Congress
Krishnamoorthi steps down as top Democrat on House China panel
Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi is stepping down as the top Democrat on the select House committee on competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the move ahead of a public announcement.
Krishnamoorthi is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Dick Durbin. The panel has been generally lauded as a bipartisan effort to investigate and analyze economic and political matters surrounding the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping.
Congress
Lawmakers seek to limit DHS power to shuffle cash in funding bill
Top appropriators on Capitol Hill are seeking to tighten limits around how much money DHS can shift between accounts as they finalize funding bills ahead of the Jan. 30 shutdown deadline.
Rep. Mark Amodei, the Nevada Republican who chairs the DHS funding panel, told reporters Tuesday night that House and Senate appropriators are crafting their spending measure to make it “harder to make the money mobile.” The effort comes as the Trump administration has spent the past year testing the limits of its power to disregard congressional intent and reprogram billions of dollars between accounts.
“We did a bunch of reprogramming,” Amodei said of Republicans in the White House. “It’s like, hey, that’s bullshit.”
To limit the Trump administration’s ability to shift cash, appropriators plan to include tables within the bill that show exactly which accounts should be funded and lower the percentages of cash that can be used for other purposes, Amodei continued.
Appropriators have briefed President Donald Trump’s budget office on the funding bill they hope to pass and have taken OMB’s input into account, Amodei said. Still, he acknowledged that some Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, will not be fond of new restrictions on moving around cash.
“Now I know that the secretary doesn’t like that,” Amodei said. “And it’s like, well, we’ve all got our unlike departments. And so welcome to the club.”
He also divulged that the funding bill will provide enough cash for DHS to keep 44,500 immigrants in detention facilities at any given time. Appropriators will be tracking detention capacity every month and expect the Trump administration to fill that “detention bed” capacity, he added.
“They better, by God, be full,” said Amodei.
Amodei is in the midst of final negotiations with senior Senate appropriators on the DHS funding bill. “We’re real close,” he said. “We want to be able to publish the bill this week.”
Congress
GOP-led Jan. 6 committee sets first hearing for next week
The new Republican-led panel tasked with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack will hold its first hearing next week, Rep. Barry Loudermilk said in an interview Tuesday — the five-year anniversary of the event.
The Georgia Republican, who is the chair of the select subcommittee, said his panel was still ironing out its list of witnesses, but he anticipated the focus would be the pipe bombs left at the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters the day before the riots at the Capitol.
“It’s gonna be sometime next week,” Loudermilk said. “We’re gonna be really looking at the pipe bomb and the FBI’s investigation — previous investigation. Why did it take five years?”
News of the hearing that would look at the events of that day through the lens of security failures rather than attempts by President Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election was the culmination of a daylong campaign from Republicans to offer an alternative memory of the Capitol attack.
The White House published a website offering a largely false narrative of what unfolded at the Capitol five years ago — one that blamed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and forcefully denied Trump’s role in inciting the violence. Democrats and Republicans also fought over the fate of a commemorative plaque mandated by Congress to honor those who protected the Capitol on Jan. 6, with Speaker Mike Johnson maintaining the project was untenable.
Loudermilk said he had not spoken to Johnson about the memorial tablet and hasn’t been following the controversy around it but suggested he wasn’t opposed to its display — something of a break with House GOP leadership have sought to either bury the matter or denigrate the effort.
“I don’t have problem putting it up. I think you need to honor the police,” he said. “I mean, the rank and file police, they were just trying to do their job.”
Congress
Johnson: U.S. military action in Greenland ‘would not be appropriate’
Speaker Mike Johnson Tuesday evening swatted down the idea of any U.S. military action to take over Greenland, just after the White House said President Donald Trump wanted to acquire the territory and would not take military action off the table.
“No, I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday evening.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday that “utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal.”
The speaker, who said he hadn’t seen the statement, appeared to not believe the White House would make such a comment. Johnson did say he believed “Greenland is viewed by a lot of people as something that would be a strategic positioning for the U.S.”
Johnson said the issue didn’t come up in conversations with Trump earlier Tuesday at the House GOP retreat.
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