McCarthy Speaker quest leaves balancing act on national security

Posted on (Updated by Rebecca Beitsch

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is toeing a delicate line on national security issues in the lame-duck session as he seeks to win enough votes on the House floor to win the Speakership in January.

McCarthy is torn between competing factions of the GOP as he weighs a series of moves targeting the Biden administration and other Washington Democrats in the next Congress — all while trying to convince conservative GOP lawmakers to back him for Speaker.

He’s vowed to boot California Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell off the House Intelligence Committee and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He’s also threatened to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of the southern border.

And McCarthy has indicated he will withhold GOP support for a lame-duck vote on a bipartisan defense policy bill as a way to fight “wokeism” in the military.  

If the delay is successful, it would mark the first time in more than 60 years that has Congress failed to reauthorize Pentagon spending by the end of a calendar year; the delay would allow a GOP House to take it up next year.

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Democrats have blasted McCarthy’s plans to boot Democrats from panels as purely political, while Republicans say Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) set Congress on that slippery slope when House Democrats impeached former President Trump twice and later expelled two Republicans from their committee seats.

The House voted last year to punish Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) for sharing an animated video showing him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) was removed months earlier for promoting the execution of leading Democrats before she was elected to office. 

McCarthy blamed Democrats for “this new standard.”

“Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on committee,” McCarthy said at the start of 2022. “This is a new level of what the Democrats have done.”

For Schiff, McCarthy has zeroed in on his role in the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, accusing him of lying to the public about the former president’s ties to Moscow and Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. He’s bashed Swalwell for his ties to a Chinese spy with whom he cut off contact after being warned of her true identity by the FBI.

Schiff said his targeting is nothing more than an effort by McCarthy to win support for his Speakership bid.

McCarthy was elected Speaker-designate in a closed-door GOP conference vote, but lost 31 votes. He will need to win over many of them to be elected Speaker on the House floor.

“McCarthy’s problem is not with what I have said about Russia. McCarthy’s problem is, he can’t get to 218 without Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz,” Schiff said Sunday during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union." 

“And so he will do whatever they ask. And, right now, they’re asking for me to be removed from our committees. And he’s willing to do it. He’s willing to do anything they ask.”

The Mayorkas fight reflects the awkward line that McCarthy is trying to walk.

He courted conservative votes last week by vowing an investigation of Mayorkas but did not fully embrace an impeachment vote, allowing himself wiggle room to change his mind next year.

“If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate. Every order, every action and every failure will determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said at a press conference in El Paso, Texas.

In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) expressed doubt the GOP would be able to impeach Mayorkas swiftly.

“You’ve got to build a case. You need the facts, evidence before you indict. Has he been derelict in his responsibilities? I think so,” he said.

Other Republicans, however, want to go full steam ahead, suggesting anything short of Mayorkas’s removal would put the country’s security at risk.

“He needs to go,” Rep. Ronnie Jackson (R-Texas) told Fox News on Sunday. “We need to make an example of Mayorkas. And he will be just the start of what we do in this new Congress.”

Other Republicans have dismissed an impeachment vote as a stunt.

“It would basically be putting form over substance to go through a big performance on impeachment that’s never going anywhere,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a George W. Bush appointee, said over the weekend, “rather than actually working with the administration to solve the problem.”

McCarthy also faces divisions on delaying the defense bill, as some Republicans want to move forward and also pull back from threats to limit support for Ukraine. 

McCarthy says he wants to pump the breaks on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and another round of funding to aid Ukraine in its battle against Russia, saying he wouldn’t back a “blank check.”

“I’ve watched what the Democrats have done on many of these things, especially the NDAA — the wokeism that they want to bring in there,” McCarthy told reporters shortly after the midterms. “I actually believe the NDAA should hold up until the 1st of this year — and let’s get it right.”

McCarthy is far from the only Republican with complaints about the NDAA. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) put out a report slamming the “Woke Warfighters” of the Pentagon. But McCarthy is also facing pressure from the right.

“Let’s hold the bill hostage. Let’s leverage what we have,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who opposes McCarthy’s Speakership bid, recently said on a podcast. 

Democrats and the Biden administration argue a delay will hurt the military.

“If you kick it off four, five, six months, you are really damaging the United States military. So I hope Kevin McCarthy understands that,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said. “You are damaging the United States military every day past Oct. 1 that you don’t get it done, and certainly more so every day past" Jan. 1.

On Ukraine, some Republicans have bristled at the idea of holding back any funding as the country continues to make advances against Russia.

“We're going to make certain they get what they need,” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said in an appearance alongside McCaul.

“The fact is, we are going to provide more oversight, transparency and accountability. We're not going to write a blank check,” McCaul added. “Does that diminish our will to help the Ukraine people fight? No. But we're going to do it in a responsible way.” 

Jan. 6 panel seeks to break through with prime-time programming

Posted on (Updated by Rebecca Beitsch

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is preparing for a crucial week as it prepares to finally share with the public the fruits of its months-long investigation into the riot in prime time on Thursday. 

The 8 p.m. hearing kicking off a series of meetings shows the committee is eager to reach a broad segment of Americans and relay the extent to which democracy itself was at stake that day. 

“The goal here is to construct this narrative,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies with Brookings.  

“What they want to do is go through the countless depositions that they've taken and other evidence that they gathered and figure out a way to try and convey a story to the public.” 

The challenge is making a captivating case for a wide audience, particularly those who feel they already know what happened that day or who are ready to move on from the attack. 

According to polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the country is nearly evenly divided on how much it wants to reflect on the day. 

While 52 percent said it’s important to learn more about what happened, 48 percent said it was “time to move on.” The divide is almost entirely partisan. 

“I do think that the committee will have difficulties in communicating messages because of the kind of segregated information environment in which a lot of the American public exists,” Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, told The Hill. 

“That said, I do think the visual of a solemn public hearing and live testimony plus, in all likelihood video material, could focus attention in a way [for] the members of the American public are otherwise not thinking about these issues.” 

Putting the hearing in prime-time shows the committee doesn’t want to just reach those who already view the attack as a grievous assault on democracy. It wants to reach independents and even conservatives who have heard GOP leaders brand the panel as a partisan witch hunt. 

Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor who helped craft the UMass poll, said even with the sharp partisan divide, there are those who don’t have strong feelings about the attack. 

“We're finding in the poll that about 19 percent of people are purely independent. And then there's another 9 percent who lean Democratic and another 8 percent lean Republican. So there is a little bit of mushiness in the middle. And those people potentially can be shifted,” he said, noting that just one-third of Americans strongly identify as conservative. 

“If there really is damning evidence of long-term planning, involvement in collusion by the president or his top advisers … that does have the potential to move some people.” 

Rhodes and others have warned the committee must be careful in how it frames such messaging. 

“I think the most important [thing] might be this is not perceived as a Trump versus Biden frame, which the first impeachment hearing pretty much was, but rather it imparts a Trump versus Pence framework. I think that there are many people that are concerned about the direct threat to Mike Pence that occurred on Jan. 6,” Goodman said.  

“I think that captures attention in a very different way. It’s not as political or partisan.” 

There are signs the committee could be leaning in that direction. Multiple outlets reported the panel has been in discussions about inviting Pence’s legal advisers and chief of staff to testify. 

“As soon as this is perceived as or appears to be a strictly partisan affair and an attack on the Republican Party as an institution, then you're going to get a lot of resistance or skepticism,” Rhodes said. 

“To the degree that the messages can be about upholding and maintaining institutions and values that benefit people, regardless of party, the more you will get at least a willingness to hear some of these concerns.” 

The panel’s makeup could help it.  

Republicans in the House objected during the two committee impeachment proceedings on Trump, but the two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel agree with its objectives.

“Each hearing is going to be different than I think a lot of what we're used to seeing because everyone is rowing in the same direction. So you have the Democrats and you have [Rep. Liz] Cheney [R-Wyo.] and [Rep. Adam] Kinzinger [R-Ill.], so the committee is bipartisan, but they are all in pursuit of a shared goal in a way that just is not true of other recent high profile investigations, whether it be the Trump impeachment or Benghazi,” Reynolds said. 

“That’s going to make for a serious exposition of the facts that's just going to feel different than what we’ve gotten used to.”    

Goodman said the absence of Republicans opposed to the committee’s mission will not just change the tone but even the way in which information is presented. 

“I do not think that the hearings are going to be anything like the circus that has existed in hearings — and the impeachment hearings — in that past in which some members of Congress were simply playing to kind of a right-wing media. And so this will be a more solemn hearing which is going to be truth seeking, [that’s] the way in which I see it. And I don't think that hearings are going to be a source of disinformation. I think they're going to be a source of information,” he said. 

The committee has not yet announced who will testify at the first hearing, but it has pledged to release never before seen footage from Jan. 6. 

“The committee will present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings, and provide the American people a summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” it said in a Thursday statement. 

It’s not clear what type of footage the committee plans to present at the hearing. 

While in the past it’s relied on visceral imagery — including an officer being smashed by rioters in a doorway and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) barely escaping as the mob closed in on the Senate chamber — even new footage of the attack may seem repetitive to those who watched it unfold live on television. 

But Goodman said video recordings from some of the committee’s more than 1,000 depositions could be captivating for the public. 

Rhodes also said new information will be key, especially to break through in an unusually busy summer news cycle. 

“It can be a challenge to get people to refocus on events that occurred in the past, especially when there's going to be a lot of elite disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about what happened and who was involved in with what culpability,” he said. “I think that's a real challenge even though it sounds like the committee is going to have a lot of really juicy and damning information to share.”  

“They may be able to bring attention especially if they come out with some really shocking new revelations but it is going to be a challenge to break through everything that's going on right now.”