Principals

1. Biden says tax the rich
2. Black lawmakers’ SOTU hopes
3. Republicans bend the knee
4. Where do Haley voters go?
5. Ukraine aid talks
6. Fetterman’s earmark controversy

PDB: House committee to hear warnings about outsourcing biomanufacturing to China

Biden State of the Union scheduled for 9 p.m. … House approves spending package … WaPo: Sanders privately warned Biden about messaging on the economy

— edited by Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann and Morgan Chalfant

Biden will push proposal to tax the rich, businesses in SOTU

Raise taxes on the rich, cut taxes on parents, and lower the deficit. That’s the upshot of President Biden’s second-term economic agenda, which he will lay out during tonight’s State of the Union address. White House National Economic Council director Lael Brainard told reporters that the president plans to tout signs of economic success — like low unemployment and wage growth — and “lay out his vision for the future.” A White House fact sheet says Biden will call for raising the corporate tax rate to 28% and corporate minimum created by the Inflation Reduction Act to 21%, while requiring billionaires to pay 25% of their income in taxes. He’ll also push to once again expand the Child Tax Credit. A senior Biden administration official said the White House will propose a budget next week that would reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years.

— Morgan Chalfant

What Black lawmakers want to hear at the State of the Union

Black members of Congress are hoping Joe Biden will use his State of the Union speech to speak directly to the concerns of African Americans who are feeling lukewarm about this reelection bid, Kadia Goba writes. “I just want him to reaffirm a lot of what he has done already and how it impacts Black communities,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y. told Semafor. Others had more specific suggestions: Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, told Semafor she personally requested the president “say something about housing”; Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas said Biden should promise to protect pro-diversity policies from Republican rollback efforts. Black voters will also be listening carefully to Biden’s message on Gaza, argued Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. Many wonder “why taxpayer money is going there for that but not coming to our communities to help build out infrastructure,” he said. While Biden still commands support from a solid majority of African Americans, some polls have shown his numbers falling well below the 92% he won in 2020.

Who’s bending the knee today?

Donald Trump is the uncontested nominee as of yesterday, and his Republican skeptics are quickly falling in line. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell shrugged off Trump’s recent history of racist remarks about his wife and announced that it “should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.” Trump thanked him for his backing. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa signaled her support next, putting the entire leadership team behind the former president. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. backed Trump last month as he looks to succeed McConnell, but threw his support behind top Trump ally Kari Lake’s Arizona Senate run on Wednesday just for good measure. Outside Washington, former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. refused to vote for Trump in 2016 because she could “not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.” Now running for governor after losing her seat in 2018, she endorsed Trump and said “Biden’s cognitive decline renders him unfit to serve.”

The race for Nikki Haley’s supporters

Nikki Haley pointedly did not bend the knee for Trump, which encouraged Democrats to make a play for her supporters. While Trump continued to denigrate her campaign on Truth Social and boast how he “TROUNCED” her, Biden told her voters “there is a place for them in my campaign” in a statement. The president’s finance team is already reaching out to the Republican donors who bankrolled her run, Politico reports. And Primary Pivot, a super PAC that urged non-Republican voters to turn out for her during the primaries, rebranded as Haley Voters for Biden. “We wanted to start this effort as soon as possible to lock in that kind of resentment toward the way Trump and MAGA have treated Haley voters,” co-founder Robert Schwartz told Semafor’s David Weigel.

McCaul weighs items for emerging foreign aid package

The House and Senate are talking — at least a little bit — about an emerging GOP Ukraine package in the House. That’s according to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who told reporters he’d gotten positive feedback from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on proposals to seize frozen Russian assets for Ukraine and turn some aid for Kyiv into a loan. Asked about the talks, a Schumer spokesman reiterated that he “supports the Senate-passed bipartisan supplemental bill.” But it’s unclear if the Senate version will ever get a vote in the House, while McCaul said he believes Speaker Mike Johnson will put his measure on the floor.

If that doesn’t work, lawmakers are still pursuing discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson, with one from Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. that can begin taking signatures Friday. Fitzpatrick said at a news conference that the procedural threat is meant “to apply pressure” to House leaders, but that he wasn’t ready yet to force a floor vote. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who is preparing a separate petition for the Senate-passed aid package, said he was waiting to see if President Biden’s State of the Union moved Johnson to act. Asked if he would have enough Republican votes, he replied: “I don’t know, to be honest with you, but we have to do something.”

— Morgan Chalfant and Kadia Goba

The strange row over John Fetterman, an earmark, and BDSM ‘sex parties’

An earmark controversy involving BDSM “sex parties” has managed to produce one of the odder recent office dramas on Capitol Hill, Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reports. Lawmakers decided to nix over $1 million in federal funding for a Philadelphia LGBTQ community center from their appropriations deal this week, after it came under attack from conservatives for hosting kink-themed events (the influential X account Libs of TikTok led the pile-on). But Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. raised eyebrows on Wednesday when he told reporters he wasn’t responsible for a letter his office sent asking for the money to be cut, insisting he supported the funding while blaming the missive on rogue staffers. A source familiar with the issue, however, told Semafor that Fetterman had in fact been briefed ahead of the earmark’s removal. The Senator eventually posted a statement explaining that his office asked to remove the money rather than let it be stripped publicly, and promised to fight for it next year.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Speaker Mike Johnson met with Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. about the bill to force ByteDance to divest TikTok yesterday and he indicated he is leaning towards supporting it. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is also encouraging members to support the legislation.

Playbook: White House chief of staff Jeff Zients said that Americans will see a “very energized president” during tonight’s State of the Union speech. President Biden plans to criticize “the Republican House’s refusal to take up the bipartisan national security bill” and address the Gaza war “head-on,” he said.

Axios: To prepare for tonight, Biden hunkered down at Camp David with Zients and other aides. Biden’s team consulted the historian Jon Meacham as it worked on drafts of the speech.

The Early 202: The State of the Union gives Biden a chance to address concerns about his age. “He’s going to be up there for 40 or 60 or, God help us, 70 minutes,” said Dan Cluchey, a former White House speechwriter who worked on the president’s 2022 address. “And you get to tune in and watch and make that judgment for yourself.”

White House

• President Biden wants to raise the number of drugs for which Medicare negotiates prices from 20 to 50, and will make that pitch during his State of the Union address later tonight.
• First lady Jill Biden’s guests at the State of the Union tonight will include: Kate Cox, who sued the state of Texas over the state’s abortion ban; United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain; singer and civil rights activist Bettie Mae Fikes; Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson; Maria Shriver; and Jazmin Cazares, whose sister was killed in the 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting.

Congress

• It’s State of the Union time! Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. is bringing Julian Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, as his guest. Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Nanette Barragán, D-Calif. is bringing Fat Joe, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. has invited tennis legend and equal rights advocate Billie Jean King.
• The House voted to pass its “minibus” spending package in a bipartisan 339-85 vote, sending it to the Senate for consideration.
• A former National Security Agency official will warn lawmakers of the risks of intellectual property theft from China and of the vulnerabilities of the U.S. outsourcing biomanufacturing to China over the last decade during a hearing the House select committee on China is holding today on biotech and U.S.-China competition. “Over the past ten years the U.S. led the world in biotech research, development, and commercialization, but outsourced much of biomanufacturing and a myriad of related bioservices to places like China,” Charles Clancy, who is now chief technology officer at MITRE, a nonprofit that manages federally-funded research and development centers, will say, according to testimony shared first with Semafor. “As we reexamine our globalized trade relationships and supply chains, we realize that this outsourcing has created significant risk.”
• House lawmakers will vote today on the Laken Riley Act, a Republican-sponsored bill named after the late University of Georgia nursing student that would require ICE to detain migrants arrested for theft.

Outside the Beltway

• Alabama lawmakers passed and Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law protections for IVF after the controversial state Supreme Court ruling on frozen embryos.
• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul plans to deploy the National Guard and state police to patrol the New York City subway system amid a rise in crime.

Economy

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led a group of investors who put $1 billion toward rescuing New York Community Bancorp.

Courts

• Investigators probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona issued grand jury subpoenas to several people connected to Donald Trump’s previous presidential campaign. — Politico
• A former Google software engineer who is also a Chinese national was charged with trade secret theft for taking files on artificial intelligence while secretly working for companies in China.

Polls

• The percentage of Americans who view China’s economic power as a critical threat declined from 64% one year ago to 51% today, according to new polling out today from Gallup. At the same time, the share who view a possible conflict between China and Taiwan as a critical threat increased slightly from 47% to 50% (a big jump from 30% just three years ago).
• Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J. might be lesser-known than New Jersey first lady and Senate primary rival Tammy Murphy, but he’s viewed more favorably than she is among voters in the state, according to a new Monmouth University poll.

On the Trail

• “Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President,” Elon Musk tweeted after news broke of a weekend meeting with Trump. The wording was notably ambiguous, since the relevant question is whether he’d give to outside groups that can accept unlimited and/or anonymous donations.
• Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. suspended his campaign and immediately endorsed Biden.
• Mark Harris will be the Republican nominee in North Carolina’s 8th district, a comeback after his 2018 election set off a fraud scandal involving absentee votes that prompted a court to redo the election.
• After sitting out the GOP primary debates, Donald Trump called on Biden to participate in general election debates while seemingly ending the GOP boycott on the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
• No Labels is expected to advance plans to field a presidential ticket, even as they struggle to find candidates for the job. — AP

Foreign Policy

• A Russian missile landed in Odesa just hundreds of meters away from a convoy that was carrying both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
• People living in eastern Ukraine are worried about a Russian advance there, after Ukrainian troops were forced to withdraw from Avdiivka in February. — BBC
• A missile fired by Houthi rebels from Yemen killed three people working aboard a commercial ship transiting the Gulf of Aden.

Technology

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will mark up legislation this morning that aims to address national security concerns associated with TikTok by forcing China-based ByteDance to divest the app.

Blindspot

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: Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., blamed her loss in Tuesday’s California Senate primary on “billionaires spending millions to rig” the race against her.

What the Right isn’t reading: Republicans in the Kansas state legislature have proposed a bill that would require abortion providers to ask patients why they’re terminating their pregnancies, then report that information to state authorities.

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann, Morgan Chalfant

Editor-at-Large: Steve Clemons

Reporters: Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

Written by former diplomats with over a decade of experience, International Intrigue scours hundreds of global sources to deliver high quality insights and analysis on the top stories around the world. Trusted by leaders from the Pentagon, Goldman Sachs, and Google, it is a great addition to your morning media diet. Sign up for free

Katherine Clark is a representative from Massachusetts and the House Democratic whip.

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