A Little More Conversation, A Little Less Action

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

It’s taken for granted that in a split Congress, very little non-essential legislation will see the light of day. It’s an odd sort of waiting period, where lawmakers prep various bills, dance around waving their arms for reporters to cover their issue, their lonely floor speeches, their bold-punctuated press releases.

And their bills mostly lay dormant, stuck in the “introduced” stage of the legislation tracker. The lucky ones get single chamber passage, only to usually be ignored by the opposing party’s leadership in the other.

Senate Democrats’ attempts to address judge shopping — the insidious, now ubiquitous gamesmanship where right-wing litigants plant lawsuits in divisions governed by only one right-wing judge to secure partisan victories — live in this split-chamber limbo.

Many of the members are freaked out by this trend, genuinely alarmed by the groundshaking decisions it’s producing. But the chances of getting anything that meaningfully addresses it through the House, where Republicans have cheered these decisions in equal measure, are vanishingly slim.

So, they lay the foundation. Nineteen of them signed a letter imploring the Judicial Conference to internally change its rules on how cases are distributed, to stop one right-wing judge from enjoying a monopoly in his division.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) — who recounted his experience in the 90s overseeing committee hearings on the abortion drug mifepristone with a broad, nostalgic smile on his face to me in a back hallway of a Senate office building (his wife says he looks like a “boy scout” in those old CSPAN clips) — introduced a bill with Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) to make lawsuits seeking national injunctions go through a three-judge panel. He was so excited to talk about the bill, and to lament the recent judge-shopped opinion on mifepristone that spurred him to introduce it, that he started answering before I got my question out.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was similarly enraged enough about that mifepristone decision to introduce her own remedy to judge shopping, which would route suits against federal government actions that would extend relief beyond the named parties to the D.C. Circuit. Revealing the unlikelihood of getting anything done legislatively at least until the 2024 elections, she quickly pivoted to fixes the courts could make internally when I asked her about the bill.

The lawmakers can use their various pulpits to raise awareness of the issue: “The courts should do a better job but Congress should nail them down and make sure that they’re following tougher rules. The Senate could hold hearings. We can speak out on this, we can go to the floor,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told me. But not much else.

So in the meantime, this is what they do. Lay the groundwork, try to get their colleagues energized about the issue. Hope that when the moment arises, they can pounce on it, bills and caucus support in hand.

Shifting to lean against the hallway wall, out of the traffic of 12-year-old-looking interns and coffee bearing staff, Wyden told me intently: “You keep your eyes open for all the opportunities.”

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Gaining Luft

I’d been following Gal Luft for the past several months before his indictment was released this week. His story was fascinating: D.C. think-tanker turns up in Cyprus, arrested on a U.S. extradition warrant. He makes a comically obvious ploy by suddenly claiming that he has information about the Bidens, earning him attention from Congressional GOP investigators, before fleeing Cypriot law enforcement to become an international fugitive.

Two things make Luft’s story even more interesting. One is that, like any talented liar, he’s not making everything up out of whole cloth. Luft did, in fact, work at a Chinese energy conglomerate, the same one which paid out millions in consulting contracts to Hunter Biden. It’s not unreasonable to think that he might have had something to say. The second part is that, from the very beginning of this story, we knew one important fact about Luft: he was facing federal indictment. The details were unclear, but that didn’t stop House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) from spending months saying that he wanted to interview Luft; Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Sunday that Luft should receive immunity in exchange for testimony.

It wasn’t until Monday evening that prosecutors revealed the indictment, issued in November 2022. Per the filing, Luft faces charges of conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent of China, of lying to the feds, and charges relating to various alleged schemes to traffic arms and move sanctioned Iranian oil. Luft remains at large, while Rep. Comer, more of a cynic than a true believer, scaled back his request: he’ll do with FBI documents from Luft’s case, no interview with the fugitive.

— Josh Kovensky

The Shutdown Crystal Ball 

It’s funny how bills that have little to do together are intrinsically bound by the underlying politics, the sacrifices made and deals brokered to get them done.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is still living the debt ceiling law, still dealing with the fallout of a right flank enraged by a deal that passed on the backs of Democrats. To assuage that anger, McCarthy kowtowed to these extremists, letting amendments blocking funding for service members’ abortion expenses, barring transition-related health care from coverage and abolishing diversity offices into the annual defense bill. The result is a product that’ll be dead on arrival in the Democratic Senate.

Some House Democrats, particularly those with a vested interest in funding the military, are banking on the Senate being the adults in the room who will write a defense bill that can pass, and that will eventually crowd out the hot-button amendments during the reconciliation of the two bills.

If that happens, McCarthy may again be faced with the options of either passing a must-pass bill with significant Democratic support, or buttering up his far-right members.  

It’s early for shutdown predictions, as there are still a few months left in the fiscal year. But a prolonged throwdown over the defense bill — only one of a wide swath of government funding bills that must pass to keep it functioning — only crunches the timeline and inflames the tempers as October creeps closer. 

— Kate Riga

“In the chairman’s opening statement, he said that he’s upset that he believes the FBI prevented more Americans from learning about a private citizen’s laptop. That is bananas to me… You’re essentially saying to the American people that you’re the guardians of personal security and privacy but the 2020 election was determined because the FBI didn’t let more Americans see a private citizen’s non-consensual nudes? Is that what we are saying here? That you lost the election not because of your ideas but because a private citizen’s laptop wasn’t out there? … You should be a party of ideas not a party of non-consensual nudes.”

That is Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) laying it on Republicans as FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee this week.

The hearing was chaotic, hostile and filled with shouting matches over baseless and frankly unhinged accusations. Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and the GOP lawmakers on the committee spent the whole hearing trying to score soundbites on Fox News and attacking Wray — a registered Republican who was appointed to the role by former President Donald Trump.

But as Republicans kept bringing up their favorite boogeyman, Hunter Biden and his laptop, Swalwell gave us this gem of a quote.

All the hostility and ridiculousness aside, I did not have GOP described as the “party of non-consensual nudes” on my 2023 bingo card. 

— Emine Yücel