Today’s notice: Reconciliation is only going to get tougher when the Senate chimes in. A powerful political operator you should know more about. How MAHA is battling over SNAP benefits and soda. Judge Pirro’s long FEC fight. And fill out the NOTUS survey so we can serve you better!
How the Cooling Saucer May Freeze Out Reconciliation
The House’s reconciliation process is ongoing, unpredictable and slow. But the House drama may prove to be the easy part, NOTUS’ Ursula Perano and Helen Huiskes report.
“All along, both chambers have maintained wildly different visions for the reconciliation bill,” they write, and as the House moves forward with a bill aimed at keeping the GOP’s tiny minority together, there’s no indication the Senate GOP will simply swallow whatever the House produces. This, of course, puts additional pressure on the timing of everything — with congressional leaders saying they want this thing done by July while neither chamber has released a word of language.
The biggest potential disagreement is over Medicaid cuts. Throughout the reconciliation process, the Senate has seemed poised to be a moderating influence over those reductions. But when Speaker Mike Johnson ruled last week that there wouldn’t be cuts to the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage — essentially a breakdown dictating how much states and the federal government pay for certain Medicaid enrollees — senators suggested that FMAP is open for discussion.
In a section-by-section summary of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s piece of the bill released Sunday night, Republicans didn’t really touch FMAP, but the committee’s chair, Rep. Brett Guthrie, told members that they had found “north of $900 billion” in cuts in their portion of the reconciliation bill, NOTUS’ Hill team reports. That’s a number senators may be uncomfortable with.
Given the inevitable disagreements, some Republican senators are already suggesting a conference committee. That worked when the GOP passed the original tax cuts in Trump 1.0. But every little change the Senate makes will come with consequences on the House side — and this time, Republicans are discussing real spending cuts, not just lower taxes. “The politics of this reconciliation bill are much tougher than the reconciliation bill Republicans passed in 2017,” Ursula and Helen write.
The Man Who Built Modern Anti-Trans Politics
The American Principles Project was among the very first conservative groups to run serious campaigns around the opposition to expanded trans rights. Liz Skalka reports for NOTUS on the guy who invented that effort: APP president Terry Schilling.
In an expansive piece, she looks at Schilling’s history as an activist as well as the political style he created, tracing how support for so-called “bathroom bills” went from being a GOP liability in the 2016 North Carolina gubernatorial race to one of the party’s strengths in 2024.
President Donald Trump was already talking about trans players in women’s sports before he was introduced to Schilling, but last July, Schilling met the president and showed him data on what putting money behind the topic could do.
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.
- Private Prison CEO On ICE Contracts: We’re A Better Deal Than El Salvador’s Cecot, by Matt Sledge and Jose Olivares for The Intercept.
- Man ‘Disappeared’ by ICE Was on El Salvador Flight Manifest, Hacked Data Shows, by Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox for 404 Media.
- The Pentagon’s Culture Wars Strike West Point, by Greg Jaffe for The New York Times.
- The Woman Leading the Surging MAGA Antitrust Movement, Nancy Scola for Politico.
- A Congressional Conclave Can’t Agree on a New U.S. House Chaplain, by Billy House for Bloomberg.
Punch-Out: Soda Popinski Edition
So many traditional political lines have been scrambled by Trump 2.0 — and one of the most striking examples is playing out right now in a battle over SNAP benefits and soda.
The MAHA movement, embodied by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is intent on banning food assistance from being used to purchase sugary drinks (an idea once endlessly mocked by Republicans when it was suggested by Michael Bloomberg). Two stories on how the fight over SNAP and soda is redrawing lines inside conservatism.
- Big Soda is lobbying against new rules from the USDA (which oversees SNAP) that would allow states to deny benefits for purchasing soda, NOTUS’ Taylor Giorno reports. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins seems supportive of the new rules, but the chairs of Agriculture committees in the House and Senate “don’t seem so keen,” Taylor writes. The American Beverage Association engaged in public spats with Trump officials and sloshed around nearly $800,000 in reported lobbying efforts in the first quarter, the most it has spent in a quarter since 2010.
- The political shift on this has been rapid, NOTUS’ Emily Kennard writes. Trump’s USDA denied Maine the right to deny SNAP benefits for soda in 2018, and Republicans helped kill a bill aimed at taking sugary beverages as well as candy and other treats out of SNAP in the same year. Now it’s Democrats who are the most vocally pushing back on MAHA, she writes. Rep. Frederica Wilson told Emily RFK’s movement “needs to stop micromanaging $6 a day for little children.”
— Evan McMorris-Santoro | Read about the lobbying. | Read about the politics.
Front Page
- Jeanine Pirro’s 2006 Senate Committee Ignored Election Laws and Still Owes Big Money to Creditors: The former Fox News host is Trump’s newest pick to be U.S. attorney for Washington D.C.
- Potential Cuts to NOAA Are Already Giving One Oklahoma Lawmaker ‘Stomach Cramps’: “The very discussion about reducing our investment in our scientific research and our weather forecasting causes me to have stomach cramps,” Rep. Frank Lucas said.
- House Democrats Sound the Alarm About a 10-Year-Old U.S. Citizen With Brain Cancer Who Was Deported to Mexico: Three Democrats, including the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, visited Mexico on Friday to see a Texas family that was deported in February.
- Newark’s Mayor Was Arrested at an Immigration Protest: A Democratic member of Congress said she was “assaulted by multiple ICE officers” at the facility protest.
Week Ahead
- Trump is scheduled to land in the Middle East on Tuesday for an official trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
- The Supreme Court will hold a special oral arguments hearing for three cases challenging Trump’s executive orders limiting birthright citizenship on Thursday.
- Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Agriculture are expected to hold markups for their respective parts of reconciliation on Tuesday.
- Several Trump administration officials are heading to the Hill to discuss their budget demands this week.
- Sean Duffy is scheduled for Wednesday, so is Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
- Lee Zeldin is scheduled for Thursday.
- And RFK will appear before both the House Appropriations committee and Senate HELP committee on Wednesday.
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