Principals

☞White House: Biden will close out the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit later today with an event on food security. “The United States is all in on Africa’s future,” he said in an address to dozens of African delegations in attendance on Wednesday.

☞Chuck Schumer: The Senate will finally take up the NDAA. Schumer is pushing for a vote on Sen. Joe Manchin’s, D-W.Va. permitting reform bill as an amendment (the measure didn’t make it into the compromise NDAA that passed the House last week and is unlikely to succeed).

☞Mitch McConnell: Senate Republican leaders are moving forward with the omnibus, despite pushback from some members in the caucus. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. and a handful of conservative allies held a press conference Wednesday to slam the emerging funding bill and demand a short-term CR to give House Republicans a chance to respond.

☞Nancy Pelosi: The Speaker was showered with accolades during the unveiling of her official portrait on Wednesday. Former Speaker John Boehner choked up while delivering a tribute. “No other speaker of the House in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel with such authority or with such consistent results,” he said at the ceremony.

☞Kevin McCarthy: Supporters of McCarthy’s speaker bid are now wearing “O.K.” pins, short for ”only Kevin.” Meanwhile, his critics are unimpressed by his recent turn against McConnell for ignoring House Republicans in spending talks. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. told Semafor he could have responded “earlier” and expects him to react “louder.”

On the first day of Christmas, the White House gave to me: More COVID tests! The Biden administration plans to send four free COVID-19 tests to every U.S. household that wants them, as part of its winter strategy to combat the virus. Americans can begin ordering the kits today and they’ll start shipping next week. The administration failed to convince Congress to include more funding to fight the virus in the omnibus, so officials are relying on remaining money from the American Rescue Plan.

This ain’t no pivot: Despite recession fears and recent signs that consumer prices might finally be cooling down, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters yesterday that the central bank isn’t planning to ease up its efforts to throttle inflation any time soon. The Fed hiked interest rates half a point Wednesday, projecting for the first time that they would rise above 5 percent next year, and stay there for all of 2023. However, Powell also hinted that the pace of rate hikes could slow down going forward, which might give the Fed some wiggle room.

Keep your Addison Rae videos away from the Inspector General, government workers. The Senate by unanimous consent passed legislation offered by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. that would bar the use of TikTok on government devices last night, following in the dance steps of a handful of Republican-led states who have done the same. The measure would still need to pass the House to make it to Biden’s desk.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: House Republicans are planning to reinstate a rule next year that gives Congress the power to zero out government officials’ salaries in appropriations bills.

Playbook: Last week, a McCarthy ally asked moderate Republicans to “push back hard” on the demand from House conservatives that he reinstate the “motion to vacate” that would make it easier for them to oust him mid-speakership. The pro-McCarthy effort seems to be taking shape this week.

The Early 202: The White House is working to kill a Senate resolution offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. that would halt U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Senators aren’t ready to let Kevin McCarthy negotiate a big boy bill just yet

THE NEWS

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is fuming over being cut out of a massive bill to fund the government through next year and the Senate thinks that’s just adorable.

With Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi all working towards an omnibus spending deal, McCarthy wants a short-term funding bill instead that would expire soon after Republicans take control of the House and let them start from scratch.

“Allow the American people what they said a month ago, to change Washington as they know it today,” McCarthy said at a press conference on Wednesday.

But with the exception of a few conservative allies, Senators are largely dismissing his complaints, telling McCarthy to get his House in order before asking for a seat at the grown-up table. And remember, they say, they’re doing this for his own good.

“I just think for Kevin’s sake, even though he’s not asking for it, I think some Republicans just feel like we should relieve him of that burden,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., who sits on the Appropriations Committee, told Semafor.

JOSEPH AND KADIA’S VIEW

It makes sense some House Republicans are mad. The backdrop of the negotiations is that nobody involved in the deal wants McCarthy (or whoever ends up in charge) negotiating this bill come January.

McCarthy is poised to run a narrow 222-seat majority next year that is already forcing him into tension with his far right flank, who currently are threatening to tank his speakership and urging him to take a hard line with McConnell.

“We need to have everyone vote no [on an omnibus], and then we also need to call out the Senate and challenge the Senate to also vote no, because the Senate can stop this,” Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., one of the holdouts on the speaker’s vote, said.

With the House GOP still going through its awkward phase, neither Democrats nor Republicans working on a deal are confident McCarthy can keep his caucus unified in a high-stakes shutdown fight. In addition to the potential for chaos, a House-led deal could jeopardize bipartisan Senate priorities like Ukraine aid and a bill to block Jan 6th-style coup attempts that’s set to ride the omnibus.

So while top negotiators say they understand that maturing leaders need to show off in front of their new friends sometimes, they worry that an omnibus would be an awful lot of responsibility for a still-growing caucus.

“He’s running for speaker and I understand that, and he’s got a lot of dissidents, so people say what they want,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala, an appropriator who McCarthy has complained is not “accountable” to voters due to his impending retirement. “But I’m hoping we can pass an omnibus, fund the government, fund the military, fund the veterans.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

For all the acrimony, it’s not clear how different a spending deal negotiated with House Republicans would actually be, Manhattan Institute fellow Brian Riedl told Semafor. Since future spending bills will still require 60 votes in the Senate, bipartisan talks there are likely to have a huge influence on the final outcome.

“I think Senate Republicans are happy to have a House Republican majority,” Riedl said. “But they also think whatever is going to pass a supermajority in the Senate is probably going to pass a slightly-Democratic versus slightly-Republican House with about the same difficulty.”

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Kadia Goba

Rwanda’s Kagame says U.S. pressure won’t make him release jailed international hero

Rwandan President Paul Kagame sat down with Semafor’s Steve Clemons on the sidelines of the U.S.-Africa Summit on Wednesday — and he didn’t hold back when the conversation turned to controversy, including the fate of an imprisoned international hero. Here are a couple notable moments.

On China

Kagame dismissed the notion that Rwanda — or other African countries — should have to choose between partnering with the U.S. or with China.

“I don’t think we need to be bullied into taking or making choices, choosing between the U.S. or China,” he said. “Whatever is going on between China and the U.S. and then that being brought to Africa is something we need to treat carefully ourselves.”

On Paul Rusesabagina

Kagame also waved away U.S. efforts to push for the release of dissident Paul Rusesabagina, a heroic figure in the 1994 genocide who was portrayed in the film “Hotel Rwanda.”

Rusesabagina, a lawful permanent resident of the U.S., was convicted on terrorism charges for his connection to the National Liberation Front. The U.S. classifies his imprisonment as a wrongful detention and Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised his case directly with Kagame and other officials during a trip to Rwanda earlier this year. But that hasn’t seemed to sway the African leader.

“We’ve made it clear there isn’t anybody going to come from anywhere to bully us into something to do with our lives,” Kagame said. “Maybe make an invasion and overrun the country, you can do that.”

— Morgan Chalfant

Republicans are planning to investigate Biden. One major activist has a plan to hit back.

David Brock, the punchy liberal activist and Media Matters founder, is already trying to organize a counterattack against House Republicans who’ve promised to launch an onslaught of investigations into President Biden next year.

His new outfit, Facts First USA, has been shopping a strategy memo around Democratic offices on Capitol Hill, urging them to “link investigations with extremist MAGA politicians,” and frame them as a move by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. to appease GOP hardliners in his rocky quest for the speaker’s gavel. The group shared the memo with Semafor on Wednesday.

Citing polling it conducted in November, Facts First argues that “Republicans are allowing deeply unpopular congressmembers to become their spokespeople.” The group singles out McCarthy in particular, as well as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is expected to run point on a number of investigations as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

“The public believes that Republicans are acting based on political motivations and our messages should reinforce that idea,” the memo states. “Nevertheless, failing to offer a response to Republican attacks creates serious vulnerabilities for President Biden and his administration.”

The memo does not cite any specific investigations. But House Republicans are planning an extensive slate of probes, including inquiries into the Biden family and specifically Hunter Biden’s past business dealings overseas. McCarthy has also threatened to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the situation at the southern border.

There’s been debate about how forceful the response should be from the Biden camp. The Washington Post reported recently that Hunter Biden and his allies want to more vocally respond to allegations about his foreign business dealings, while other Democratic strategists want him to maintain a lower profile.

— Morgan Chalfant

One Good Text with ... Claudia Sahm

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report concluding that COVID-19 “may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: States where abortion has been banned or restricted are seeing higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, according to a new study from the Commonwealth Fund.

• Tough times at the Washington Post. On Wednesday, a video of CEO Fred Ryan getting heckled by angry staffers after awkwardly announcing layoffs for next year made the rounds on Twitter. At Puck, Dylan Byers surveys the internal dysfunction at the paper, where Editor in Chief  Sally Buzbee has been criticizing Ryan. Meanwhile, Semafor’s own Max Tani reports that Buzbee herself “has begun musing aloud to staff about whether they thought she should resign.”
• With Donald Trump stumbling out the gate in his presidential rerun, Ron DeSantis seems to be making a play for hardline conservatives by diving deeper into the world of vaccine skepticism and criticizing the same-sex marriage bill Biden recently signed, Politico writes.
• New York Mayor Eric Adams’ new plan to involuntarily hospitalize homeless people suffering severe mental illness could be a major test case for U.S. cities struggling with how to help the unhoused. But the New York Times writes that it faces a host of logistical challenges, including a lack of inpatient beds for psychiatric patients.

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— Steve Clemons