Principals

☞ White House: Biden on Tuesday offered a plan to extend the Medicare trust fund’s solvency 25 years by raising taxes on Americans making above $400,000 and letting the government negotiate prices for more drugs. The plan — part of Biden’s forthcoming fiscal year 2024 budget — is likely to fall on deaf ears in the GOP-controlled House.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The Senate still intends to move forward with a vote on a resolution undoing a controversial D.C. crime bill, despite a last-ditch effort by the Washington D.C. city council to withdraw the bill to avoid Congress taking action.

☞ Mitch McConnell: The Senate minority leader will appear at a fundraiser for Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., who is running for Senate in Indiana in 2024, later this month.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The Republican leader is expected to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen when she visits the U.S. later this year in lieu of taking a trip to Taiwan, according to the Financial Times.

☞ Hakeem Jeffries: Democrats are lashing out at Tucker Carlson’s portrayal of the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol on Monday night, including Joe Morelle, D-N.Y who said he would work with his colleagues and leader Jeffries to “develop and implement recommendations” to avoid what he called a “dangerous breach.”

The Biden administration is considering resuming the detention of migrant families who cross illegally into the U.S., according to the New York Times, a policy that it had reversed at the end of 2021. The discussions come as the administration grapples with how to handle an anticipated increase in migrants at the border when the public health order known as Title 42 lapses later this year. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Semafor “no decisions have been made,” but advocates are angered by the possibility, saying Biden would be returning to a cruel practice embraced by his predecessor.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first batch of Jan. 6 footage provided to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy last night, telling viewers that it proved the riot was “mostly peaceful chaos.” (Reminder: No, it wasn’t.)  He added that the “overwhelming majority” of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol were “sightseers.” In other Fox News developments, the network appears to be softening its “soft ban” on Trump.

Capitol Hill is turning up the heat on TikTok today, with a bipartisan group of senators set to unveil legislation that would help the government review and possibly ban foreign social media platforms from the U.S.. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner has said the bill isn’t only aimed at the Chinese-owned video app, but rather is meant to create a formal system for dealing with national security threats from foreign tech.

Sen. John Fetterman’s, D-Pa. chief of staff Adam Jentleson tweeted photos of the two of them working on Senate business from Walter Reed, where Fetterman is being treated for clinical depression. Jentleson added that Fetterman “will be back soon.”

China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang took aim at the U.S. in unusually blunt terms in his first news conference, accusing Washington of pursuing “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression” of Beijing.

JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said that the airline expects that the Justice Department will try to block its planned merger with Spirit Airlines, telling the Wall Street Journal that DOJ antitrust regulators approached the case “with their minds made up.” Hayes said JetBlue would challenge an antitrust suit.

— Morgan Chalfant and Jordan Weissmann

Punchbowl News: House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t get a heads up beforehand that Biden would support the GOP-led bill revoking changes to the D.C. criminal code. House Democrats are frustrated in part because a number of their members voted against the bill expecting a veto.

The Early 202: Senate Democrats facing tough reelection races in 2024 plan to override the D.C. crime bill, but Schumer and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-highest ranking Senate Democrat, haven’t said yet how they intend to vote.

Playbook: Failed Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano told Politico he’s considering challenging Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa. for his seat in 2024.

Axios: Trump is considering picking a woman to serve as his running mate and sees unsuccessful Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake as a “model” choice.

Can Republicans and Democrats make babies together?

THE NEWS

Between his riffs on preventing World War III and delivering retribution against his enemies, Donald Trump rolled out a relatively new plan at CPAC on Saturday: More babies.

“We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom!” Trump said to a cheering crowd of conservatives. “I want a baby boom! You men are so lucky out there — you are so lucky, men.”

The very same week, freshman Senator J.D. Vance, R-Ohio said he’s eyeing legislation to provide universal pregnancy coverage in the coming months. He argued on Monday that “it’s way too expensive” to give birth in the US. In other words, it might be a step towards single-payer for babies.

“I think that if you actually want a society where families can bring new life into the world — and I certainly do — then that’s a problem to fix,” he told Semafor. “It’s really not more complicated than that.”

These are the latest signs that a turn toward natalism — policies explicitly designed to encourage more births — is breaking through on the right after years of lobbying by a small group of socially conservative policy wonks.

“This is a conversation that in some respects has been going on for a long time, and we’ve been sort of beating the drum in the wilderness,” Patrick Brown, a family policy expert at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who has briefed Republicans in Congress, told Semafor. “If there’s ways that policy can get involved to lift some of the burdens off parents or would-be parents, I think Republicans are now much more sensitive to that concern than they certainly would have been 10 years ago.”

JOSEPH’S VIEW

On paper, there should be lots of room for Democrats and Republicans to work together on this issue. Members of both parties have proposed significant benefits targeted at families with young children. It wouldn’t be the first time, either: the child tax credit was originally the product of a coalition between anti-poverty progressives and tax-cutting conservatives in the late 1990s.

While they rarely tie their policies directly to falling birth rates, Democrats have rolled out a number of ideas to make it easier to have and raise children. President Biden tried to make a massive expansion of child tax credits his political legacy before crashing into Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va, who proved to be immovable in his resistance. The failed Build Back Better talks also included a push for universal pre-K and child care programs that politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. had championed in their campaigns. Paid parental leave is a virtually universal Democratic goal.

Some family benefit proposals normally considered beyond the boundaries of the political right are starting to find proponents among conservatives. They have sometimes clashed on the details, though: Mitt Romney revised an earlier proposal to provide up to $350 in monthly checks to parents last year to cut off parents making less than $10,000 in order to address critics on the right who complained it would discourage work.

The trend might have been accelerated in part by last year’s Dobbs decision, which put Republicans on the defensive over their support for mothers as they tried to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. recently packaged some of his proposals for expanded child tax credits and parental leave into “​​a pro-life plan for post-Roe America.”

“Trump, JD Vance, Romney, Rubio — diverse parts of the party are coming up with ideas to help support families, and that’s huge,” Abby McCloskey, a conservative policy expert who has consulted with potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates, told Semafor.

Still, many of these proposals still have limited backing among GOP lawmakers and their stiff price tag puts them in competition with Republican-backed tax cuts elsewhere. “The view within the GOP that the federal government should be subsidizing marriage and more children will remain a minority,” Scott Winship, director of the Center on

Opportunity and Social Mobility at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, predicted to Semafor.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

On the left, Jill Filipovic argues that policies to better support families are a good idea on the merits, but that linking them to calls for higher birth rates to win conservative support is a mistake. Similar “baby bucks” policies in countries like Hungary are often intertwined with anti-immigration politics and they’ve so far mostly failed to actually convince parents to have more children. “Natalism comes with a whole lot of baggage, limited benefits, and potentially significant costs,” she writes.

New House GOP subpoenas focus on anti-‘disinformation’ efforts and conflicts over schools

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chair of a committee charged with investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government, issued three subpoenas on Monday to two former National Association of School Boards officials and the former head of the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security.

The subpoenas represent the broad scope of the committee’s investigations, which include investigating how the Biden administration and the media have characterized “disinformation,” and whether the FBI overstepped its bounds in investigating threats made against teachers and school board members.

Nina Jankowicz was briefly tapped by DHS to helm the Disinformation Governance Board, but the Biden administration paused and ultimately disbanded the panel after a haphazard rollout opened it up to a torrent of criticism from Republicans. Jankowicz in particular received harsh attacks from the right over prior tweets she had made linking former President Trump to Russia.

Jankowicz, who currently works at the Center for Information Resilience, signaled she would cooperate with the subpoena in a tweet on Monday evening.

“I will happily testify to the truth of the Board under oath: That it was a working group meant to address disinformation that endangered Americans’ safety, and that — because of the Republican Party’s irresponsible lies about it — our democracy is less secure,” she wrote.

Chip Slaven and Viola Garcia, former executives of the National Association of School Boards were also subpoenaed for their roles in a letter to President Biden asking the administration to investigate threats made against educators and school board members.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to coordinate with state and local officials to look into the matter, but Slaven and Garcia’s description of the attacks as possible acts of “domestic terrorism” received immediate backlash on the right, who suggested it was a smear against parents voicing criticism about COVID-19 policies and lesson plans on race and gender. The board later apologized for the language in the letter and agreed to a formal review of their procedures related to its release.

—Kadia Goba and Morgan Chalfant

Republicans on the House Administration Committee are embarking on their own Jan. 6 investigation by launching an online portal where the general public, as well as government whistleblowers, can share information related to the attack on the Capitol. The panel plans to probe whether any security failure may have occurred that day, including the “capabilities” of the Capitol Police and the “delay in support” of the National Guard, according to the portal, which went live last week.

“A lot of individuals have approached our committee asking how they could share information with us, so this is to help facilitate that,” a Republican committee aide told Semafor. Democrats have already expressed concern that the committee may use its investigation to try and deflect blame for the attack from the rioters and former president Trump.

— Kadia Goba

Tim Kaine is a Democratic senator from Virginia. He and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind. have a bipartisan bill that would repeal the 1991 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs). The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will mark up the bill on Wednesday.

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: A lawyer working for the Southern Poverty Law Center was among a group of protesters charged for allegedly attacking a police training center in Atlanta.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: Former Trump aide Hope Hicks met with prosecutors in Manhattan investigating hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels.

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— Steve Clemons