HUNTER BIDEN CONTEMPT VOTE DROPPED
Congress is back in session this week with a relatively full agenda.
The top priority for lawmakers, likely, will be averting a government shutdown.
Under the terms of a “laddered” arrangement worked out last year, some government funding is set to expire on Jan. 19, while other sectors of the government will go into shutdown on Feb. 2.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, departs a House Oversight Committee meeting at Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 10, 2024. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Over the weekend, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reached a deal that would extend that two-part deadline to March 1 and March 8.
The package won’t cause much controversy in the Senate, where stopgap funding bills are regularly adopted by massive bipartisan thresholds.
The same can’t be said for the House, where stopgap funding bills have increasingly become anathema to Republicans. Many Republicans view funding deadlines as an opportunity to win major concessions from the Democratic Senate and White House on issues like government spending and border security.
Following the announcement of the deal, the House Freedom Caucus—a contingent of right-wing Republicans—wrote in a post on X, “This is what surrender looks like.”
With that tension in mind, Johnson will almost certainly need Democratic support to advance the measure in the House this week—the same move that cost former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) his job.
Also this week, Republicans dropped consideration of a resolution to recommend that first son Hunter Biden be held in contempt of Congress.
The change comes after Biden’s lawyers announced that he would comply with future congressional subpoenas. A Republican staffer told The Epoch Times afterward that, should Biden comply in the future, they would seek to hold the contempt measure in abeyance.
Yesterday, this offer came to fruition after House Republicans dropped a markup of the resolution.
Republicans are expected to issue new subpoenas against the first son in the coming weeks.
Republicans and Democrats have also reached a deal to change tax law that could be considered in the near future.
The proposal would revive Trump-era tax deductions for businesses and expand the child tax credit.
Finally, a bipartisan deal worked out in the Senate to provide aid for Ukraine in exchange for border provisions likely won’t advance.
The decision to bring the bill to the floor rests with Johnson, who said “Absolutely not” in a post on X after details of the deal—including a massive expansion of green cards, allowing 5,000 illegal aliens into the U.S. every day, and immediate work permits for illegal aliens—leaked.
—Joseph Lord
GOP CANDIDATES SET SIGHTS ON NEW HAMPSHIRE
On Monday night, former President Donald Trump received a resounding validation of his presidential aspirations in the Iowa Caucus. Now, all eyes are on New Hampshire, which will hold the first-in-the-nation primary in less than a week.
Trump won a stunning 51 percent of Iowans’ support—the largest margin of victory ever recorded in Iowa.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came in second with 21.2 percent of the vote, while former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley came in third with 19.1 percent of the vote.
Two candidates—biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, by contrast, failed to achieve the results they hoped for and announced they were dropping out of the race.
With the field now whittled down to three main contenders, attention is focusing on New Hampshire—a state that may be less friendly to Trump than deep-red Iowa.
New Hampshire is where Haley has focused much of her campaign energy. It’s also a much less inherently conservative state than Iowa is.
Immediately after the results finished being tabulated in Iowa, Haley boarded a plane to attend a campaign event in the Granite State.
Trump did too, after first stopping in New York to attend the start of a civil defamation trial brought by E. Jean Carroll. The former president stumped in Atkinson accompanied by his erstwhile rival Ramaswamy.
DeSantis wasn’t Trump’s main target in New Hampshire, where DeSantis is polling at an average of 6.5 percent according to RealClearPolitics.
Instead, Trump focused his energy on Haley, who’s polling at a much more menacing 29.3 percent in the state.
Haley’s backers, Trump said, are “pro-amnesty, they’re pro-China, they’re pro-open borders ... they’re pro-war ... they’re pro-Biden, frankly.”
He criticized her ties to libertarian-leaning mega-donor Charles Koch, an advocate of immigration amnesty and less stringent border policies.
“If you want a nominee who is endorsed by all the RINOs, globalists, and demented Never Trumpers ... and crooked Joe Biden’s biggest donors, then Nikki Haley is your candidate,” Trump said.
Trump’s swipes at Haley come as the former South Carolina governor’s campaign and affiliated PACs have stepped up their attacks on the frontrunner.
An ad paid for by SFA Fund Inc., a PAC associated with Haley, depicted the former president as “a bully,” saying he’s “lying about Nikki.”
Another ad calls Trump and President Joe Biden “the two most disliked politicians in America."
“Both are consumed by chaos, negativity, and grievances of the past,” the ad says.
During a Jan. 16 appearance on CBS News, Haley refused to go so far as to say Trump was unfit for office.
But she did say: “I don’t think he needs to be the next president. I’m going to be the next president. And so we want to move forward so he’s no longer a part of the conversation.”
Haley also said the same day that she wouldn’t take part in an upcoming debate with DeSantis unless Trump agreed to come—an indication that she’s now focusing all her fire on the former president. As a result, ABC canceled the debate that had been scheduled for Thursday night.
As DeSantis faces abysmal polling numbers in the Granite State, the battle for victory there is seen as a race between Haley and Trump.
After her disappointing third-place finish in Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is an important test for Haley’s staying power—particularly as she faces down another primary battle in her home state South Carolina, where polls show Trump is the clear frontrunner.
Her prospects for victory in New Hampshire may depend on pulling support from former rival Chris Christie, who focused his campaign on attacking Trump, as well as winning support from moderates and liberals in the open primary.
—Joseph Lord
ADMINISTRATIVE STATE ON TRIAL
Decades-old precedent, known as Chevron deference doctrine, could be overturned by the Supreme Court as the justices review the doctrine’s application to recent cases set for oral argument today.
Overturning Chevron has been the subject of much debate as the standard has informed regulatory decisions for years and has been cited more than 18,000 times by federal courts. It could change how Congress passes legislation, enhance the judiciary’s power, and limit executive agencies’ discretion.
Commercial fishing companies Loper Bright Enterprises and Relentless, Inc. are asking the Supreme Court to strike lower court decisions that upheld the Commerce Department’s policy requiring that they pay for people to monitor the companies’ compliance with federal law.
Agencies should act within the bounds outlined by Congress but critics have complained that the administrative state acted in recent years outside of the authority legislators granted it. It’s a thorny issue because Congress is sometimes ambiguous in its language, leaving plenty of room for debate over what bureaucrats are allowed to do.
Chevron, which came from the Supreme Court case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, said courts generally should defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous language in congressional statutes. However, many have noted that it has fallen out of use by the Supreme Court in recent years.
The Magnus-Stevenson Act doesn’t explicitly allow Commerce to force commercial fishing companies to pay for monitors but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that under Chevron, that requirement was a reasonable interpretation of the law given some of its language surrounding agency authority.
This Court seems to be using the current term to tackle concerns about administrative power as it has taken several cases (SEC v. Jarkesy, CFPB v. CFSA, and Loper Bright/Relentless) that address bureaucrats’ power from multiple angles. Chevron is perhaps the biggest of these cases but big consequences, such as ruling administrative law courts unconstitutional, could follow the others.
—Sam Dorman
WHAT’S HAPPENING
- A court in Maine is due to rule on Trump’s appeal of a 2024 election ballot disqualification ruling.
- The House Foreign Affairs Committee holds a hearing at 10 a.m. on the flow of U.S. money into the CCP’s “monetary might.”
- George Scott, the acting inspector general for NASA, and Catherine Koerner, a NASA associate administrator, appear before House lawmakers at 10 a.m. to testify about the progress of the mission to return to the moon.
The COVID-19 pandemic may have emerged from a Chinese laboratory according to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former boss. The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports on the claim, delivered during testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Most Iowa Caucus-goers think that Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election, The Epoch Times’ Austin Alonzo reports. The stunning finding comes after Iowans gave Trump a record-breaking 51 percent support in the nation’s first electoral battle of the 2024 political season.
Young voters want less abortion and more rights for unborn children in the womb according to a recent survey. The Epoch Times’ Samantha Flom reported on the survey, which found that 54 percent of voters ages 18 to 42 believe human rights should begin in the womb.
The U.S. military carried out additional strike against Houthi targets in Yemen following a missile attack by the Houthis on a U.S.-owned cargo ship, The Epoch Times’ Andrew Thornebrooke reports. The strikes come as Houthis escalate their attacks on Red Sea shipping in response to Israel’s war against Hamas.
The Department of Justice is adding additional charges against two brothers who said they protected Rosanne Boyland against a brutal attack by the Capitol Police on Jan. 6, 2021, The Epoch Times’ Joe Hanneman reports. Boyland, a Trump supporter, was one of the only people who died on Jan. 6.
Trump’s blowout victory in Iowa solidified his status as the GOP frontrunner and knocked two lingering challengers out of the race. Now, all eyes are on New Hampshire, a state whose support Nikki Haley is relying on. An article by Politico explores the convoluted political history of the Granite State and how it could play out this year.
