Principals

☞ White House: President Biden watched Wednesday’s debt limit vote with staff while he was staying overnight in Colorado Springs ahead of his Air Force Academy commencement address this morning, according to a White House official. The president phoned House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clarke, Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer following last night’s vote.

☞ Senate: The Senate will now take up the debt limit bill, and Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell both want to see it done quickly. It still might hit a few speed bumps in the upper chamber, where a handful of senators have expressed objections to different aspects of the bill. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the only 2024 candidate who gets to vote on it, came out against the deal, arguing the bill gives Biden an “open checkbook.”

☞ House: The final vote on the bill to raise the debt ceiling was 314-117, with 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voting against it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — who had asked for added encouragement to vote for what she called a “shit sandwich” — tweeted that Speaker Kevin McCarthy shared footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol with conservative outlets that will report on it.

☞ Outside the Beltway: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Wednesday that he was sending 100 members of the Virginia National Guard to the U.S.-Mexican border in response to a request from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The governors of West Virginia and South Carolina also announced similar plans, bringing the total number of GOP governors who’ve offered Abbott aid to eight.

Federal prosecutors have obtained a recording of former President Trump acknowledging in summer 2021 that he kept a classified Pentagon document related to a potential attack on Iran, according to CNN. Prosecutors have been questioning witnesses about it in their probe into the former president’s handling of classified documents since leaving office, including interviewing outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Former Vice President Mike Pence will enter an increasingly crowded 2024 GOP presidential primary field next Wednesday, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to Semafor. Also expected to launch their own bids next week: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.

The House select committee on China is looking into whether a research grant to a U.S. university runs afoul of federal law. In letters to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the president of Alfred University in New York obtained by Semafor, the panel’s chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. expresses “deep concern” about a $13.5 million grant given to Alfred for research related to hypersonic weapons given that the school hosts a Confucius Institute and partners with the China University of Geosciences. Confucius Institutes are language and culture centers funded by the Chinese government, dozens of which have closed on U.S. campuses in recent years amid U.S. scrutiny. A law going into effect this year restricts Pentagon funding to schools that host them.

FBI Director Christopher Wray offered to let House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky. view the internal document the congressman has requested in connection with his Biden investigation at the bureau’s headquarters, but that hasn’t defused Comer’s threats to hold Wray in contempt. “Anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena,” Comer said in a statement after a phone call with Wray on Wednesday. The document, known as an FD-1023, contains unverified information about Biden by a human source that reportedly was included in a group of documents Rudy Giuliani gave to the Justice Department in 2020 during the Trump administration.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: Senate leadership aides from both parties told Punchbowl there’s a “reasonable hope” the Senate can pass the debt ceiling package by Friday night, depending on whether Schumer can make agreements with senators who are pushing for amendments to the bill.

Playbook: Three Republican lawmakers  — Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky. — were instrumental in helping McCarthy avoid a conservative revolt and get the debt ceiling bill across the finish line, Politico writes.

The Early 202: One aspect of the debt ceiling bill that’s gotten comparatively less attention: it includes a provision that could help prevent a government shutdown this fall, the Washington Post writes. The mechanism was championed by a pair of unlikely allies, Massie and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Axios: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can’t seem to settle on how to pronounce his last name in the early days of his campaign, Axios notes (is it “Dee-Santis” or “Deh-Santis”?). Someone else who’s taking note: Trump, who used DeSantis’ different pronunciations on the campaign trail to imply the Florida governor is a phony.

Did Washington underestimate Kevin McCarthy?

THE NEWS

Kevin McCarthy’s allies say it’s finally time for him to get a little respect.

After some last-minute procedural drama on Wednesday, House lawmakers passed the new bill to lift the debt ceiling negotiated by the speaker and President Biden in a blowout, 314-117 bipartisan vote. Overcoming angry opposition from his right flank, McCarthy delivered support from 149 Republicans, a rebuff to critics who once questioned whether he could control his party’s unruly conservative wing enough to deliver a debt deal.

“McCarthy has always been underestimated,” Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., one of the lead negotiators on the deal to raise the debt limit, told reporters Wednesday. “There have been multiple times this calendar year alone that he’s been underestimated. The votes tonight will prove out why that is the wrong proposition here in Washington.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, McCarthy’s fellow Californian, was even more effusive. “This is the best speaker with the best negotiation we’ve ever gotten with the president of either party,” he told Semafor. “Is it perfect? No, but they never are.”

OUR VIEW

The superlatives may be a little over the top, but McCarthy’s allies have a point: The national press and much of official Washington appears to have underestimated the man.

McCarthy has never enjoyed much esteem in certain corners of Washington — Politico once ran an entire article about how reporters thought he wasn’t particularly smart. And from the moment the Californian first picked up the gavel, he was widely written off as a historically weak leader, a speaker “in name only” who appeared unequipped to manage his party’s slim, 5-seat majority. To win his new perch in the face of right-wing opposition, he’d given up much of its formal power, agreeing to rules that would hand GOP hardliners more say over what bills reached the House floor and allowing any one member to call a snap vote to oust him if they felt he stepped out of line.

The New York Times warned that McCarthy had handed the GOP’s arch-conservative wing “the ability to hold him hostage” and that the country “should brace for the likelihood of a Congress in perpetual disarray for the next two years.” Many doubted he would be able to negotiate a debt ceiling compromise (our colleagues among them) and wondered if McCarthy might risk a default simply to keep his job.

By all accounts, the White House agreed. According to Politico, Biden aides largely believed that the competing demands of hard-right and moderate Republicans made it impossible for McCarthy to move a debt-ceiling bill with only GOP votes. So the president spent much of the year publicly refusing to even discuss the issue with McCarthy until he passed a spending plan of his own, assuming the speaker would fail and be forced to cave.

Instead, McCarthy pulled off a legislative two-step, forcing Biden to the negotiating table by rallying Republicans behind a deeply partisan bill hardliners would agree to, then keeping the right on board just long enough to hash out a viable compromise. Conservatives may be unhappy with the final bill, but for now there doesn’t appear to be any serious effort to topple McCarthy.

Senior Republicans said McCarthy succeeded in part by bringing some of his antagonists from the speaker’s race into the decision-making process, including by placing three hardline conservatives onto the prestigious Rules Committee. Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, the panel’s chair, told Semafor that working closely with conservatives like Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian known for bucking leadership who ultimately backed the bill, helped them “identify problems early.”

“He’s really built the team where rank-and-file members feel ownership of this body and these work products,” Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told Semafor.

House Republican leaders have exaggerated some of their wins in the debt ceiling deal, which in many ways looks like a relatively normal budget agreement. McHenry has called it the “largest deficit reduction package in American history,” for instance, which as a Republican budget expert put it, is “not remotely true by any measure.” On the left, meanwhile, some commentators have suggested Biden outplayed McCarthy by keeping Democrats’ concessions to a minimum, and possibly slipping in a small expansion of the food stamp program.

Maybe. But McCarthy has shown he can govern effectively without kowtowing to the GOP’s hard right — no easy feat in the modern Republican party. A hostage, he was not.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Not everyone is doling out credit to McCarthy. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., tweeted her opposition to the vote Tuesday morning and added, “Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.”

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On the trail with Casey DeSantis

IOWA — Ron DeSantis called his wife, Casey, to the stage in West Des Moines. And in Salix. And in Council Bluffs. And in Pella.

Each time, she received boisterous applause, and talked about their three children, starting with an explanation for her hoarse voice — she’d been “telling a 3-year-old why she cannot color on the dining table with permanent marker” — and a joke about finally getting to speak to adults.

She also wasn’t afraid to throw a culture war punch, telling voters how DeSantis stood up to “the corporate media, the left, the White House, Fauci” on COVID-19.

Politicians often rely on spouses to soften their harder edges and humanize them for voters, but her strategic role could be significantly more important in this campaign.

DeSantis himself is not known for his retail politics (in fact, quite the opposite), and has been plagued by headlines painting him as an awkward, at times antisocial stiff. In recent weeks, he has been noticeably trying to improve that aspect of his presidential run, but even his close allies will admit it’s not his bread and butter.

This is where his wife, Casey, comes in. Florida’s First Lady — a petite woman who’s been compared to Jackie Kennedy, recently overcame a battle with cancer, and comes from a journalism background — appears to be well-liked by Iowans. She’s more natural at the handshaking and small talk that’s so vital to a 2024 campaign, and is consistently swarmed by people vying for photographs. No spouse has been more visible in the primary’s first months.

“She’s great at this and it works very well for Ron. They really connected with Iowans. It’s a night and day contrast to Trump’s dysfunctional family dynamic,” a person close to DeSantis texted during the couple’s Iowa swing this week.

It’s also well-known that she’s her husband’s closest advisor, a fact that has in recent weeks sparked in-depth media stories — both positive and negative — about her unusual involvement in his political career.

Ron DeSantis and his supporters have been protective of her, especially after a Politico Magazine profile that (jumping off a quote from Trump ally Roger Stone) repeatedly likened her to the ambitious, scheming Lady Macbeth. Attacks from Trump’s friends have a tendency to migrate to the candidate himself, who has not been above dragging rivals’ families into the muck.

— Shelby Talcott and David Weigel

What does the debt deal mean for future Ukraine funding?

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., fresh off a trip to Ukraine, complained Wednesday that the bipartisan budget agreement didn’t include any funding for Kyiv’s war effort in addition to locking in what he views as insufficient levels of spending on defense.

“It’s bad for defense. There’s not a penny for Ukraine. I want to know, have we pulled the plug on Ukraine when they’re about to go on the offensive?” he told reporters. “This whole thing is irresponsible for our defense needs.”

The bipartisan agreement to raise the debt ceiling would cap defense spending at President Biden’s proposed $886 billion for the next fiscal year, which amounts to a 3.3% increase over current levels, angering some defense hawks like Graham who wanted more.

But the deal doesn’t curtail future funding for Ukraine, which the White House has sought and can continue to seek through emergency supplemental requests. Another ask is likely to make its way from the White House to Capitol Hill later this year, though the timeline has been pushed back after a Pentagon error overvalued the cost of ammunition and other weapons for Kyiv.

“We’re using the president’s numbers in defense and I’m certain that he had planned for a continuation of the Ukraine funding,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. told Semafor. “There’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about these budget caps, but I think we can accommodate that.”

Graham said he wants to know if the administration plans to seek a supplemental aid request for Ukraine, and even suggested a supplemental appropriations bill could be passed to bolster the defense budget. He also said he’s trying to file amendments to the bill.

“I’m going to vote no,” Graham said of the bill to raise the debt ceiling. “And the difference between me voting no and burning the place down is, I want answers to my questions.”

If and when the White House does ask Congress to appropriate more Ukraine aid, the fight to approve it will be difficult in the House given the opposition among a group of vocal conservatives to military and economic assistance for Kyiv (Congress has approved over $75 billion to date, more than half of it military assistance). Still, U.S. and Ukrainian officials note that there continues to be bipartisan support in Washington for Kyiv’s war effort.

“No matter what happens in the halls of Congress, there won’t be an effect on our ability to support Ukraine,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday when asked about what the debt ceiling fight shows about the future prospect of funding.

— Morgan Chalfant

Byron Donalds is a Republican representing Florida’s 19th congressional district. We talked to him about the NBA Finals kicking off tonight between the Miami Heat and the Denver Nuggets.

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: Chinese citizens who U.S. military officials suspect were posing as tourists but were actually spies have tried to enter military bases in Alaska on multiple occasions over the past few years, according to a report from USA Today.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: A national security adviser to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. resigned over a Washington Post article that depicted him as playing a major role in the senator’s hold on senior military nominations in objection to the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy.

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— Steve Clemons

Editor-at-large Steve Clemons

Washington Bureau Chief Benjy Sarlin

Washington Editor Jordan Weissmann

National Security Reporter/Lead Principals Writer Morgan Chalfant

Congress and Politics Reporter Kadia Goba

Domestic Policy and Politics Reporter Joseph Zeballos-Roig

2024 Campaign Reporter Shelby Talcott

Senior Politics Reporter David Weigel