Principals

☞ White House: Veteran Democratic flack Ben LaBolt will replace Kate Bedingfield as the White House communications director. Bedingfield is expected to play a role in Biden’s impending reelection bid.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The Senate majority leader said over the weekend that a national ban on TikTok should be “looked at.” Maine Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, recently co-sponsored legislation barring the app.

☞ Mitch McConnell: Senate Republicans would love the world to stop talking about Sen. Rick Scott’s proposal to sunset all federal programs every five years. “I think the vast majority of us would say that we prefer to look at it in a different direction,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. said on CNN.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The Speaker was in Glendale, Arizona on Sunday at Super Bowl LVII posing for a selfie with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. Back in Washington, House Republicans are trying to craft new rules around what projects can be eligible for federal earmarks.

☞ Hakeem Jeffries: The minority leader visited Mt. Ollie Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Sunday. Notable: Jeffries visits more than 100 churches a year, according to a spokesperson.

After taking heat for allowing China’s spy balloon to drift across the country, the U.S. military has now blasted three unidentified “airborne objects” out of the skies of North America since Friday. It sniped the third on Sunday afternoon, when the Pentagon said an F-16 downed an object flying about 20,000 feet over Lake Huron in Michigan because it potentially posed a threat to civil aviation. While officials are still trying to learn more about the vaguely-described objects, they say one reason for the uptick in sightings is that the military has been more “more closely scrutinizing” the skies since the detection of the Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month.

So what exactly did we shoot down (aside from literal U.F.O.’s)? Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on ABC Sunday that he had been briefed on two of the objects, and that the administration said they were balloons. But defense officials are being more circumspect. “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters. Asked whether the targets may be extraterrestrial, VanHerck said “I haven’t ruled out anything.”

The Chinese government for the first time accused the U.S. of “illegally” flying balloons over China 10 times since the start of last year, and said it reserves the right “to take necessary means to deal with relevant incidents.”

The FBI found one document marked classified at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, after a voluntary search late last week. Meanwhile, lawyers for former President Trump recently turned over a folder and laptop potentially containing classified information to federal officials, according to ABC News. One of Trump’s attorney’s downplayed the news, telling CNN that the team sent an empty folder marked “Classified Evening Summary” that Trump had been using to block light from a telephone at his bedside. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio said on CNN yesterday that he was “stumped” that classified documents keep turning up where they shouldn’t be.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. sent a letter to the White House endorsing Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, or Robert Reich, who served as Labor Secretary under the Clinton administration, to replace Marty Walsh as Labor Secretary when he leaves.

Playbook: The White House is going after Republicans over Social Security and Medicare non-stop, but some Democrats are cautioning the administration not to get overconfident even though some things might appear to be going their way.

Axios: The NRCC wants to portray Hakeem Jeffries as inexperienced by highlighting Nancy Pelosi’s decision to remain in Congress.

The Early 202: The Congressional Hispanic Caucus plans to meet virtually today as chair Rep. Nanette Barragán, D-Calif. faces questions about her leadership after firing the group’s new executive director.

The caucus trying to prevent AI-pocalypse

THE NEWS

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that creates human-like responses on demand, has Congress playing catch up.

For decades, sci-fi writers and futurists have been telling the world to prepare for an era of disruption as AI takes off, but this year’s high-profile breakthroughs have alarmed some members who are already thinking about how to properly regulate the technology.

“We’ve all been stunned by ChatGPT,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., a 72 year-old member who went back to school recently to get a master’s degree in machine learning. “The fact that it’s here now has really surprised me and I’m probably a little better informed than the average.”

Enter the AI Caucus. The 32-member group serves as a conduit between members of Congress, academia and industry experts and wants to aid lawmakers in making well-informed decisions when considering regulatory issues.

“Congress has really struggled to regulate technology and emerging technology like AI,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. said in a statement to Semafor. “I think a lot of the delay is due to technological illiteracy.”

Their role has been to informally weigh in on AI-related issues that may come up in committees. This Congress, they’re prioritizing building up their membership, staffing offices with AI-knowledgeable aides, and working to create meaningful education programs to ensure the rest of the Congress is sophisticated enough to regulate or legislate AI.

When Congress is ready to take the next step, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif. is working on legislation that would create a bipartisan commission to recommend how to regulate AI.

“We’re going to do that once we feel smart enough to know what we’re talking about,” Lieu said.

For now, they’re bringing in experts to try and demystify the technology.

“You’d be surprised at how much time I spend educating my colleagues about the fact that the biggest risks of AI are not the creation of an army of evil robots with red laser eyes taking over the world,” Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif. told Semafor.

Among the more pressing non-Terminator risks, members are looking at challenges to data privacy and academic learning, where there’s already a mini-panic that students will use ChatGPT to make homework obsolete. “How are kids going to get educated if they can just cheat the whole way through?” Beyer said.

But there’s also widespread optimism within the AI caucus about how technology can continue to make humans more efficient (if sometimes rendering us useless). In medicine, for example, AI could take on burdensome administrative duties and improve treatment recommendations. And members also see AI technology revolutionizing the education system for the better — if it can be properly managed.

In the immediate term, it’s national security fears that are most likely to spur Washington to action. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas who co-chairs the AI Caucus, told Semafor he plans to work with the Commerce Department to end any export of American AI technology to China.

KADIA’S VIEW

We’ve been here before. Congress hasn’t been able to regulate social media almost 20 years after Facebook launched. The implosion of crypto sullied the digital currency industry and drew an angry response from members of Congress, but they were slow to implement meaningful guardrails before the crash and still seem divided on how to proceed now. AI technology is moving so fast that it’s hard to imagine they’ll be able to catch up any better.

That’s not to say there isn’t buzz around the issue. Speaker Kevin McCarthy even has a plan to enlist MIT to give members a crash course in bleeding edge technology.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

If Europe can do it, then maybe the U.S. can. The E.U. is inching closer toward passage of the AI Act and the European Parliament is expected to vote on a draft next month, with final passage expected at the end of the year. It would make them the first major regulator to tackle AI.

“We’ll be looking at what they’re doing very closely,” Obernolte said. That said, he added he was concerned that Europe’s “aggressive” approach could end up a cautionary tale if it discourages innovation: “We have to remember that the growth of technology has catalyzed some of the biggest improvements in human prosperity that have ever occurred.”

The China committee chair wants Congress to start running war games

The Republican leader of the House select committee on China thinks that Congress should start doing its own war games to evaluate a would-be invasion of Taiwan by China.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., a Marine Corps veteran who chairs the new panel, said part of the committee’s work will be demonstrating to the American public what the consequences of an invasion would be — not only the military fallout, but economic ramifications as well.

“We’re exploring options where we could do creative wargaming that integrates financial and economic warfare into purely kinetic warfare to tease out the importance of Taiwan,” he told Semafor in an interview.

Gallagher, who believes that preventing an invasion depends on deterring China with robust U.S. military assistance to Taiwan, sees convincing the public of the importance of that aid as one element of the panel’s work.

“We can learn the lessons of Ukraine and surge hard power west of the international dateline and turn all this happy talk about arming Taiwan to the teeth to reality,” he said. “Then I think we can prevent war.”

The committee is starting up at a critical moment for U.S.-China relations. Tensions are running high after the U.S. downed a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month and cancelled a meeting between top diplomats in Beijing.

The war games idea is one of several that Gallagher has for the committee as it gets ready to begin work. The panel will hold events later this month to spotlight the Chinese government’s human rights record, Gallagher said, and has started to lay plans for its first hearing.

Gallagher, like the committee’s ranking member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., has emphasized that he’s determined to keep the committee’s work as bipartisan as possible. He told Semafor that the Chinese government’s human rights record is a “natural entry point into this discussion for Democrats and Republicans.”

The Wisconsin Republican also said he wants to break out of the mold of the typical congressional hearing by getting members off of Capitol Hill and holding field hearings.

“Let’s be honest: Most congressional hearings are boring…most members don’t show up for them, most members just read from a script, so we don’t want to fall into that trap,” Gallagher said. “Even when we’re doing formal hearings we’re going to try and make them more interesting.”

As for the spy balloon, Gallagher signaled it won’t be a primary area of focus, but that the panel would look to tie it into a broader case that China was growing bolder.

“Putting this in the context of a pattern of aggression we’re seeing from the CCP, connecting it to their spying on university campuses, connecting it to their purchase of land near military bases, connecting it to their illicit police stations that they have on American soil, I think, is the area where we can play a unique role,” he said.

— Morgan Chalfant

Matt Bennett is executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington that he co-founded.

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: The National Archives and Smithsonian were hit with lawsuits from abortion opponents who say they were told to remove or hide clothing with “pro-life” messages during visits around the March for Life. Both the Archives and Smithsonian have issued statements apologizing for the incidents.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: The Trump campaign reportedly paid an outside group to look into the former president’s 2020 election fraud claims but their research was never released because it didn’t prove his assertions.

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— Steve Clemons