Senate Sets Up a Brutal January as Border Talks Drag On

Schumer acknowledged that negotiators need more time.
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg

Happy Tuesday! On this date 25 years ago, President Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice by the Republican-led House. He would later be acquitted by the Senate. At the time, Clinton was just the second president ever to be impeached.

Senate Sets Up a Brutal January as Border Security Talks Drag On

Senate leaders said Tuesday that negotiators have made progress toward a national security supplemental spending bill including aid for Ukraine and border policy changes, but they acknowledged that the two sides have more work to do, meaning that a vote won’t happen until January at the earliest.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve made some significant progress, but we obviously aren’t there,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.

McConnell called the supplemental package “extremely important” and said he thinks the country needs the national security deal because “this is the most dangerous time since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” But with no deal in sight yet, the Senate was preparing to begin its holiday recess after a few final votes, including a temporary reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration and military nominations held up by Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville as part of his protest over a Pentagon policy on abortion-related travel.

Some lawmakers were already in holiday mode; just 61 of 100 senators voted Monday night on the confirmation of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley as Social Security commissioner. O’Malley was confirmed by a 50-11 margin.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week kept lawmakers in town and said they’d be voting on a security-funding package this week, but Senate Republicans have been insistent that there was no chance of a deal getting done before the end of the year given the issues that remained unresolved and the legislative text that had yet to be written. Schumer acknowledged as much on Tuesday. “We know it’s going to take more time,” he told reporters after a weekly Democratic lunch, “but I am significantly more optimistic today than I was Thursday when we left based on the negotiations that have occurred all weekend.”

The talks have been the subject of criticism and questions from members of both parties, who are worried that their representatives might privately agree to concessions they find problematic.

“There’s a reason why Congress hasn’t passed major immigration or border reform in 40 years. This is tough to come to a compromise and it’s just as tough to write to make sure that you get the ideas down on paper in a way that makes sure that the policy is implemented correctly,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, the lead Senate Democratic negotiator, adding, “Momentum is heading in the right direction, and I think that will continue over the course of this week.”

Murphy said he would take a day and a half off for Christmas but would otherwise keep the talks going, adding that negotiators are “closer than ever before to an agreement.”

Government funding deadline looms: Lawmakers will face two deadlines to prevent partial government shutdowns early next year, one on January 19 and the other on February 2. And Congress isn’t due back until the week of January 8, leaving precious little time for dealmaking. Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, urged Republicans to abide by the debt-ceiling deal struck by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy months before his ouster. “You don’t get to negotiate how much of your word you’re going to keep,” she said Tuesday.

McConnell on Tuesday took a jab at leaders on the other side, telling reporters that the Senate wasn’t nearly as productive as it could have been and that more progress could have been made on annual appropriations bills. But when asked if the House should stick to the debt-ceiling deal on spending levels, he demurred. “I don’t give the speaker public advice about how to handle things,” he said before adding that a spending deal is important to avoid a full-year continuing resolution, which under the debt-ceiling deal would come with automatic 1% cuts across the board.

“A CR is simply unacceptable for a year. It’s devastating, particularly for defense, and we’ve got all of these wars going on. So we need to reach an agreement on the top line [spending level] and get about getting an outcome as soon as possible.”

The bottom line: Tomorrow will be the last day the Senate is in session, so wait ‘til next year! It’s shaping up to be a doozy!

Number of the Day: $2.1 Million

The U.S. Navy has shot down dozens of drones and missiles fired at commercial ships in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels based in Yemen, but the rising cost of the operation is starting to raise concerns at the Defense Department. As Politico’s Lara Seligman and Matt Berg report, the anti-aircraft missiles the U.S. has been using to defeat the Houthi attacks are expensive, costing as much as $2.1 million per shot. By comparison, the drones being deployed by the Houthis cost just a few thousand dollars.

“That quickly becomes a problem because the most benefit, even if we do shoot down their incoming missiles and drones, is in their favor,” Mick Mulroy, a former defense official and CIA officer, told Politico. “We, the U.S., need to start looking at systems that can defeat these that are more in line with the costs they are expending to attack us.”

The Navy has cheaper options for shooting down drones and missiles, including the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, a Gatling gun installed on U.S. destroyers that fires 20 mm ammunition. But the Phalanx system has a much more limited range than an antiaircraft missile; the former works best in a range of one to five miles, while the anti-aircraft missiles on many ships are effective at a range of up to 130 miles. Saving money by relying on the Phalanx system means the Houthi’s anti-ship missiles end up coming much closer to their targets, raising the risk of a successful strike. So for now, it looks like the U.S. is stuck with a stark imbalance in costs as it continues to defend against attacks in the Red Sea.

More Than Half of Children Losing Medicaid Coverage Live in Just 5 States

As individual states continue to disenroll millions of people from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) now that the pandemic-era suspension of participation guidelines has come to an end, new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that more than 50% of the children who have lost health coverage this year come from just five states.

From March 2023, when the disenrollment process began, to the end of September, 2.2 million children were removed from Medicaid and CHIP, two programs that overlap and are typically lumped together. The five states with the largest total declines in enrollment – Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Arkansas — accounted for 54% of the reductions, or more than 1.2 million children.

All five states are led by Republicans, and the first three have refused to expand their Medicaid systems as allowed by the Affordable Care Act. In terms of total disenrollment, the 10 states that have refused Medicaid expansion — Texas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin and Wyoming — have removed more children from coverage than all of the expansion states combined, HHS said.

Echoing the worries of many healthcare experts, the Biden administration has expressed concerns that some states have been too aggressive in removing beneficiaries from their Medicaid and CHIP rolls, with many people losing coverage simply because they failed to complete various kinds of paperwork. HHS said Monday that Secretary Xavier Becerra has sent letters to the nine states with the highest disenrollment rates urging them to “adopt additional federal strategies and flexibilities to help prevent children and their families from losing coverage due to red tape.”

Among other things, Becerra called on governors to remove barriers to participation such as CHIP enrollment fees and premiums; to make it easier to automatically renew children for coverage; to expand efforts to contact families facing renewal; and to expand their Medicaid programs so that children do not fall into a coverage gap. “I urge you to ensure that no eligible child in your state loses their health insurance due to ‘red tape’ or other bureaucratic barriers during the Medicaid enrollment process,” he wrote.

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