•President Biden promotes the bipartisan infrastructure program today at General Motors’ electric vehicle assembly plant in Hamtramck, Michigan (NPR). Meanwhile, Democrats in the House of Representatives are considering removal of a tax credit for union-built EVs (like those to be built in Hamtramck) from Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan to promote passage by the Senate (Roll Call).
•Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, wants a vote on the Build Back Better bill by Christmas, although Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, is pushing to waive it off until next year (NBC News). The House is scheduled to vote on it (very) late this week.
•The U.S. plans to buy 10 million Pfizer and Merck COVID-19 pills, which officials believe could be a pandemic game-changer (WaPo).
•The prosecution wrapped yesterday, and now the defense presents its case in the Georgia trial of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, as the Wisconsin jury in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse enters its second day of deliberations.
House to Vote on Censuring Gosar – Rep. Paul Gosar, R-AZ, the former dentist whose two brothers and a sister (out of nine siblings) have called for his resignation, is up for House censure in a vote today, according to Politico, over an animated video posted online depicting Gosar fatally stabbing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, in the neck. Gosar also is shown about to attack President Biden in the cartoon video reportedly posted by the congressman’s staff. Along with the censure, the House will vote on removing Gosar from his committee assignments, a la Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, who lost her assignments way back in February for pro-QAnon postings prior to running for Congress.
MTG, meanwhile, is pushing Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, to strip 13 House Republican “traitors” who voted for Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill of their committee assignments.
Note: Pundit chatter points to this dichotomy as evidence the GOP is as much in disarray as the Democratic Party, although it’s a disarray particular to Republicans. McCarthy was once a relatively moderate Republican himself – he’s from California, after all – but now he must consider giving in to MTG’s (and thus Donald J. Trump’s) wishes, as the House Democratic majority votes to censure Gosar, anyway.
Meanwhile, cable news stations and other outlets that are not Fox News report on House Republicans who voted against bipartisan infrastructure but are touting bridge repairs and the like they are bringing home to constituents.
Bottom Line: No matter what McCarthy does to stifle the increasingly loud arguments between his party’s factions, no pundits are backing off the presumption that a GOP massacre in next November’s House midterms will shift power to Republicans. The guarantee of a GOP House is not a guarantee of McCarthy as House speaker, however – if a majority of a Republican House majority are pro-Trumpers, there remains a real chance the former president, and not McCarthy, would replace Nancy Pelosi.
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Rep. Speier Announces Retirement – Rep. Jackie Speier, D-CA, announced she will not seek re-election in next year’s midterms, per Roll Call. Speier, 71, ran for the House after she was shot by members of the Peoples Temple cult at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978. Her boss, Rep. Leo J. Ryan, was killed at the airport there following the massacre of 37 cult members. Speier currently holds senior positions on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, and serves as a subcommittee chairman on both.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Nic Woods