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The Intercept 

In the proposed rules package for the new 118th Congress, the Republican Party wants to create a subcommittee to investigate law enforcement and surveillance agencies.

The pledge to form the new committee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” is one of the concessions the far-right Freedom Caucus is demanding of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in exchange for supporting his bid to become speaker of the House. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has cited it as a reason to support McCarthy.

Freedom Caucus members routinely rail against the FBI’s investigations of President Donald Trump and [cut]what they describe as[/cut] excessive domestic surveillance. The “Weaponization of the Federal Government” committee would give them power to investigate the purported abuses under the auspices of the Judiciary Committee. Freedom Caucus members said they want to model the new body after the Church Committee that ran investigations into intelligence abuses in the mid-1970s, leading to significant reforms.

Democratic members of the House were quick to condemn the comparison of the “Weaponization” subcommittee with the legacy of Sen. Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led on intelligence reforms. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who lauded the original Church Committee, warned that the rebranded one could be a distraction from passing bipartisan legislation to rein in the very agencies Republicans are probing.

“To compare these is a total misunderstanding of what the Church Committee did,” Khanna told The Intercept. “The question is, if we are going to focus on making sure the government isn’t engaged in surveillance, we should be engaged in passing the Internet Bill of Rights and engaged in passing legislation that will prevent that surveillance. I don’t want a committee that will start casting political aspersions on law enforcement agencies.”

“I don’t think there is any potential merit because it’s already tainted.”

There will be little Democratic buy-in for the panel, according to interviews with minority party members, who cast the committee as one interested merely in embarrassing Democrats. “I don’t think there is any potential merit because it’s already tainted,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. “The preface to this has been all the comments the Republican majority in the House have made relative to the FBI, relative to spying on Trump, relative to going through our mail and conspiracy theories. It’s already tainted. It has no value. It’s not a Church commission. It’s more of a McCarthy commission” — a reference to the notorious, and notoriously overzealous, investigations into communists run by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

The proposed committee would effectively investigate the “deep state,” a term popularized by Trump devotees to refer to machinations of unelected security apparatuses, though the phrase traces its roots to left-wing civil liberties advocates, suggesting at least the potential for some trans-ideological collaboration. Republicans were once closely aligned with the FBI but many turned against the federal law enforcement agency following its investigation into collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2020 campaign. In August, dozens of federal agents raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and recovered classified documents taken from the White House. The former president and his supporters in Congress were enraged. In recent months, GOP lawmakers have also called for investigations into the FBI’s role in shaping social media discourse around revelations concerning Hunter Biden.

The outgoing chair of the Rules Committee, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., echoed the condemnation of comparisons between the new proposed committee and historical reform efforts: “I think it’s insulting to the Church Committee to compare this to that.”

The Church Committee oversaw sweeping investigations into agencies with vast surveillance powers including the CIA and FBI. The precursor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Church Committee, along with its House counterpart the Pike Committee, helped bring to light LSD experiments, propaganda campaigns overseen by the CIA against unwitting U.S. citizens, widespread domestic phone surveillance, and assassination plots against foreign leaders.

Despite Democrats’ skepticism toward the “weaponization” committee, there are dozens of oversight issues where they could find common cause with Republicans. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, recently revealed revelations about the FBI’s mishandling of hundreds of sexual harassment complaints against employees. In October, The Intercept reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to combat “disinformation” could potentially lead to influencing news stories unfavorable to the agency by affecting their distribution.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., one of the House GOP members holding out for concessions from McCarthy, refused three attempts for comment, despite her fellow Freedom Caucus members’ eagerness to see the committee formed.

“We’ve got a lot of oversight to do, and I think there will be a lot of committees involved,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one of the most outspoken members challenging McCarthy for concessions. “This is probably a longer discussion. In the course of a hallway discussion, I’m not sure I can break down the finer points.” On Tuesday morning, McCarthy said that his opponents had demanded to lead the upcoming committee.

Greene, a Freedom Caucus member friendly to McCarthy’s bid, was focused on the sole issue of securing her preferred speaker’s leadership position. “I’m so excited about all those things, but we can’t do them until 19 people decide to vote for Kevin McCarthy,” she said.

Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., a long-standing member of the House Intelligence Committee, cast doubt on the prospects for bipartisanship on the “Weaponization” committee. “It’s an indication that this isn’t going to be about accomplishing anything,” he said of the Republicans’ apparent partisanship. “I would predict there will be double-digit select committees and special new subs on existing committees. This is all about attacking and going on the offense and very little about what bills are we going to pass.”

Quigley suggested that the “Weaponization” committee would set up a formal structure for the Republican Party’s right flank to air its worst conspiratorial views. Quoting the late writer Hunter S. Thompson, Quigley joked, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

The post Republican Freedom Caucus Pushes for New Committee to Investigate the Surveillance State appeared first on The Intercept.

​Politics Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

Story at a glance

Two-fifths of Americans used no cash in 2022.

Paper currency and coins have downsides: they are unsanitary, inconvenient, costly to handle and easy to steal.

Credit and debit cards leave a valuable digital trace but that also means they are easy to track.

America may soon be poised to go cashless. Now, the nation must decide if ditching the dollar bill is a good idea.  

Two-fifths of Americans used no cash in 2022. Back in 2015, by contrast, fewer than one-quarter of consumers went cashless, according to Pew surveys. In a separate poll, three-fifths of consumers told Gallup they used cash only on occasion last year, twice the share of five years ago.  

Paper currency and coins are unsanitary, inconvenient, costly to handle and easy to steal. Criminal enterprises thrive on the portable anonymity of the hundred-dollar bill. Cashless transactions solve those problems, advocates say. They also allow Big Brother to track the American consumer’s every move. 

“When you pay cash, I give you money, you give me a good, end of story,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “If you’re using your credit card for all of your transactions, then data is being collected about an enormous range of your activities, including medical conditions, political donations, sexual activities, how much liquor you buy, how many cigarettes you buy.” 

In left-leaning New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, city leaders have enacted laws that require businesses to accept cash, ostensibly to protect the “unbanked,” a small but significant share of citizens who rely on currency.  

New York’s cash mandate seeded an epic battle between city regulators and Van Leeuwen, a chain of ice cream shops known for $6.50 scoops and cashless operations. Company owners held out for nearly two years before changing the rules last fall. 

That was but one skirmish in a larger battle over the future of cash in American society. 

Consumers used cash for 20 percent of all payments in 2021, down from 31 percent in 2016, according to the Federal Reserve. In place of cash, shoppers favored the credit card (28 percent) and debit card (29 percent). 

“People have literally been changing the way they pay for goods and services,” said Lee Rainie, director of internet and technology research at Pew.  

COVID-19 hastened the cashless trend. The pandemic inspired fears, largely misguided, that the virus might spread on currency. Many consumers stopped carrying cash, spurring a national coin shortage.  

“I think it’s very much like the jump in e-commerce we saw during the pandemic,” said Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate, the financial services company. “I think we’re going to continue to see a slow evolution away from cash.” 

Much of the nation hasn’t looked back. Three-fifths of wealthier Americans, those with six-figure household incomes, told Pew pollsters they used no cash in a typical week in 2022. More than half of the under-50 demographic told Pew they no longer worry about carrying cash.  

“There are good reasons why people change the way they pay, and it has to do with a combination of benefits to consumers and benefits to businesses,” said Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University who studies consumer finance.  

“When you ask retailers who’ve gone cash-free, they’re primarily small retailers, and a lot of them are pretty straightforward: ‘After my store got robbed the fifth time, I decided it wasn’t worth taking cash.’” 

Accepting bills and coins in 2022 is easier for a large, established business, harder for a small startup. “You have to have safes,” Zywicki said. “You have to have security cameras. You have to have a certain kind of cash register.” 

And while COVID-19 may not spread on dollar bills, paper currency is, in fact, filthy. Researchers have found scores of microorganisms on folding money, including microbes found in mouths and on genitalia. One analysis of dollar bills from different American cities found traces of cocaine on most of them.  

Zywicki likens the cashless trend of today to the decline of personal checks 15 or 20 years ago. American consumers used to routinely write checks to cover groceries and car repairs and appliance purchases. That changed with the new millennium, when consumers and merchants ditched checks for debit cards. Between 2000 and 2012, the number of transactions covered by checks declined by more than half.   

“Debit cards basically replaced checks,” Zywicki said.  

Yet, even in 2022, some Americans cling to cash. 

Older Americans still use cash for roughly one-quarter of purchases, according to Fed data. Low-income families, those earning less than $25,000 a year, rely on cash for more than one-third of their purchases.  

“There’s still a significant chunk of Americans who are either unbanked or underbanked,” Stanley said. “Underbanked” consumers have bank accounts but rely on overpriced alternatives such as payday loans and check-cashing shops.  

Credit card companies typically charge transaction fees that range from 1 to 3 percent of the purchase price. Together, Visa and Mastercard collected $138 billion in service fees in 2021. They are among the most profitable companies in the world.  

Shops generally pass that cost on to the consumer. To critics of the credit industry, those fees amount to a tax. “Can you imagine if we had a 1 to 3 percent national sales tax, what we could do with that money?” Stanley said.  

When shops build those fees into their prices, Stanley reasons, the credit system effectively penalizes the poor, who pay fees for cards they do not own.  

Stanley and left-leaning civic leaders fall on one side of the whither-cash debate. Zywicki falls on the other. 

“The first thing we should focus on is not trying to prop up cash,” Zywicki said. “What we should focus on is trying to facilitate access to bank accounts for anyone who wants one.” 

Take note, however, that the George Mason scholar shares the ACLU’s concern over shrinking privacy in financial transactions. 

To illustrate the vulnerability of consumer data, in a widely circulated 2019 article, a Washington Post columnist purchased a pair of bananas at a big-box retailer with his credit cards.  

“You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank,” he reported. “Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.” 

Credit card companies and retailers conspire to sell consumer data to advertisers, who use it to predict — and even to subtly influence — the shopper’s next move. In this transaction, the consumer is the product. 

To counter the data spies and retain a modicum of free will, consumer advocates say, read the fine print on your card agreement, consider paying in cash, use a robust ad blocker and avoid clicking on anything that looks like a promotion. 

“All this data, it’s not empowering you, it’s empowering somebody else,” Stanley said. 

Soon, even the federal government may be able to harvest consumer data. Late last year, the Fed announced a pilot program for a central bank digital currency.  

The digital dollar would offer a federal alternative to cryptocurrency, backed by the government. Citizens could open a bank account directly with the Fed, accessing digital funds on an app or a prepaid card, said David Waugh, managing editor at the American Institute for Economic Research, in a column for The Hill.  

“Cash remains our strongest tool to promote financial inclusion while preserving privacy and security, and new digital tools should emulate it– not replace it,” said U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, an Illinois Democrat, in support of legislation to develop a digital dollar.  

But a digital dollar would also give the government “direct control over citizens’ bank accounts,” Waugh writes. China’s government has touted its own digital currency as a means to control its citizens. 

“Yes, it’s obnoxious when Mastercard sells your data,” Zywicki said. “But in my view, if we empower the government to be able to issue programmable, digital currency, I think that’s a very dangerous thing.” 

​Arts & Culture, Changing America, Enrichment, money Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

The messy, drawn-out battle over electing the next Speaker is raising the danger of a debt limit crisis later this year, lawmakers in both parties warn.  

Conservative rebels in the House are demanding that the next Speaker, whether it’s Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) or someone else, make a stand against passing a clean debt limit increase, which would set up a major fight with Senate Democrats and President Biden.  

Congress has successfully avoided a debt limit crisis since 2011, which was also the first year of a new House GOP majority.  

That year, the standoff between the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House brought the federal government within days of defaulting on its debt obligations.  

Lawmakers say the nasty battle over electing a new Speaker portends another potential crisis later this year.  The Treasury Department won’t say when exactly the debt limit will expire, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates it will need to be raised sometime after July.

Conservative rebels who blocked McCarthy’s election as Speaker on six consecutive ballots say the Speaker must insist on using the debt limit as leverage to enact major spending reforms — something that Senate Democrats have dismissed as a non-starter over the past decade.  

“Us 20 want changes, and we’re going to stay here until we get it,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told reporters Wednesday. “Could McCarthy all of a sudden morph into a fiscal conservative? We’ll see.” 

“Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling? That’s a non-negotiable item,” he added.  

A group of seven conservatives opposed to McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter last month demanding that the next Speaker “commit to not raising the debt ceiling without a concrete plan to cap spending and operate under a budget that balances in 10 years.” 

Senate Republicans, however, warn that debt ceiling legislation with spending caps isn’t going to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, setting up the two chambers for a stalemate that could put the nation’s credit rating at risk or the federal government on the verge of default.  

“That’s not going to get 60 votes. That’s math,” said a Senate GOP aide, who predicted that “it’s going to be a challenge” to pass legislation to raise the debt limit later this year.  

McCarthy said in October that he would be willing to use the debt limit legislation as leverage to force spending cuts, but conservatives have doubts about how hard he would push it when the stakes are high and default is a real possibility.  

But the bruising battle over electing a Speaker, which has played out over two days, has lawmakers in both parties worried that whoever winds up leading the House Republican majority this year will have a hard time passing debt limit legislation or regular spending bills given the staunch opposition of a small group of conservatives and the party’s slim five-seat majority. 

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to the Senate GOP leadership team, said raising the debt limit, which is expected to expire this summer, “will probably be the single biggest challenge the House will have.” 

Asked about the prospect of passing a debt limit bill that caps spending or balances the budget in 10 years, Cornyn replied, “Could you get 60 votes in the Senate for that?” 

“We’ll see how the story ends. I don’t know,” he added.  

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) suggested the messy and protracted battle over electing Speaker doesn’t bode well for getting must-pass legislation done later this year.  

“You’re looking at a preview of coming attractions,” he quipped.  

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, predicted that passing debt limit and spending legislation will be a heavy lift this year and said the possible outcome is hard to predict while the Speaker’s race remained in limbo.  

“It’s impossible to know at this point. It’s always hard,” he said, predicting the debt limit “will be” a big fight this year.  

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said clean debt limit legislation won’t fly with conservatives this year — even though congressional leaders haven’t used it as a vehicle to pass fiscal reforms since Congress passed the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) as a way to end that year’s debt limit crisis.

“Who says it’s clean? That’s their point. They don’t want clean. They want constructive things like we’ve done in the past,” he said, referring to the BCA, which imposed caps on discretionary spending and established sequestration, the automatic reduction of certain mandatory spending programs. 

A Senate Democratic aide on Tuesday called the BCA “the worst piece of legislation passed” in recent memory, signaling that Senate Democrats have no appetite for agreeing to a major spending cut in a deal to raise the debt limit.  

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) floated the idea of raising the debt limit in last year’s lame-duck session while Democrats still controlled the House, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) shot down the idea.  

Now Democrats warn Congress could be headed for a fiscal disaster later this year.  

“It’s very troubling,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) of the chances of a debt limit crisis later this year.  

“We put at risk the economic future not only of our country but the world,” he said.  

Doggett said whether McCarthy is elected as a weak Speaker or someone else steps in to fill the top leadership job, it’s likely “we’re going to have brinkmanship on [the debt limit] or shutting down the government.” 

Doggett said that “there certainly is that danger” that 2023 could turn into a reprise of 2011, when the deadlock over raising the debt limit dragged on for months and took the country so close to default that Standard and Poor’s downgraded the nation’s credit rating.  

McCarthy met with a group of his conservative opponents Wednesday evening in a last-ditch effort to persuade them to flip their votes, but he will have to make a strong commitment on using the debt limit to play hardball with the Senate to reduce the deficit if he is to sway them.   

“Obviously spending is a very important issue, especially to conservatives like me, and that has been part of our conversations,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Donald Trump-allied conservative who is supporting McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker. 

Mychael Schnell and Al Weaver contributed.  

​Senate, News, David Joyce, Debt crisis, Hal Rogers, House Speakership vote, Kevin McCarthy, Pete Sessions Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

Lobbyists are celebrating their return to the Capitol as it reopens to the public, ending nearly three years of pandemic restrictions that severely limited physical access to lawmakers.

The decision by Capitol officials to end strict rules for visitors on Tuesday, which followed pleas from the lobbyists and House GOP leaders, will boost K Street’s visibility on the Hill in time for the new Congress. 

Thousands of lobbyists roamed the Capitol campus this week without an appointment or congressional escort for the first time since March 2020, when Congress implemented COVID-19 restrictions. 

“It really was a very nostalgic, almost emotional feeling, truly,” said Brian Pomper, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss & Feld and former Democratic Senate aide. “Talking to other people, I think they felt similarly that it just was so good to be back, and a reminder of just how important face-to-face interaction is for this business, which is very much a people business in many ways.” 

The pandemic restrictions, which were extended after last year’s Capitol attack, made it difficult for lobbyists to meet with lawmakers in their offices. Congressional aides and K Street representatives increasingly relied on Zoom calls because getting people into Capitol buildings required too much time and planning. 

The restrictions prevented lobbyists from loitering in Capitol buildings — taking away the chance encounters that hired guns often lean on to build connections with members of Congress — as well as traveling between offices to attend multiple meetings. 

Now, lobbyists are once again enjoying largely unfettered access to lawmakers and their staffers, something they had become accustomed to before the pandemic. 

“I think it’s always important for lawmakers and their staff to see your face and really hear you tell your story in person. It shows that with all the different draws on people’s time, that you want to make the time to come in and advocate for your issues. So, I do think it will have an impact,” said Carolyn Coda, a lobbyist at Invariant who specializes in taxes and financial services.

“If you want to really go deep in the weeds on an issue, being able to do that in person is going to be really advantageous for those that make the time to do it,” she added.

With pandemic restrictions no longer in place, C-suite executives and other high-profile clients will be more likely to meet with lawmakers in person, potentially boosting their influence, lobbyists said.

“More frequent client visits will probably be the name of the game now,” said Aaron Cutler, a former aide to House GOP leaders who heads lobbying at Hogan Lovells. 

Lobbyists said that the restrictions made it particularly difficult to conduct fly-ins, where hundreds or even thousands of individuals from a particular industry converge on Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers. 

Some companies and trade associations held their fly-ins at other venues, such as Nationals Park, because the Capitol restrictions made the logistics too complicated.

“I think all of us are thrilled that we are finally returning to some normalcy after more than 1,000 days of limited access,” said Alex Vogel, a former Senate GOP aide who heads the Vogel Group. 

Lobbyists expect to keep relying on Zoom for its time-efficiency, particularly for meetings with congressional staffers, while relying more on in-person gatherings with members. 

Virtual meetings, meanwhile, didn’t stop Washington lobbying firms from raking in record-breaking earnings last year. 

The most profitable run in K Street’s history came under the COVID-19 restrictions, which also coincided with massive new government spending and Democratic control of Washington, both of which came with new opportunities and threats for deep-pocketed companies.

Total federal lobbying spending surpassed $3 billion through nine months of 2022, according to nonpartisan research group OpenSecrets, putting it on track to smash previous records. The vast majority of that spending comes from large corporations and their trade associations. 

House Sergeant-at-Arms William Walker announced last week that members of the public would be able to visit congressional offices without an official appointment or escort, according to a memo to lawmakers obtained by The Hill. 

The National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics, a trade association representing lobbyists, pushed those changes in meetings with lawmakers and the Capitol Police, whose leaders wanted to address staffing shortages before reopening the Capitol. 

“If not for our profession, temporary rules might have become permanent,” Paul Miller, the group’s board chairman, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Miller credited House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) for crafting a reopening plan and spearheading the effort to lift restrictions. 

Shortly after the midterms, McCarthy wrote a letter to Capitol officials urging them to reopen Congress to visitors by the new year, arguing that Americans “have been restricted from exercising their constitutional right to petition the first branch of government” for several years. 

“Reopening the House is more than just a symbolic measure — a government of the people, by the people, for the people requires interaction with the people,’’ wrote McCarthy, who now finds himself locked in a tough fight to be the next Speaker. “It is for this reason that we must welcome Americans from across the nation back to the Halls of Congress.”

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Just In | The Hill 

Former President Trump’s criticism of hard-line abortion opponents is laying bare the tension over the issue within the GOP as the party looks to regroup after a bruising midterm election. 

On Monday, Trump accused Republicans, particularly those against abortion with no exceptions, of underperforming in the election. 

“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “I was 233-20! It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters.” 

The attack drew a response from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which was amplified by Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, underscoring the divide within the party over how to message on the issue. 

“There was ALSO a profound midterm lesson for future federal candidates: those who adopt the Ostrich Strategy on abortion lose,” the group said in a statement.

Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, lambasted Trump’s statement as “stupid” in an interview with The Hill. 

“Ultimately I thought it was so unlike Trump,” Schilling said. “First of all, it’s not true. The candidates that he endorsed that lost all went with this strategy of deflecting and the ostrich method.”

At the root of the back and forth is the fact that Democrats have successfully used the abortion issue as a galvanizing force in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade last summer. 

​​“The problem is either when candidates stick their head in the sand and don’t know how to deal with it or don’t want to talk about it,” one Republican strategist told The Hill. 

Conservatives point to a number of Senate candidates in tough races, such as Mehmet Oz, who lost to now-Sen. John Fetterman (D) in Pennsylvania in November. 

“All throughout the campaign Fetterman is accusing Dr. Oz of being an extremist on abortion,” Schilling said. “And Dr. Oz’s strategy, and this is not just him it was most of the candidates that lost, his strategy was to deflect, not address that claim, and then immediately shift it over to inflation. That’s a losing strategy.” 

There were other Trump-endorsed candidates that leaned in on abortion restrictions and ended up losing their races, including former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who said he opposed exceptions. Additionally, former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Michigan gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon voiced opposition to exceptions and lost their races. 

Of course, there are also other factors as to why these candidates lost. Whether abortion was the main reason, or whether it was due to other factors like flawed candidates or ties to Trump, is a matter of debate. 

Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last month that while abortion may have galvanized some support for Democrats, the GOP’s main problem was candidate quality. 

Throughout the midterm campaign, Republican candidates leaned on the three-fold strategy of focusing on rising inflation, crime and the flow of migrants over the southern border. 

As the smoke has cleared in the months since the midterms, more Republicans, including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, argue that candidates could have mirrored their Democratic opponents by taking a stronger approach on the issue.

Conservatives lay blame on the GOP’s leadership on Capitol Hill, arguing that they have set the tone for what they say is the party’s less-than-aggressive strategy on abortion. 

“When I talk about leadership, I’m not talking about the RNC,” Schilling said. “I’m more talking about McConnell and a lot of these House leaders who refuse to have any votes that put Democrats on the defense.” 

McConnell has thrown cold water on the idea of a national abortion ban, arguing that the issue should be dealt with at the state level. Anti-abortion advocates have strongly pushed back against that notion. 

“Don’t say it’s just up to the states now,” said Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony List. “No, it’s up to the people and their elected representatives and that includes federally.” 

“Our candidates need to point out how extreme the other side is,“ she added. 

Many anti-abortion proponents say their best-case scenario would be a national 15-week ban on the procedure.  

“The winning strategy is endorsing an aggressive 15-week bill with exceptions,” Schilling said. 

Still, Republicans say the party needs to find its footing on the issue ahead of 2023’s off-year elections and the presidential election in 2024. 

“We’re the pro-life party, we’ve been the pro-life party,” said the GOP strategist. “How do you not know how to talk about it? We’ve been running on this issue for decades.” 

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