This Week in Congress

House

The House is back to work after electing a new Speaker. The House passed the FY’24 Energy and Water Appropriations bills.

Senate

The Senate began debate on a three-bill FY’24 minibus.

Speaker of the House Election

This week, after a 22-day delay, the House elected Rep. Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, as the 56^th Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Johnson is a graduate of Louisiana State University and its Paul M. Hebert Law Center. Before entering politics, he was an attorney in private practice and worked for Alliance Defending Freedom. He also founded Freedom Guard, a nonprofit legal ministry designed to represent Christian clients in lawsuits.

Speaker Johnson has strong views on abortion and stated “a child in the womb” is a “unique human being with unique DNA” from the moment of conception.  Johnson also dedicated earlier phases of his career to limiting gay rights, including same-sex marriage and health care access. Johnson described homosexuals as “sinful” and “destructive” and argued support for homosexuality could lead to support for pedophilia. He also authored op-eds that argued for criminalizing gay sex. “There is clearly no ‘right to sodomy’ in the Constitution,” Johnson wrote in a 2003 column in a Louisiana newspaper.

Appropriations

House

Speaker Johnson has laid out an aggressive appropriations schedule for the FY’24 bills. Johnson has proposed bringing up the Legislative Branch (HR 4364), Interior-Environment (HR 4821) and Transportation-HUD (HR 4820) bills next week. The Financial Services (HR 4664) and Commerce-Justice-Science bills would be considered the week of Nov. 6, and the Labor-HHS-Education and Agriculture would be debated the week of Nov. 13. But with the current CR expiring on Nov. 17, another CR will be required to give sufficient time to negotiate the differences between the House and Senate bills.

Senate

The Senate began debating a three-bill minibus. The package includes the FY’24 Military Construction-VA (S 2127), Agriculture (S 2131) and Transportation-HUD (S 2437) bills. Today, the Senate could vote on an amendment by Sen. Braun, that would restrict using funds for earmarks to those awarded under a merit-based process under existing law. Majority Leader Schumer praised the bipartisan effort to bring the package to the floor after senators worked for much of the last month to reach an agreement that would expedite floor consideration.

Supplemental

President Biden is requesting $56 billion in supplemental appropriations to address domestic issues. The funding request includes:

• $6B for Disaster Response and Other Needs
• $16B for child care
• $6B for the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP)
• $6B for American Security and Energy Independence
• $1.6B for Energy Assistance
• $1.55B for Countering Fentanyl
• $1.05B for International Food Assistance
• $220M for Wildland Firefighter Pay

The domestic supplemental can be found here

The fact sheet can be found here

The summary can be found here

Other Happenings Around the Nation

Abortion

In the year after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, something unexpected happened: The total number of legal abortions in the US did not fall. Instead, it appeared to increase slightly, by about 0.2 percent. This finding came despite the fact that 14 states banned all abortions, and seven imposed new limits. Even as those restrictions reduced the legal abortion rate to near zero in some states, there were large increases in places where abortions remained legal. Researchers said they were driven by the expansion of telemedicine for mail-order abortion pills, increased options and assistance for women who traveled, and a surge of publicity about ways to get abortions.

Georgia

A Georgia law banning most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy can remain in effect, the state’s highest court ruled. A judge in Atlanta had blocked the law last year, finding it was void because, at the time it was passed in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision still guaranteed a right to abortion nationwide.

Texas

In recent months, abortion opponents in Texas have succeeded in passing a growing number of local ordinances to prevent people from helping women travel to have abortions in nearby states that still allow the procedure. Lubbock County, a conservative hub of more than 300,000 residents near the border with New Mexico, became the largest county yet to enact such a ban. The county commissioners court, during a public meeting that drew occasionally impassioned testimony, voted to make it illegal for anyone to transport a pregnant woman through the county, or pay for her travel, for the purpose of seeking an abortion.

Vaccines

Mpox

Bavarian Nordic says an advisory committee of the CDC has voted in favor of recommending routine use of mpox vaccine Jynneos in adults. The panel recommends individuals 18 years and older with certain risk factors should receive the two-dose regimen. Recommendations will be forwarded to the Director of the CDC and the US Department of Health and Human Services for review.

COVID-19

CDC Director Cohen said about 3.6% of the US population, or 12 million people, have received the reformulated COVID-19 vaccines since the shots hit pharmacy shelves five weeks ago, while 16 million people have received the annual flu vaccine. Cohen said the US is on track to hit last year’s COVID-19 vaccine uptake, which reached 17% of the population.

COVID-19 Shots for Kids

The CDC recommends the next round of COVID shots for everyone 6 months and older. The shots were expected to be available within days in pharmacies and doctor’s offices across the country, the CDC said. But more than a month later, the pediatric versions of the new shots for children 6 months to 11 years old are still difficult to find. A confluence of problems, from technicalities about who can give shots to small kids to the lack of accurate information online on where the kid-sized doses can be found, are still preventing parents from making sure their children are protected.

Combo Flu/COVID

This week Moderna announced it has dosed its first participant in a phase III clinical trial of a combination influenza and COVID-19 vaccine. This phase will evaluate the safety and efficacy of the combo vaccine compared to flu and COVID vaccines that are administered separately in two groups, one involving 4,000 adults aged 65 and older and another involving 4,000 adults between ages 50 and 64.

RSV

The CDC has recommended rationing an important monoclonal antibody product to protect young infants from RSV due to strained supply of the new product, Sanofi’s Beyfortus. In a health alert issued this week, the CDC said clinicians should prioritize available doses for babies at highest risk from respiratory syncytial virus, reserving 100-milligram doses for infants under the age of 6 months and those with underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of experiencing severe illness if they contract RSV.

LBGTQ

Infertility has a new definition in the U.S. — one that could make a big difference to would-be parents who are single or LGBTQ+. Last week, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) issued an expanded description of the condition, stating that infertility involves “the need for medical intervention, including, but not limited to, the use of donor gametes or donor embryos in order to achieve a successful pregnancy either as an individual or with a partner.”  Infertility affects same-sex couples and single individuals, too. “What we’re really trying to do is to acknowledge the reality that there are multiple reasons why patients may need medical intervention in order to build their families,” said ASRM’s Sean Tipton. “It also could be that someone is single or is partnered with someone who is of the same sex as they are, and those people deserve access every bit as much as anybody else.”

Speaker Johnson on Same-Sex Marriage

After receiving criticism for his previous comments on same-sex marriage, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he wanted to be clear on his stance: he is “a rule of law guy.” “I made a career defending the rule of law, I respect the rule of law,” Johnson said on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News Thursday. “When the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell opinion, that became the law of the land, okay.” … “I respect the rule of law and also genuinely love all people, regardless of their lifestyle choices,” he said. “This is not about the people themselves.”

340B

Some hospital outpatient clinics are likely to lose 340B drug discount program eligibility under a policy the Health Resources and Services Administration issued Thursday. Hospitals participating in the drug pricing program now must register offsite clinics with HRSA and list them on Medicare cost reports to qualify for 340B, the agency announced in a Federal Register notice. This reverses a 2020 HRSA policy that aimed to streamline 340B certifications during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pennsylvania

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania is in line to receive $86 million from the government under a legal settlement resolving cuts made to a national drug discount program designed to strengthen safety-net hospitals. The amount for Penn’s flagship hospital in University City represents the sixth-largest payout to any hospital in the nation, and accounts for the bulk of the $129.2 million coming to the University of Pennsylvania Health System, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.