Heard on the Hill – 09/09/24
What we’re hearing from people we trust on and around the Hill.
What we’re hearing from people we trust on and around the Hill – please send us more tips!
Congressional Gold Medal awards: Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) will award the families of the 13 American servicemembers who were killed during the Biden-Harris administration’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan the Congressional Gold Medal tomorrow. The award is the highest one Congress can bestow, and it is the first of its kind for this Congress. The news of this award was first reported by the Washington Reporter.
Afghanistan accountability: Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released his report chronicling the Biden-Harris administration’s failures leading up to and in the aftermath of its decision to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Decoding DeFi hearing preview: Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, with the possible exception of Rep. Ritchie Torres, are expected to use this week’s hearing on the future of decentralized finance to focus on illicit finance and the Trump family’s DeFi project, we’re told. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.), will likely tie Trump to crypto, and claim that crypto itself is therefore bad. Republicans on the committee are expected to focus on the tech. Industry insiders note to us that the bigger hearing will be with SEC Chair Gary Gensler later this month.
SAVEty first: The House Rules Committee is taking up Speaker Johnson’s stop gap-funding bill, and is attaching the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship for voting.
Empire state of mind: Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) will be on Capitol Hill tomorrow for his long-awaited hearing about his COVID-era nursing home policies, which his detractors blame for thousands of unnecessary deaths. Cuomo’s allies responded to the hearing by lavishing praise on Anthony Fauci. In advance of the hearing, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R., Iowa), who’s on the COVID Select Committee, told the Reporter that she’s wondering “which Cuomo will show up? Will he be a chameleon like Kamala Harris and pretend he never said or did what he did and try to hide his true self serving nature?”
To BEAD or not to BEAD: On Tuesday, the Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing examining the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Brendan Carr, the top Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told us last week in an interview that the program, which Vice President Kamala Harris is in charge of, is the “single slowest moving broadband initiative in history.”
Team player: Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio) will be a special guest at a Washington, D.C. fundraiser next week for top Republican Senate candidates, including Jim Banks, Bernie Moreno, Sam Brown, Jim Justice, Hung Cao, Eric Hovde, Tim Sheehy, Mike Rogers, Dave McCormick, and Kari Lake. Tickets cost up to $50,000 for the joint fundraising committee.