On heels of debt fight, House GOP rolls out tax-cut package

Just days after Washington’s bitter fight over raising the debt limit, House Republicans are calling for billions in new tax cuts.

GOP lawmakers unveiled a plan Friday that would offer a range of benefits to big businesses, small firms as well as millions of average Americans. A cost estimate was not immediately available, but Republicans are sure to take slings over the likely budget impact, coming so soon after the debt battle in which they decried federal red ink.

But the package — which would beef up the standard deduction and expand business research writeoffs, among other provisions — is being rolled out with an eye toward a year-end tax deal, something Democrats want as well. Many are already demanding an expansion of the child tax credit as the price of any agreement, which could swell the cost.

Lawmakers had hoped to strike a similar business-tax-breaks-for-family-friendly-benefits exchange during last year’s lame-duck session, though that got surprisingly little traction.

But many are eager to try again and see the end of this year as their last chance to do something big on the tax front during this session of Congress.

Part of the Republican plan would undo restrictions on several popular business tax breaks that recently came online. Lawmakers are facing mounting pressure from the business community to nix new restrictions on writeoffs for research and development expenses, in particular, which have jacked up the effective tax rates many companies pay. Along with restoring R&D breaks, their plan would also rescind tougher rules on capital and interest expense deductions.

Other parts of the plan would expand the so-called Opportunity Zone program, with an initiative specifically aimed at benefiting rural areas — something that is especially important to House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.).

There are tax cuts for individuals as well, including a plan to temporarily expand the standard deduction to the tune of $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for couples. Republicans would also kill an IRS crackdown on the taxes paid by gig workers Democrats pushed into law in 2021, but that has been delayed. At the same time, the bill would revoke some of the green energy tax credits Democrats created last summer.

The Ways and Means committee plans to take up the legislation next week.

Democrats have been highly critical of Republicans’ bid to cut taxes on businesses, but, ironically, Democrats might be better off going along with bigger benefits for companies.

That’s because, under the logic of Capitol Hill dealmaking, if one side gets a certain amount of money to spend, then the other gets a similar-sized allowance as well.

And expanding the child credit is costly, because it is claimed by so many people, so giving more to corporate America would mean Democrats would have a bigger budget to expand the child credit. They likely wouldn’t have enough to revive the lapsed, pandemic-era expansion that sent monthly checks to millions of Americans, so they would have to settle for something more incremental.

There are also some surprising omissions from the Republican plan, including a bipartisan proposal to cut taxes on auto dealers who complain that a combination of the pandemic and the arcane accounting rules they use to calculate their taxes temporarily sent their tax bills skyward.

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Trump's former AG challenges Dem argument on Biden-related FBI doc

The document was considered credible enough to get passed on, Barr says.

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New York court hears arguments to redraw the state’s congressional maps in 2024

ALBANY, N.Y. — A legal challenge that could eventually give New York Democrats a second crack at drawing new congressional district lines continued to work its way through the courts on Thursday, with a mid-level state appellate court hearing arguments that could restart redistricting by the end of the summer.

The gerrymandered lines drawn in 2022 that would have made Democrats the favorites in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts were thrown out on procedural grounds. That was the start of a rough year for Democrats in the state, who wound up winning only 15 of the 26 districts drawn by the courts and helped fuel Republicans’ ability to win back the U.S. House.

But lawyers with ties to the national party are now seeking to start the process from scratch — a move that could potentially help Democrats in 2024, particularly in the New York City suburbs where Republicans flipped three seats and will serve as one of the nation's top battlegrounds.

“For all their pontificating and high-minded rhetoric about trying to defend democracy, well here they’re trying to subvert it,” former Rep. John Faso, who has helped guide the GOP’s legal strategy around redistricting in recent years, said after the hearing. “Their goal here, if they win, is to put this case back into the backrooms of Albany and D.C. so they can gerrymander the whole state.”

A constitutional amendment New Yorkers approved in 2014 says that an “Independent Redistricting Commission” draws a set of maps, then the Legislature can vote them up or down. If they are voted down, the commission draws a second set of maps that are once again given to the Legislature. If they’re voted down a second time, then lawmakers can draw their own lines.

But the commission last year never got around to producing a second set of maps. The Democratic-dominated Legislature drew its own lines, though they were ultimately scrapped once the courts intervened and drew the current lines for New York’s 26 House seats.

At issue now is whether the maps drawn by the courts were a one-off deal used only for the 2022 elections.

“The IRC has a constitutional obligation to finish drawing New York’s congressional map,” said attorney Aria Branch of the Elias Law Group, a Democratic-aligned firm which brought the case. The court “drew a map in emergency circumstances for the 2022 elections only. That emergency is now over.”

If they win, the entire process would presumably start over. A reconstituted redistricting committee would hold hearings throughout the state this fall and produce new plans by January. If two sets of the maps are voted down, Democrats in the state Legislature could have a new chance to pick up the pen and draw more advantageous lines.

Republicans argue that such a solution would be off the table. They point to constitutional language that says that any redistricting plans “shall be in force” until after the next decennial census “unless modified pursuant to a court order.”

“The Legislature acted unconstitutionally with an unconstitutional gerrymander,” Faso said. “The only remedy was for the court to impose a remedy, and that’s what they did.”

The five judges who heard the case on Thursday repeatedly indicated that the 2022 decision from the Court of Appeals, New York’s top court, did not leave them with much guidance as to whether they envisioned the maps they ordered as permanent or a stopgap.

And the case will almost certainly end up back before the Court of Appeals no matter what Thursday’s judges wind up deciding.

“I can’t see how it won’t,” said New York Law School senior fellow Jeff Wice. “Either side’s going to appeal.”

And there’s a new wrinkle if the case ends up before the state’s top court. The court, which decided 5-4 in favor of Republicans in 2022, has since been revamped. Former Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, a one-time Republican who wrote the opinion in favor of the GOP, resigned last summer. Caitlin Halligan, who is viewed as more solidly Democratic, was sworn in on Wednesday.

New maps wouldn’t be a silver bullet for what ailed Democrats in New York in 2022. Even if the Democratic-drawn maps had remained on the books, they would have likely only won one additional seat due to terrible showings on Long Island, where Republicans swept all four seats, and parts of the northern New York City suburbs.

But new maps could, even if the changes are slight, help Democrats in some key congressional districts in a presidential election year in the heavily blue state.

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Biden, Sunak pledge ongoing Ukraine support

President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain on Thursday reiterated their unwavering, indefinite financial support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

“I believe we’ll have the funding necessary to support Ukraine as long as it takes, and I believe that we’re going to, that support will be real,” Biden said during a joint news conference at the White House. “Do we think Russia would stop at Kyiv? Do you think that’s all there would be happening? I think not, and I think the vast majority of my colleagues, even the critics that think that would not be the case as well.”

Despite Biden’s assurances, Republican leadership in Congress has set nondefense spending caps for the next two fiscal years, and it’s unclear whether those budgetary limits will leave enough wiggle room for additional Ukraine aid.

Sunak pointed to Britain’s NATO contributions above their required benchmark as proof that it intends to keep funding Ukraine’s military, and he vowed to keep supporting Ukraine even if other European allies don’t “follow the lead that the U.S. and the U.K. set.”

“We will be here for as long as it takes, and hopefully that will speed up the calculation in [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] mind that he should withdraw his forces and stop what is an illegal and unprovoked act of aggression,” Sunak said.

When asked whether it was time that NATO elect its first British secretary general in over 20 years, Biden conceded, “Maybe.”

“They have a candidate who is a very qualified individual, but we’re going to have a lot of discussion between us, in NATO, to determine what the outcome of that will be,” Biden said.

And despite Britain’s departure from the EU in 2020, Sunak said that the country would continue to be a contributor “for years to come” in the Ukrainian military effort.

“I know some people have wondered what kind of partner Britain would be after we left the EU,” Sunak said. “I’d say judge us by our actions.”

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Sunak and Biden reach for critical minerals deal in show of unity

The U.S. and U.K. will start negotiating a deal immediately to mitigate the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act.

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Why Mike Pence thinks he has a prayer in 2024

ANKNEY, Iowa — If you want to understand why Mike Pence believes he has a shot at winning the presidency, it’s best, friends and advisers say, to look at the framed parchment Bible verse he’s kept on his fireplace for more than 20 years.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,” reads the verse from Jeremiah, a gift from his wife.

Pence’s plans, spiritual and political, are coming into focus now. On Wednesday, he announced his presidential campaign — a long shot bid to rip the nomination from the grips of the man who made him vice president and then incited a mob that called for his execution.

He and his team believe that there is a path. But seeing it does, to a degree, require a belief in the supernatural.

He’s badly trailing his former running mate, Donald Trump, and finds himself behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by double digits, even with the vast donor network and name ID that comes with having been a former vice president. Perhaps more daunting is that his negatives are higher than any of his competitors: a product, it appears, of not doing Trump’s bidding on that fateful day in January 2021.

While he received a standing ovation at the Herbert Institute for Public Policy in Utah after noting to the audience he did his duty on Jan. 6, he has also been openly heckled by Trump’s base at least twice for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results. One time came in his own backyard at a recent National Rifle Association convention. “Good to see you, too,” he dryly responded to scattered boos at the gathering in Indianapolis earlier this year.

But Pence, with his announcement here and a trip to New Hampshire planned for Friday, is plowing ahead anyway in a primary where his rivals regard him as so little a threat that virtually none of them have yet criticized him by name.

In his announcement speech, Pence said that “the American people deserve to know that on [Jan. 6], President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. Our voters will be faced with the same choice. I chose the Constitution.”

Marc Short, Pence’s longtime confidant, teared up as he stood in the back of the room as Pence talked of Jan. 6. He said the campaign would be the “least poll-tested campaign,” and sloughed off Pence’s current position in the field. He, like other true Pence believers, thinks the race is more wide open than conventional wisdom suggests.

“He doesn’t have the same measuring stick,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and former neighbor of Pence. “He’s talking to his wife, and he’s reading the Bible, and he’s praying about it and trying to figure out if this is what God wants him to do. He’s probably paying more attention to that than he is any polling. That doesn’t mean he does not consider it. It’s just not his priority.”

In an often sunny speech dripping with references to Ronald Reagan and scripture at a Future Farmers of America Enrichment Center here, Pence introduced himself to voters as a pre-Trump conservative on issues ranging from foreign policy to abortion rights.

“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 he promised to govern as a conservative,” Pence said. “Together we did just that. Today he makes no such promise.”

For years, Pence prided himself in having his finger on the pulse of the conservative movement — “I was Tea Party before it was cool,” he once said — a bomb-throwing talking head on Fox News crusading against the likes of George W. Bush and John Boehner before Boehner brought him to heel as the chair of the Republican Study Committee. And for more than a decade, Pence has had his eye on the White House, eschewing potential campaigns in 2012 and 2016. It was during that latter cycle that Trump plucked him from the Midwest to be his running mate, saving him a tough reelection battle.

Pence’s theory of the case is based on a mix of divine intervention and a Rube Goldberg machine-like series of events. It goes like this: Trump and DeSantis cancel each other out in a murder-suicide pact, and Pence steals the evangelical vote in Iowa away from them both, as well as Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, who are vying for the same slice of caucus-goers.

Pence, his aides hope, will ultimately emerge from the rubble as a happy warrior who can tout the policy victories of the Trump era — with all of its ideology and none of its id — one who can connect better with voters in grassroots setting better than the top two candidates, particularly in all 99 Iowa counties aides say he’ll visit at least once.

But that’s a lot of hope on which to rest a candidacy.

“He's going to get a polite reception from groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition or Family Leader and these more socially conservative, Christian-oriented political groups,” said David Kochel, the veteran Iowa GOP strategist. “But at the end of the day, a lot of what we've seen about Pence is that he was disloyal, he could have done more, and that’s in the water, too. So he probably has a low ceiling. But he has the potential for a good showing with that block of voters in Northwest Iowa and elsewhere, but I don’t see him winning the Iowa caucuses.”

Much of Pence’s campaign is predicated on the idea of reintroducing himself as more than just Trump’s former vice president. Pence’s favorability tanked after Jan. 6, according to multiple polls. An April 2023 poll from The Wall Street Journal found that 60 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of him, up from 54 percent in December. Just 29 percent had a favorable view of him.

But both Pence and those around him insist they can overcome that — saying he is well known but not known well. They think he’ll at least get a shake from voters. After all, he is, they say, the former vice president and should be taken seriously.

And then there’s that verse from Jeremiah that’s still in his head. Between that, his wife, Karen, and a tightly knit clutch of loyal advisers, Pence is convinced, allies say, that he has a way forward.

Still, even some of those allies don’t believe he does. Republican state Sen. Josh Kimbrell of deep-red Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and, like Pence, a former talk show radio host, spent part of 2021 and 2022 guiding him around his early voting state. Last May, he told POLITICO that Pence was building a “groundswell of grassroots support here” and had done “a very good job of connecting with what I would say is the bread and butter of the Republican primary electorate.”

But in an interview with POLITICO this spring, Kimbrell had landed in a different place, speaking more favorably of DeSantis, whom he said had a “good pathway to win the presidency.”

As for Pence? “I still think he's a good person,” Kimbrell said. “I still think he would make a great president. I think in the current environment, he would have a hard time winning the Republican nomination.”

In some ways, Pence’s campaign is an ideological rescue mission as much as it is a political one: He is running, he has said, to restore the soul of traditional economic and foreign policy conservatism, while fusing it with the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration. Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who served as Pence’s lieutenant governor but is not ready to make an endorsement, told POLITICO that he is “ecstatic that he is talking about substance.”

“He’s talking about the things that are bankrupting this country,” Holcomb, who is term limited, said.

Former Indiana Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Gregg, who twice challenged Pence and remains in a text-friendly relationship with his old opponent, said Pence is in the exact position most beneficial to him.

“Mike Pence’s greatest strength is that people underestimate him,” Gregg said. “They really do. I did. They think he’s kind of a lightweight. And that man is the most focused, on-message candidate they’re ever going to meet.”

For Pence, there are worse things than being an underdog. He counts as his favorite movie Hoosiers, the 1980s basketball film about a small town high school team led to an improbable state championship by a washed out college coach. In fact, Pence had a chance to be an extra in the movie, he told POLITICO last year, but ultimately didn’t go to the filming at Hinkle Fieldhouse while living in nearby Broad Ripple. One path not taken but, perhaps, part of a larger plan.

“That’s just where he loves to be,” said Jeff Cardwell, a friend since the 1980s who Pence installed as state Republican Party chair when he was governor, and who remains in close touch with him. “He loves to be underestimated. Coming in as, with low expectations, the underdog, that’s a great place to step in.”

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Chinese citizens seek to block Florida’s law banning them from owning property

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Critics challenging a new Florida law that blocks some Chinese citizens and other foreigners from owning land in the state asked a federal court this week to block its implementation.

They say the new law, which takes effect July 1, is too vague and risks creating "Chinese exclusion zones" across vast swaths of the state, including many of Florida's largest cities. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the measure, FL SB264 (23R), into law in May.

"SB 264 fails to provide people of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to understand whether their property is subject to the law’s prohibitions," lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida wrote in their motion for an emergency preliminary injunction filed Tuesday.

A Florida Department of Economic Opportunity spokesperson said that the agency does not comment on pending litigation while a spokesperson for Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson did not provide a comment when requested. Both Simpson and the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, among others, are defendants in the case.

States across the country, including California and Texas, have introduced more than a dozen similar pieces of legislation in recent months. Florida’s would be the first to be enacted into law.

The lawsuit filed in U. S. District Court in Tallahassee is among several challenging recent actions by the GOP-controlled Legislature and DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president.

"We have a lot — a big increase in the number of people who are Chinese nationals coming," DeSantis said Wednesday during an event in Arizona. "Clearly the CCP is a major threat to this country and we need to make sure we are recognizing that."

Under the law, anyone buying agricultural land or property within 10 miles of a military base, installation or designated "critical" infrastructure must sign an affidavit saying they are not prohibited under state law from doing so.

It labels seven nations as a "foreign country of concern": China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.

According to the law, anyone "domiciled" in those nations who are not "lawful" U.S. residents may not purchase agricultural land after July 1. They are not allowed to buy other lands within 10 miles of military installations or critical infrastructure.

The new law specifically prohibits those from China from owning additional property or buying more than a single parcel of two acres that must be at least five miles from a military installation.

The bill faced opposition in the Legislature from Chinese Americans and visitors from China who said it would subject them to discrimination. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund joined the ACLU in May in suing the state on behalf of their clients.

The House bill sponsor, state Rep. David Borrero (R-Sweetwater), drew jeers from a committee hearing audience in April when he responded that the only people affected by the legislation would be members of the Chinese Community Party.

"This is your home — you have nothing to worry about," Borrero said. "You may purchase land."

In their request to U. S. District Judge Allen C. Winsor for an injunction, the plaintiffs argue that the state law is preempted by federal statutes and regulations that balance foreign affairs and national security with foreign investment.

"SB 264 upends that balance," the plaintiffs contend. "Disregarding the federal government’s judgments regarding the appropriate approach to China and other foreign nations, Florida has adopted its own draconian regulation of land purchases."

The opponents also argue that it's unclear who the law would apply to because "domiciled" has a stricter meaning under state law and could apply to those in the U.S. who have not been granted permanent residence status.

The "same uncertainty will undoubtedly chill sellers, agents, insurance companies, and countless others from doing business with noncitizens who may or may not be deemed to be 'domiciled' in China or another covered country," they stated.

The groups wrote that it's also unclear what is "critical" infrastructure or a military "installation" under the new law.

Critical infrastructure is defined by the law to include sea ports, airports, power plants or telecommunications systems. Military bases or installations must be more than 10 acres in size.

The groups argue that those are broadly and vaguely defined terms and that those who are affected now have no maps to determine where those zones are when the law takes effect July 1.

The law "will have the net effect of creating 'Chinese exclusion zones' that will cover immense portions of Florida, including many of the state’s most densely populated and developed areas," the injunction request stated.

And many other people will avoid buying property altogether to avoid unknowingly falling within an exclusion zone, the groups wrote.

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