through its process with no defined due date.
“We’re still taking input from stakeholders,” Lieu said, deferring to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on timing.
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