Principals

☞ White House: The Biden administration is taking new steps today to address extreme heat in the U.S., including using $7 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to improve weather forecasts and over $150 million from the infrastructure law to improve water storage in drought-prone states like California.

☞ Senate: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell abruptly froze during a press conference yesterday for an extended period and was escorted away. He returned a few minutes later to finish his remarks, saying he had felt “lightheaded,” but was “fine.” President Biden called to check in: “I told him I got sandbagged,” McConnell told reporters, a joking reference to Biden tripping over an obstacle at a speech. Hours later, NBC reported McConnell fell while disembarking a plane on July 14.

The episode renewed questions about the 81-year-old GOP leader’s health just four months after he was hospitalized with a concussion from a fall in D.C. But his fellow Republicans are publicly insisting he should remain on as leader. “I hope he gets a good rest over the break,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W. Va. told reporters.

☞ House: A former intelligence official told a House panel that the federal government “absolutely” possesses unidentified aerial phenomena, also known as UAPs or UFOs, and that “nonhuman biologics” were found at a crash site. Lawmakers from both parties are pushing for more oversight of the federal government’s information on unknown objects in the sky. The House Financial Services Committee advanced a bill to regulate cryptocurrencies.

☞ Outside the Beltway: California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered this week to help resolve the Hollywood strikes: He’s reached out to both studio executives and the actors’ and writers’ unions, a senior adviser said Wednesday. (Thus far, none of them have taken him up on his offer.)

What was supposed to be a straightforward court hearing that put Hunter Biden’s legal saga to rest erupted into chaos on Wednesday. Biden’s attorneys and the Justice Department at first sparred over the terms of a plea deal they brokered, then resolved their dispute — only to have the federal judge overseeing the case in Delaware decline to immediately approve the deal over concerns about enforcing the pre-trial diversion agreement on the gun charge. The two sides still have time to work out the issues. Meanwhile, House Republicans have latched onto the admission by a prosecutor in court that the investigation into Hunter Biden is ongoing to suggest more shoes could drop.

The Fed is no longer forecasting a recession, Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters on Wednesday, citing “the resilience of the economy recently.” His comments came shortly after the Fed raised rates by 25 basis points to try to further tame inflation, which has come down dramatically this year but remains a concern. Still, Powell sounded cautiously optimistic that “we do have a shot” to win the inflation fight without triggering a downturn.

Ron DeSantis said he wouldn’t consider Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as vice president but might “sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.” Several typically DeSantis-friendly conservatives expressed outrage at his remarks, which he made to sports site OutKick. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, was caught on video this month suggesting COVID-19 was bioengineered to avoid “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This isn’t the first time the two candidates’ paths have crossed this cycle: Kennedy said in May that DeSantis invited him to breakfast during the pandemic and told him he wanted to “burn” the National Institutes of Health “to the ground.”

Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, who endorsed former President Trump, criticized the DeSantis administration over its Black history teaching standards, saying he supported the overall approach but not a requirement that students be taught that African Americans benefited from skills learned during slavery. His statement set off a fierce back-and-forth between the Trump and DeSantis campaigns: “Did Kamala Harris write this tweet?” DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw replied on Twitter. Donalds is the only Black GOP member of the Florida delegation.

— Benjy Sarlin, Morgan Chalfant and Jordan Weissmann

Punchbowl News: Republican senators are publicly rallying around McConnell, but privately some suggest he “isn’t as dominant” in meetings behind the scenes. Punchbowl also reports that the GOP leader, who overcame polio as a child, occasionally uses a wheelchair to get around in what a McConnell spokesperson called a “precautionary measure in a crowded area.”

Playbook: Politico wonders if the DeSantis campaign is truly resetting and digs up some insight from former McCain staffers who helped the late Arizona senator with a successful reboot in the 2008 GOP primary.

The Early 202: As Biden gears up for a big speech on climate issues today, the Washington Post looks at Democrats’ divide over the president’s record on climate policy thus far. While polling shows many of the party’s voters are pleased with his progress, some think he hasn’t gone far enough — and top environmental groups are also pressuring him to push more ambitious policies.

Axios: Hunter Biden’s attorneys were “fuming” after the court hearing yesterday.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s votes could play a starring role in Democratic ads

THE NEWS

Get ready to hear a lot about Marjorie Taylor Greene as next year’s congressional elections rev up.

Democrats are looking to make the Republican from Georgia one of their chief foils as they attempt to wrestle back control of the House next year, and one major political group is already laying the groundwork to link other GOP members with Greene.

The new “MAGA Scorecard” released Thursday from the Center for American Progress Action Fund stacks up all 222 House Republicans against Greene’s voting record. The report indicates that the vast majority of the House GOP conference has voted alongside her 92% of the time. The figure varies little for the five vulnerable swing-district members from New York, who voted with her at least 85% of the time.

“They are continuing to move further and further towards the extreme parts of their party and their voting record shows it,” Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash. and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Semafor.

JOSEPH’S VIEW

The White House has been eager to cast Greene as the face of “ultra-MAGA” Republican extremism, so it’s no surprise to see Democratic campaign outfits join the effort. They’re essentially betting that they can tie relatively moderate swing-district Republicans to her positions much the way the GOP cast even middle-of-the-road Democrats as far-left activists yearning to strip funding from law enforcement in 2020.

“It certainly had an impact on us when they were painting us as ‘defund the police.’ They were taking the democratic socialist message and applying it to Abigail Spanberger,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va. told Semafor. “We got really hurt.”

In last year’s midterms, though, Democrats pivoted to portraying Republicans up and down the ballot as “MAGA extremists” — and experienced the strongest showing from a party controlling the White House in decades. They seem eager to build on that strategy again in 2024.

For Democrats, Greene will likely serve as a useful face for negative ads while pitching voters on their party’s achievements on infrastructure, clean energy and domestic manufacturing in positive spots. Some individual candidates have already begun tracking her votes along with their opponents.

Rep. Ann Kuster, D-N.H. told Semafor that she believes it will boost campaigns like hers (ranked likely Democrat by Cook Political Report) by forcing moderate GOP incumbents to put distance between themselves and unpopular positions held by conservatives.

“They have a problem that their leadership has succumbed to the extreme wing of the party,” Kuster said.

THE VIEW FROM MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

“I really don’t know what’s extreme about strong borders, strong economy, protecting our kids, caring about America first instead of more foreign wars,” Greene told Semafor on Wednesday. “I can’t imagine what’s extreme about that.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Republicans in swing districts argue the Democratic attacks will do little damage to their re-election campaigns. They expect their own individual brands to carry the day.

“Their campaign tactics last cycle didn’t work,” Rep. Nick LaLota, a freshman from New York, told Semafor. “They spent more than $3 million trying to call me somebody who I wasn’t. If they try that again this year they’re probably going to burn the same amount of money.”

Not every vulnerable Democrat is thrilled at the idea of inserting Greene into their race either. “I think that actually people are tired of nationalized politics and want place-based relationships,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. told Semafor.

Chip Roy is reviving a Ron DeSantis bill to make schools pay for bad student loans

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, will introduce a bill to hold universities accountable for unpaid student debt, reviving a component from a bill that Ron DeSantis introduced in 2017 when he served as a member of Congress.

The education bill would require colleges to pay an annual fine based on the overall amount of outstanding federal loans among their students in default — they would be liable for 15% minus the average national unemployment rate for that year. It also features other reforms, including requiring more transparency about repayment rates.

“Look, these universities have to have some skin in the game,” Roy said before sharing the legislation with Semafor.

DeSantis has also referenced his work on the policy since launching his campaign, saying it would push schools to emphasize job skills. “If they were responsible for guaranteeing the debts of the students, then they would change their curriculum,” he said at an event in South Carolina this month. “They would not be able to offer post-Marxist gender studies, because that’s not leading to anything.”

The bill, Roy said, would provide a Republican counter to President Biden’s student debt program, which was intended to provide borrowers up to $20,000 in one-time relief before being struck down by the Supreme Court.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, will introduce the companion bill in the Senate and said in a statement it would help young people who “needlessly face the unfair choice of either drowning in debt or sacrificing their dreams of higher education.”

DeSantis hasn’t emphasized his time in Congress, where he was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, on the campaign trail nearly as much as he has touted his record as governor. But Roy says he’s stayed in regular touch as DeSantis builds a national policy agenda and that his legislative record offers insight into his vision for the country.

“We’ve had lots of conversations about policy and about where we want to take the country, and that’s reflected both in his time in the House and then what he’s been doing as governor,” Roy told Semafor last week. “There are a lot of parallels.”

As the DeSantis campaign plans a series of new policy rollouts to get past its recent struggles, bringing one or more of his old bills to life could help draw more attention to his plans. Roy has promoted the governor’s agenda frequently on TV and in op-eds — last month, he accompanied Desantis in Eagle Pass, Texas to help promote his “No Excuses” immigration enforcement plan.

“I’ll generally do what I’m asked to do to support him because he’s a friend, and I think he’s doing a great job,” Roy said.

— Kadia Goba

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Joe Biden welcomes Italy’s far-right leader to the White House and they have a lot to agree on

Days after Giorgia Meloni won election to become Italy’s prime minister last fall, President Joe Biden pointed to her victory as an example of how democracy is at risk in the U.S. and abroad during a meeting with Democratic governors. His administration was privately anxious about her rise.

“He looked at Meloni as a dangerous figure,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Fast forward 10 months: Later today, Biden will welcome Meloni to the White House. Despite Biden’s initial misgivings, the two leaders do see eye-to-eye on the biggest foreign policy crisis of the moment: Russia’s war in Ukraine. They have what White House national security spokesman John Kirby called a “good, productive relationship.”

Biden and Meloni have vastly different views when it comes to their domestic policies, which is why Biden sought a contrast with her in the lead up to the U.S. midterm elections. Meloni’s government has made it so only a child’s biological parents are named on birth certificates in the case of same-sex couples, for example, and has embraced hardline immigration policies (although she has recently softened her rhetoric on the issue).

But Meloni has surprised the international community with her staunch support for Ukraine, providing security assistance and welcoming in Ukrainian refugees. She has also displayed a willingness to rebuff China.

“From the perspective of the Biden administration, Meloni has turned out better than expected,” said Charles Kupchan, a former Obama National Security Council official and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The president has enjoyed working with her,” Kirby said Wednesday. “There’s been a lot of alignment on a lot of key foreign policy issues.”

The two leaders are expected to discuss the war in Ukraine, North Africa, and cooperation on China later today. Meloni is said to be preparing to withdraw Italy from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an issue she’ll likely discuss privately with Biden, who has spearheaded a rival infrastructure initiative meant to give developing nations an alternative to Beijing’s program. Meloni will also meet with bipartisan leaders on Capitol Hill, according to aides.

“Are there issues of tension stemming from Meloni’s domestic agenda? Yes. but they’re going to be in the background, just like they are with Poland,” said Kupchan.

— Morgan Chalfant

Lou Correa is a Democrat representing California’s 46th congressional district. Semafor texted him after a House Judiciary Committee hearing that featured Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testifying about the administration’s border security policies.

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: DeSantis accused Vice President Kamala Harris of seeking to spread a “fake narrative” about Florida’s controversial new Black history curriculum.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation to ban so-called “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ minors, calling it a “horrific practice.”

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