Seven days until shutdown

Also, fake amendments vs. real amendments

The government is set to shut down in seven days.

There are two ways to avoid this: We can either pass a budget (which means passing 12 separate funding bills) or pass another temporary extension.

In reality, there’s no way the House and Senate are going to agree on a full budget in the next seven days. The House has only passed seven funding bills so far and the House and Senate have agreed on zero of them. Even assuming everyone started working in good faith tomorrow, we’re still a couple months from an actual budget deal.

So that leaves a temporary extension.

BUT agreeing to a temporary extension is what got the last Speaker fired. 

The new Speaker knows this - and he doesn’t want to be fired - so his plan was to pass as many funding bills as he can before asking his right-flank to go along with another temporary extension next week. 

Basically, he wants to show his right-flank that he’s trying very hard to do things the way they want in the hope that they’ll cut him some slack when he inevitably tells them he has to do a temporary extension. (Which was roughly former Speaker McCarthy’s strategy, by the way.)

This week, the Speaker’s goal was to pass two funding bills.

Tuesday night we tried to pass the first one. We had been there for over an hour voting on all these random amendments for the bill, and then, at last, we reached the vote for the actual bill. 

And just before it came to a vote, leadership took it down. No vote.

Same exact thing happened on the next funding bill. We had an hour of amendments leading up to the big vote on a funding bill, only to have the bill pulled off the agenda moments before the vote.

Why? Because of internal division within the majority party about the bills themselves. In short, some members of the majority want deeper cuts than others.

So, the Speaker’s plan didn’t work. Zero funding bills passed this week.

Next week is decision time for the Speaker. He’s going to have to go to his caucus with another temporary extension, and I honestly don’t know how they’re going to react. 

The Speaker is hoping that his right-flank basically says, “Ok, we’re not going to vote for a temporary extension, but we also won’t try to fire you if you bring it to a vote and it passes.” 

If we’re going to avoid a shutdown, that’s roughly what needs to happen. I don’t think there’s another path.

Fake amendments / real amendments

I mentioned that we voted on lots of amendments this week.

I just want to stress: A ton of these are fake efforts to get your attention.

Some examples:

• Reducing the salary of all employees of the Vice President to $1 (in other words, eliminate her entire staff)

• Reducing the salary of the Secretary of the Dept. of Transportation to $1

• Reducing the salary of the White House Press Secretary to $1

• Reducing the salary of the Securities and Exchange Chairman to $1

• Reducing salary of National Highway Transportation Administration head to $1

These aren’t designed to be serious. They’re for members to use in their fundraising emails and certain media outlets. 

Let me show you what the opposite of that approach looks like.

After I was elected, a handful of meteorologists from my district got in touch. They told me that Charlotte exists in a weather radar gap because the national weather radar network was built decades ago and back then we just didn’t get our own radar. We rely on a radar in South Carolina, and that means less accurate weather predictions for my district.

So I filed a bill a few months ago to try and fix that.

And then the work began. All kinds of issues developed with my bill, various objections were raised, modifications were made, partners were found. For something seemingly small, it became pretty tricky.

Once we had a new version of the bill, we settled on a different strategy: We’d file it as an amendment to a related bill that we knew was going to come up in the Science Committee, of which I’m a member.

And it finally happened this week. I had the opportunity to explain my amendment to my colleagues, and it passed unanimously. 

Then the bill itself passed, and now it’s headed for the floor.

That’s what a genuine effort to make amendments looks like, and I kinda love putting it in an email to all of you because I’m pretty sure you’re going to appreciate it more than all those amendments that only exist to grab your attention.

Also, I have to say: The Chairman of the Science Committee - who is not in my party - has been exceptionally kind and helpful all year. The fact that we’re in different parties doesn’t seem to matter to him one bit when it comes to working with me, and in a highly partisan environment I think he deserves a lot of credit for that.

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Campaign update

Two weeks ago, I announced I was running for Attorney General. 

I told you we had the opportunity to take a different approach to the campaign because of how many of you read this newsletter, and apparently that made sense to several thousand of you.

In other words, this is working roughly the way a campaign (ideally) should: I show you the work I’m doing, it meets a standard that matters to you, and then you have the option of supporting us directly in a way that allows us to keep doing that work.

I hope you’ll do that by contributing here - or, for those who asked for an alternative to ActBlue, by going here.

Best,

Jeff

P.S. - I just want you to know, to me politics is about trying to do good work. It’s not about the use of images to evoke a certain emotional response that connects to feelings of strength, valor, and patriotism.

Also, check out this photo from a recent event: