Former President Trump is stepping up his war with Senate Republicans by calling for primary challenges next year against GOP incumbents who do not support investigating President Biden's family finances.
Many Senate Republicans have made clear they don’t want Trump to win their party’s nomination for president, and they’re leery about rallying to his defense given the former president’s polarizing effect on moderate Republican and swing voters.
Senate GOP aides and strategists argue they can’t do much regarding the Biden family's business dealings because they don’t have the power to issue subpoenas as the Senate’s minority party.
But GOP senators aren’t giving Trump much rhetorical support either — in sharp contrast from prominent House Republicans such as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Ron Bonjean, a GOP strategist and former Senate leadership aide, said the Trump call will appear to a number of Senate Republicans like a way for Trump to distract people from the investigations into his own activities.
But he suggested it isn’t likely to work.
“A good number of Senate Republicans take a more measured approach usually. They don’t knee-jerk to pressure,” Bonjean said.
Trump appears to be losing patience with Republican lawmakers on the fence about impeaching Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as the federal and state felony charges pile up against him along with his mounting legal bills.
Trump mocked GOP senators and House members who say they have “other priorities” and would prefer to leave the investigations of Hunter Biden and the Biden family's business dealings to the House committees.
“They sit back and they say, ‘We have other priorities, we have to look at other things.’ Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried. Get out. Out,” he declared at a Saturday rally in Erie, Pa.
The comments came a few days after Trump hit Senate Republicans for not taking a more aggressive approach to Biden’s personal finances.
“With all of these horrible revelations and facts, why hasn’t Republican ‘leadership’ in the Senate spoken up and rebuked Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats, Fascists, and Marxists for their criminal acts against our Country, some of them against me,” he demanded in a post on Truth Social.
Republican senators are cool to the idea of launching impeachment proceedings against Biden in the House and generally have kept their distance from House GOP threats to cut funding to the Department of Justice and FBI in response to more than 30 felony counts prosecutors have brought against Trump.
Asked last week whether he saw any merit to an impeachment inquiry into Biden, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said impeachment “ought to be rare rather than common.”
“I’m not surprised that having been treated the way they were, House Republicans last Congress, [they] begin open up the possibility of doing it again,” he said, referring to the two impeachments of then-President Trump by a Democratic-controlled House.
“And I think this is not good for the country to have repeated impeachment problems,” McConnell warned.
It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the House Republican-led investigations into the Biden family and the Department of Justice’s handling of criminal allegations against Hunter Biden.
Bonjean said “in any impeachment, there would be a trial in the Senate,” which is another reason why Republican senators want to preserve an appearance of impartiality and not rush to judgement about allegations of corruption against the sitting president.
Republicans up for reelection next year include Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), an outspoken Trump critic, as well as Republicans who have largely stayed quiet about the president, including Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.).
None of these incumbents appear vulnerable, but GOP strategists warn that Trump’s support could result in several of them facing credible primary challenges.
“They could. Some Senate Republicans could face primary pressure over the next year, but they have a lot of time to position themselves on the matter and see how things unfold,” Bonjean said.
Trump tried to drum up opposition in the last election cycle to Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
He was more successful in stirring up support for Murkowski's Republican challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, but his efforts to recruit a primary challenge to Thune in South Dakota quickly fizzled.
Senate Republicans believe they have a good chance to win back the Senate majority in 2024 because Democrats will have to defend 23 seats, while they only have to protect 11 GOP-held seats.
Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who served several fellowships in the Senate, said Trump’s calls for Republicans to embrace the partisan investigations of Biden’s family puts Republicans facing competitive general-election races next year in a tough spot.
“These are people who given the political physics of their congressional districts have to play a very exquisite balancing act. The idea that they move to impeach Biden does not play well in those districts,” he said of Republican lawmakers in competitive House districts.
Baker warned that some Senate Republicans could be in “jeopardy” in primaries next year if Trump decides to launch a full-scale assault against incumbents he views as reluctant allies.
“Think of people like Roger Wicker, who is someone who is seen as a pretty solid guy who votes the right way but is not an extremist,” Baker said, identifying a senator who might have to watch his right flank. “There are constituencies that will respond to any demand that Trump puts out who will say, ‘I can’t support [a senator] unless he gets on the impeachment bandwagon.’
“But I don’t think any Republican who is up for reelection wants to have to do that,” he said.
Baker said that Senate Republicans up for reelection don’t want to alienate the sizable share of the Republican electorate — which he estimates at about 25 percent of Republican voters — who don’t support Trump and don’t like the idea of GOP candidates embracing his scorched-earth tactics.
One Senate Republican aide defended the Senate GOP leadership from Trump’s broadsides by pointing out that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of McConnell’s leadership team, played a key role in publicizing an FBI 1023 form that makes reference to unsubstantiated allegations that Biden was involved in a foreign bribery scheme.
“We’re not in the majority, and we don’t have subpoena power. You see Chuck Grassley and [Sen. Ron] Johnson [R-Wis.] pulling the levers on oversight and whistleblowers,” the aide said.
The form, which FBI investigators use to catalogue raw, unverified claims by informants, received little attention from other Republican senators.
A second Senate Republican strategist who requested anonymity argued that Grassley has made important contributions to the House investigations of Biden’s, even if Senate Republican leaders have generally kept their distance.
“I can’t imagine any House Republican would say that the stuff that Grassley has uncovered in his ongoing efforts is less important than what they’re doing. But I think it’s really a matter of, House Republicans are in the majority and have subpoena power and can do a lot more that Republicans in the Senate can,” the aide said.
Updated at 7:23 a.m. ET.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) flirtation with impeaching President Biden is pleasing the right wing of his conference while not scaring moderates, keeping his fractious conference together while setting up the real possibility of a third presidential impeachment in less than five years.
The increased talk of impeachment comes as the GOP dives further into investigations of Hunter Biden, who on Wednesday saw his plea agreement get placed on hold after a federal judge questioned the scope of the deal.
The drive also has heavy political implications, with attacks on Biden and his family being fertile ground ahead of the 2024 election, especially with the economy rebounding in a way that could help the White House.
But going too far poses the risk of turning off swing-district voters and endangering moderates in McCarthy’s conference. Those members back investigating Biden, but they might not support an impeachment vote.
McCarthy’s efforts so far have threaded this needle as he insists that he will never pursue impeachment for “political purposes.”
“The Speaker has said that there may be an impeachment inquiry. That is not impeachment,” said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who represents a district Biden won in 2020. “That is Congress continuing its responsibilities to look into the issues that have been raised.”
“Are they producing enough facts and evidence that warrant taking it to the next step? I don't think it's there at the moment. But these committees are doing their job,” Lawler said.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), another swing district Republican, said an impeachment inquiry effort poses an electoral risk “if it looks like it's rushed and we're not doing due process and due diligence.”
“But if we're very thorough about it. … I think the voters will feel differently,” Bacon said.
In a closed-door conference meeting Wednesday, McCarthy put no timeline on starting an impeachment probe and urged members not to overstate the evidence obtained so far, according to several GOP members.
Conservatives who have been pushing for the impeachment of Biden administration officials generally offered support for McCarthy’s approach as they try to pull the Speaker to the right on a host of other policy and spending matters.
“I don’t think there’s any question that him speaking to that has caused a paradigm shift,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said of McCarthy floating an impeachment inquiry.
McCarthy and other Republicans point to numerous issues they see stemming from information compiled from IRS whistleblowers who allege prosecutors slow-walked the Hunter Biden tax crime investigation, and from financial records they obtained that show President Biden falsely denied his family made money from China.
“Let's just say there's a whole hell of a lot of smoke, and our job is to present the fire,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), adding he would support an impeachment inquiry against Biden.
Not all conservatives are pleased, though. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) sees impeachment talk as a distraction from the right flank’s push to get McCarthy to agree to lower spending levels in appropriations bills.
“This is impeachment theater,” Buck said on CNN Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s responsible for us to talk about impeachment. When you start raising the 'I' word, it starts sending a message to the public, and it sets expectations.”
Republicans have not proven President Biden was part of any of Hunter Biden’s business activities, interfered in his criminal case, or directly financially benefited from his son’s foreign business dealings.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly said the president “was never in business with his son.
And Ian Sams, White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, tweeted on Monday night that McCarthy was focusing on impeachment inquiry “instead of focusing on the real issues Americans want us to address like continuing to lower inflation or create jobs.”
McCarthy suggested a potential impeachment inquiry could not center directly on those issues, but instead on the Biden administration’s cooperation with the House GOP probes.
“If the departments in government, just like Richard Nixon used, deny us the ability to get the information we’re asking, that would rise to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said on Tuesday.
Republicans also argue the weight of a formal impeachment inquiry would give the House more power to get the information it seeks from its various investigations.
“If we don't have access to the information, then you do have to escalate the oversight of the House,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.), another Biden-district Republican, echoed after a GOP conference meeting on Wednesday.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said that when he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee setting up impeachment of former President Donald Trump four years ago, his theory that an impeachment inquiry would give more weight to enforcing subpoenas did not pan out.
“We thought that it puts the weight of the House behind the request, not just the weight of a committee,” Nadler said. “It didn’t work.”
Democrats are scoffing at the GOP impeachment effort. Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison suggested McCarthy’s interest in impeaching Biden was a way for him to do the “bidding” of Trump — though McCarthy told reporters Tuesday he had not talked to the former president about a potential impeachment inquiry.
“I don't think that they've been prevented from getting information that they want. I think the biggest problem they have is all of the information that they've gotten does not support their overreaching and unsubstantiated conclusions and allegations,” said Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.). “He is using that as an excuse to start an impeachment inquiry without any evidence of wrongdoing.”
And while the House GOP conference is largely lining up behind McCarthy as he floats impeachment for now, there is potential for frustrations to flare if members resist efforts to move forward on an actual inquiry in the future.
“At this point, I don't know how there can’t be support for it. Any Republican that can't move forward on impeachment with all the information and overwhelming evidence that we have — I really don't know why they're here, to be honest with you,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
Senate Republicans see impeaching President Biden ahead of the 2024 election as a risky political strategy that could turn off moderate voters and are hoping to wave their House GOP colleagues off from marching down that road.
GOP senators say the party is better off focused on how to improve Americans’ lives in the future instead of fighting messy battles to settle past political scores.
“Staying focused on the future and not the past is in my view the best way to change the direction of the country and that’s to win an election,” Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) told reporters Tuesday.
Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairwoman Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said Tuesday she would prefer to focus on national security policy, which the Senate is debating this week as it wraps up work on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
“I’m really focused on NDAA right now. I really want to see it get done and I want a bipartisan deal between the House and the Senate. I think that’s what we’re focused on,” Ernst told reporters. “We need to get our [appropriations] bills done, too. So, that’s what we’re going to focus on in the Senate.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday strongly signaled to reporters that the House could move forward with an impeachment inquiry.
“How do you get to the bottom of the truth? The only way Congress can do that is go to an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday. “What an impeachment inquiry does, it gives us the apex of the power of Congress for Republicans and Democrats to gather the information that they need.”
However, McCarthy later said no decision had been made, raising doubts about whether he’d move forward with the step.
“I wasn’t announcing it,” he said. “I simply say … that the actions that I'm seeing by this administration, with holding the agencies from being able to work with us — that would rise to the level of an impeachment inquiry. We … still have a number of investigations going forward.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) declined to comment on McCarthy's impeachment push when asked about it on his way to the Senate floor.
Senate Republicans have generally kept their distance from the House Republican-led investigations into the Biden family’s business dealings and earlier this summer dismissed what they saw as a hastily filed motion by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to impeach Biden for lacking evidence and due process.
“I know people are angry. I’m angry at the Biden administration for their policies at the border and a whole host of other things, but I think we also need to look at what’s achievable,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said last month in response to Boebert’s impeachment resolution.
“And with a Democratic majority in the Senate, I don’t think that’s achievable,” he warned.
Cornyn on Tuesday remarked that the House standards for impeaching a president have dropped in recent years.
House Democrats impeached former President Trump in December of 2019 and then again in January of 2021.
He told reporters that impeaching presidents is getting to be "a habit around here," and that's not a good thing.
“Unfortunately, what goes around, comes around,” he said.
Senate Republicans remember the last time a Republican-controlled House impeached a Democratic president in the fall of 1998, it backfired on their party in that year’s midterm election.
Democrats picked up five House seats that year, marking the first time in 64 years the president’s party didn’t lose any seats in Congress during a midterm election.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who voted twice to convict Trump on impeachment charges during two separate Senate trials, said it’s not unusual for lawmakers to launch baseless attacks against a major party’s nominee for president, as happened to him in 2012.
Romney said Biden should open up about his family’s business dealings to reassure the public.
“There are all sorts of accusations and allegations. I had something of that nature launched against me when I was running for president. I found the best way to respond was full disclosure and transparency. My guess is that’s the way to make it go away,” he said. “I’ll expect to see that from the Biden team.
Romney reminded his House colleagues that the “bar” for impeachment is “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“That hasn’t been alleged at this stage, but we’ll see what develops. I certainly hope that that’s not going to confront us again,” he said.
Cornyn warned Tuesday that further lowering the bar for impeachment will set a precedent for future Congresses.
“Once a precedent is established around here, you can pretty well guarantee people will cite that as justification or lower the bar further. I don’t think it’s a healthy thing,” he said.
Even so, Cornyn acknowledged that House investigators have uncovered some troubling evidence shedding light on Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“I’m very disturbed by some of the revelations in the House about the Biden family business,” he said.
GOP senators are not eager to get drawn into a protracted battle with Democrats over an impeachment trial that may wind up dividing their conference if House investigators fail to come up with compelling evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, the standard set by the Constitution.
Investigations by the House Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees into Hunter Biden’s business dealings and whether he received favorable treatment from the Department of Justice have failed to gain much public traction, or even support from Senate Republicans on the other side of the Capitol.
Trump on Monday vented his frustration with Senate Republicans for not showing much interest in pursuing Biden.
“Why hasn’t Republican ‘leadership’ in the Senate spoken up and rebuked Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats, Fascists, and Marxists for their criminal acts against our Country, some of them against me. How long does America have to wait for the Senate to ACT?” Trump demanded in a post to his social media site, Truth Social.
National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines (Mont.) told reporters Tuesday that it’s the job of the House, not the Senate, to investigate Biden.
“It will be up to the House to determine what the facts lead them to vote on in the future. That’s their job,” he said.
Some Republican senators, however, argued Tuesday that House Republicans are justified in moving forward with an impeachment inquiry.
“Considering what the House Oversight Committee is unearthing — we can’t help that the FBI didn’t do their job for five years — now they’re finding all this information out. They’re still digging and appropriately so,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who asserted that House investigators have found “pretty strong evidence of serious crimes.”
“Whether we like it or not, we may have to deal with it,” he said. “I think the Speaker is doing what he needs to do and what’s appropriate to do, quite honestly.”
Asked about his Senate Republican colleagues’ reluctance to wade into another impeachment fight, Cramer said: “I’m not eager to get on an airplane every Monday morning.”
“We don’t do this for our own convenience, we do this because we pledge an oath and we have a president who clearly has over the years been running a really awful family crime syndicate,” he said. “We’ve got to look into it.”
He said when Democrats controlled the House during the Trump administration, “We impeached the president twice with no evidence in the kangaroo court.”
House Republicans are set to meet as a group one final time ahead of the August recess on Wednesday amid tensions over the annual appropriations process, a push to expunge former President Trump’s impeachments and questions over who they might impeach in the Biden administration.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has shaken up the final question by suggesting in an interview on Fox News on Monday night that the impeachment targets could include the president himself.
He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that Republican-led investigations into Biden are “rising to the level of impeachment inquiry” and didn’t back away from the suggestion in remarks to reporters Tuesday.
The statements by McCarthy offer red meat to the GOP base and hard-line conservatives in the conference who are jumping at the chance to go after Biden amid anger over what many Republicans see as favorable treatment by the Department of Justice.
They also come as McCarthy is trying to soothe conservatives angered by the direction of federal spending.
It’s the latest balancing act for the Speaker, who is managing a razor-thin majority and must navigate differences between conservatives and more moderate members of his conference, some of whom do not support as steep of spending cuts and do not want to expunge Trump’s impeachment or impeach Biden.
“We’ve got a narrow majority and we’re trying to work our way to a consensus and hopefully we will,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Rules Committee, said of the appropriations process.
McCarthy must also contend with Trump, the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, whom he risks angering should he fail to schedule a vote to expunge his impeachments. That dynamic could grow if Trump is hit with his third indictment of 2023 this week.
Wednesday’s Republican conference meeting — its regular weekly gathering — provides McCarthy with one final opportunity to alleviate tensions and rally his GOP troops ahead of a critical week, and a long summer break.
Top of the legislative to-do list is appropriations, as Congress stares down a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown. The House is scheduled to vote on the first two of 12 appropriations bills this week, even as conservatives remain skeptical of leadership's efforts to cut spending.
Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus put GOP leadership on notice Tuesday, announcing they want to review all 12 appropriations bills — and assess the overall price tag — before voting on any individual measures. All appropriations bills have been released by the Appropriations Committee, but two are still being marked up.
“We are united in the belief that we have to see what the entire cost is before we can start working on individual pieces of it. Because again, you will be left with a very small piece of that pie that we might have to take a lot of the spending out of,” Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), one of the Freedom Caucus members, said Tuesday.
That posture could make it tougher for McCarthy to pass the first two appropriations bills, which Democrats are expected to oppose because they were marked up at levels below the debt limit deal. If liberals are united in opposition, the Speaker will only be able to lose a handful of his members.
McCarthy brushed aside any concerns Tuesday.
“It’s your same question every week, and I haven't changed my opinion yet,” he told reporters.
The appropriations fight is at risk of being drowned out by Trump, with the former president on indictment watch and House conservatives pushing for a vote on expunging his impeachments.
Trump last week said the Justice Department informed him that he is a target in their investigation into his efforts to remain in office following the 2020 presidential election — which includes the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — a notification that often precedes charges being filed.
That news came within days of a Politico report that said McCarthy — in an effort to ease tensions with Trump after the Speaker questioned his strength as a candidate — promised to stage a vote on resolutions to expunge the former president's impeachments by the end of September, the constitutionality of which has been questioned by some.
McCarthy, who is in favor of expungement, denied ever vowing to hold a vote on the measures. But the report nonetheless resurfaced conservative calls to wipe away the impeachments, much to the chagrin of moderate Republicans.
“President Trump was wrongfully impeached twice — twice — and both of these impeachments must be expunged by the House of Representatives,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a lead sponsor of one of the expungement resolutions, said on the House floor Tuesday.
Those demands will likely grow louder if Trumps is indicted.
McCarthy risks angering Trump and his allies if he does not schedule a vote on the resolutions; but if he does, they would almost certainly fail amid opposition from moderates.
The risk of angering Trump and hard-line conservatives is especially acute as appropriations season heats up — a time when McCarthy is trying to unite his conference behind spending bills to avoid a shutdown.
Some conservatives, however, were pleased with McCarthy opening up the possibility of an impeachment inquiry, a move that could help simmer tensions between the Speaker and his right flank in the sprint to Sept. 30.
“I don’t think there’s any question that him speaking to that has caused a paradigm shift,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said Tuesday.
Emily Brooks contributed.
This story was updated at 8:12 a.m.
House Republicans are bracing for fights over spending as GOP leadership aims to bring the first two of 12 appropriations bills to the floor this week, despite vocal criticism from the party’s right flank over not cutting enough spending.
Democrats are not expected to give the GOP any help with passing the funding bills, leaving Republicans to pass them with just a slim majority — creating the very real possibility that the GOP will be short on votes.
How the GOP deals with the first two bills ahead of a long August recess will set the tone for expected spending showdowns ahead of a Sept. 30 government funding deadline, and potentially bigger spending showdowns with the Senate this fall.
Hard-line conservatives have long pressed Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to further slash spending in the House bills, aiming to take the most extreme position ahead of expected funding negotiations with the Senate this fall.
A group of 21 House Republicans, made up of mostly members of the House Freedom Caucus and their allies, wrote in a letter to the Speaker earlier this month that they plan to vote against spending bills they think contain insufficient overall cuts.
The two measures scheduled for House consideration this week are the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and military construction bill, along with the agriculture, rural development and Food and Drug Administration bill. The first actually boosts funding for the VA, in an effort to combat Democratic talking points that claimed Republicans would slash benefits for veterans.
A main disagreement between the right flank and GOP, referenced in the letter earlier this month, is over “reallocated rescissions to increase discretionary spending above that top-line,” decrying what some have called a “budgetary gimmick” to include clawbacks of previously approved spending in getting to fiscal 2022 levels.
The House Freedom Caucus is set to hold a press conference with the president of advocacy group FreedomWorks on Tuesday morning about the appropriations bills.
“Democrats intentionally funded a bloated federal bureaucracy, and if we don’t reset discretionary spending now, Republicans are effectively accepting and enshrining absurd COVID levels,” FreedomWorks said in a post urging the public to demand lower spending levels.
Some conservatives have expressed confidence that the Appropriations Committee-approved bills will see changes before final passage — and it is a possibility through either the House Rules Committee or amendments.
Those in the right flank are also prioritizing policy changes through the power of the purse.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) summarized the position of hard-line conservatives in a tweet Monday: “To consider funding federal government: 1) Return Federal Bureaucracy to Pre-COVID, 2) End Border Invasion & fed attack on Texas, 3) End FBI Weaponization, 4) End Racist DEI Govt Policies, 5) Make Europe Handle Ukraine, 6) End War on Reliable Energy.”
The 10 bills passed out of the House Appropriations Committee so far did so along partisan lines, with Democrats angry that House Republicans moved to write the 12 appropriations bills with an overall top-line target that was lower than the spending caps that McCarthy negotiated with President Biden in the debt limit increase bill in June.
The White House on Monday said that Biden would veto either bill if it came to his desk, taking issue not only with the additional spending cuts and recissions, but with culture war provisions concerning abortion, diversity and inclusion initiatives and gender-affirming care.
Pressure from hard-line conservatives poses challenges for Republican appropriators and moderates. The challenge, they note, is making sure that final funding bills can eventually pass the House and get signed into law.
“You’re not gonna get everything you want. But they are getting numbers-wise and policy-wise many of the things that are good for them,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), a subcommittee chairman on the House Appropriations Committee and chairman of the more moderate Republican Governance Group caucus, recently told The Hill.
“It’s important to pass appropriations bills that dictate the policies and procedures and how the money is going to be spent and where it’s going to be spent,” Joyce said, adding that it’s “certainly an understanding we haven’t reached yet.”