Happy Monday. The House left town until the end of August, which means the Senate is the only game in Washington for the next two weeks - if they stay in town through August 7th as planned. Here is your week ahead:
More than 300,000 Haitians are losing their legal status and their work authorization as the Department of Homeland Security’s Temporary Protected Status termination takes effect, and ICE has already drawn up the enforcement plan. Internal documents reviewed by CBS News show the agency preparing an arrest-and-deportation push that could begin as soon as this week, with Springfield, Ohio named as a target because of the Haitian community that settled there.
Trump ordered a pause in U.S. strikes on Iran over the weekend after thirteen consecutive days of attacks, and White House communications director Steven Cheung said it “would be wise for Iran to work toward a negotiated deal.” Iran stopped its retaliatory strikes in response and has signaled it will stay quiet as long as the United States does, while Iranian and Omani negotiators keep working on what Tehran’s foreign ministry calls shared principles for safe transit of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Watch for Tuesday, when Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the White House after three months of asking for the meeting.
The Senate Judiciary Committee votes Thursday at 9 a.m. in Hart 216 on whether to send Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination to the floor. Every Democrat is a no, so Blanche cannot lose a single Republican, and two of them are openly extracting concessions: John Cornyn and Thom Tillis want Blanche to formally kill the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and tighten the audit immunity deal that came out of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, John Curtis and Susan Collins have all voiced reservations and are largely waiting to see what Cornyn and Tillis get. Thursday at 3 p.m. is also Blanche’s deadline in Phang v. Blanche, where Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered him to hand over eight email chains unredacted, plus documentation backing every claim that a redacted name belongs to a victim or a law enforcement officer, as the Epstein Files Transparency Act requires. More than twenty survivors who met with him earlier this month wrote to Cornyn and Tillis that they “received an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting.”
The first vote of the week is motion on Jay Clayton’s nomination to be director of national intelligence, the confirmation vote set for Tuesday night after Lindsey Graham’s funeral. Clayton cleared the Intelligence Committee on a 9-8 party-line vote, with Democrat’s Ron Wyden saying he “has proven himself incapable of telling the truth” and Mark Warner calling himself bitterly disappointed. The reason this matters beyond the personnel fight: FISA Section 702 has been dark since June 12, and Democrats’ stated condition for talking about reauthorization was getting acting DNI Bill Pulte out of the job. Pulte spent his last weekend in the chair announcing a fourth completed round of what he called “thoughtful, measured” staff layoffs.
Senator Mike Lee spent the weekend promising to object to any effort to put the Senate into recess in August until it passes the SAVE America Act, the voter suppression bill requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote, and he wants the yeas and nays on the record. (While he has some procedural recourses on the Budget, this is giving Michael Scott more than effective legislator.)
The vote would fail badly, and that is the point, because it forces every Republican to choose publicly between the MAGA base and going home to campaign. Layered on top: Trump is pressing the Senate to take up the $95 billion budget resolution the House passed 216-214 on July 22, which carries $10 billion in election grants designed to push states toward SAVE-style rules, while Republican leader John Thune would rather spend the floor time on a bipartisan bill to fund the government past September 30.
New Budget Committee chair Republican Ron Johnson, asked about reconciliation 3.0 (a party-line spending bill), called it “a very small needle to thread.” Thune has said he wants to nearly quadruple the money the House allocated for defense spending in the reconciliation bill and that currently it doesn’t have the 50 votes needed to pass.
The Senate is expected to take an initial procedural vote Tuesday night on H.R. 5334, which Thune filed cloture on July 23 as the vehicle for the long-stalled Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026. Jim Risch, Darline Graham and Richard Blumenthal announced agreement on the text with more than sixty cosponsors on July 16; it imposes primary and secondary sanctions on Russian officials, banks and the shadow fleet, and lets the president put tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest buyers of Russian crude. Trump’s late demand to add Iran sanctions was accommodated by folding in Iran measures that were expiring at the end of the year. The holdouts are Democrats, Ron Wyden chief among them, who do not want to hand Trump more tariff authority.
A Capitol Rotunda ceremony for Lindsey Graham Tuesday morning precedes his funeral service at 2 p.m. at Washington National Cathedral, closed to the public but livestreamed. Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky are all expected, and both foreign leaders are turning the trip into White House meetings, arriving to shore up support after losing their loudest advocate in the Senate.
The Federal Open Market Committee meets Tuesday and Wednesday with the target range at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, and for once the outcome is not a foregone conclusion: markets are pricing roughly a one-in-three chance of a hike, driven by what the war has done to energy prices. Kevin Warsh, in his first months as chair, has said the committee has “no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation,” and dissents are a real possibility. June’s consumer price index actually fell 0.4 percent for the month and was up 3.5 percent on the year, with core inflation flat and up 2.6 percent, so the case for moving now rests on where oil goes rather than where prices have been.
The First Circuit maintained the block of Trump’s March executive order to limit mail-in voting before the November election. The EO would direct the Postal Service to police how states design and handle mail ballots, which would have required unique barcodes and logos on envelopes and push states to send unredacted voter files to DHS for screening. The panel said the order “plainly affects the Plaintiff States’ sovereign power to create and enforce a legal code” for elections. The case is very likely headed to the Supreme Court. Expect the administration to lean instead on New Jersey, where a registration system glitch let several hundred noncitizens register between 2023 and 2024 before the state fixed it, as the argument for the SAVE America Act.
The tariffs on patented drugs and their active ingredients take effect for the first tranche of companies on Friday, July 31. The headline rate is 100 percent, with carve-outs that read like a map of who has been negotiating: 15 percent for the European Union, Japan, South Korea and Switzerland, 10 percent for the United Kingdom, 20 percent for companies with approved plans to move production onshore, and zero for orphan drugs, cell and gene therapies and fertility treatments. Generics are exempt, and a second tranche lands September 29.
A federal judge ruled on July 23 in Whole Woman’s Health Alliance v. FDA, out of the Western District of Virginia, that three of the agency’s remaining restrictions on mifepristone are arbitrary and capricious and therefore not legal to have on the books. Judge Robert Ballou wrote that the FDA “has steadfastly found, over the past quarter century, that mifepristone is a safe and effective medication,” and ordered the administration to reconsider the rules. Whether that produces anything is a separate question, because the FDA has its own review underway aimed in the opposite direction, and the en banc Fifth Circuit is scheduled to hear Louisiana v. FDA this fall, where the state is trying to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement that would end mail delivery of the drug.
Out. The House left for the August district work period after last votes Thursday, July 23, and does not return until Monday, August 31. Before leaving, they agreed 214-208 to H. Con. Res. 89, Pramila Jayapal’s resolution directing the president to pull U.S. forces out of hostilities with Iran, with four Republicans crossing over. The Senate’s binding companion, Chris Van Hollen’s S.J. Res. 180, failed a discharge motion 47-49 the same day, with Susan Collins the only Republican voting yes.
Convenes 3 p.m. Monday. The floor schedule has one vote tonight, cloture at approximately 5:30 p.m. on Jay Clayton for director of national intelligence. Tuesday night, after the funeral, brings Clayton’s confirmation vote and the initial procedural vote on H.R. 5334 as the Russia sanctions vehicle. Also queued: another nominations package, which eats two weeks of floor time without a time agreement, and a possible procedural vote on crypto market structure legislation whether or not Democrats sign onto the ethics deal. Off the floor, Thune has told appropriators he wants a bill funding the government past September 30 ready to go this week; the sticking points include $1 billion in advance procurement for so-called Trump-class battleships. If the talks stall, he can force a vote, let Democrats block it, and try again in September. There is a fight over crypto legislation, the CLARITY ACT, but it’s going nowhere fast with banking in opposition (it seems).
FAUCI AND RAND PAUL, ROUND WHATEVER. Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs holds “Testimony of Anthony Fauci” Wednesday. Rand Paul chairs the committee and subpoenaed Fauci after he declined a voluntary invitation, which tells you the posture going in. There is no witness list beyond Fauci’s name and no posted subject matter, which for a hearing this long in the making is a choice. The topic is Fauci’s diary, whether he lied about the cause of the pandemic and more.
AI TRIPLE-HEADER. Three separate Senate panels take up artificial intelligence in two days. HELP’s subcommittee examines AI’s impact on the workplace Wednesday. The Special Committee on Aging follows with a hearing on “the AI deception machine,” focused on deepfakes, chatbots and elder fraud, which is the most concrete consumer-harm framing any committee has managed. Thursday, Commerce’s telecommunications subcommittee looks at “intelligent networks,” meaning the electricity and fiber the whole thing runs on.
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL VOTE. Judiciary’s executive business meeting Thursday at, the nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general.
A LABOR SECRETARY, AND A BILL TO STOP THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT’S DISMANTLING. HELP holds a full-committee markup Thursday at 9:45 a.m. in Dirksen 430 on an unusually loaded agenda: an original Special Education Administration Protection Act, S. 5046 barring the transfer of Education Department offices and functions elsewhere in the government, bills on IDEA and dyslexia and the science of reading, and the nominations of Keith Sonderling to be Secretary of Labor.
PUBLIC LANDS MEGA-MARKUP. Energy and Natural Resources takes up 39 measures in one sitting. Among them: a Joshua Tree National Park boundary adjustment that would also name a visitor center for Dianne Feinstein, the creation of Chiricahua National Park in Arizona, a memorial on the National Mall to the women of the World War II home front, and reauthorization of the large-scale water recycling program
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.