As Congress heads into its annual August recess, I recapped the House delegation’s biggest accomplishments and sources of frustration. Plus, UFOs are in the political spotlight, and both Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and the Biden administration are focusing on extreme heat.
The Nevada delegation’s year so far
From the multi-day election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker to the monthslong battle over the debt limit, there’s been no shortage of drama in the House of Representatives this year.
As the chamber recesses for the month of August, in advance of what will be a bruising spending fight in September, I caught up with Nevada’s four House members to discuss their biggest accomplishments and biggest sources of frustration for the year thus far. (Stay tuned for a future edition on the senators!)
Here’s what each had to say:
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV)
After four years as part of the minority, Amodei, the delegation’s lone Republican, is back in the majority.
And while some of his Republican colleagues have made life difficult for the speaker — holding up legislation on the floor, publicly denouncing the debt limit deal, and forcing moderate members to take tough votes on culture war topics — Amodei has remained loyal to leadership. He’s been a reliable “yes” vote on McCarthy’s priorities: voting for him 15 times for speaker, supporting Republicans’ signature energy bill and advancing the legislative branch funding bill through the Appropriations Committee.
Other than shepherding that funding bill through his subcommittee and the full Appropriations Committee, Amodei listed Nevada-centric work his office has done as his biggest accomplishments this term.
‘I like the way … constituent services are going,” Amodei said. “We’ve got a good track record.”
Amodei said he met Thursday with Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), the chair of the Natural Resources Committee, to schedule a hearing on his Northern Nevada lands bill. He also recently met with Veterans’ Affairs staff to discuss picking a site for a new veterans’ hospital in Reno — a priority of the state’s senators as well. He also noted his legislation fighting NASA over their use of Railroad Valley, attempting to open it up to mineral extraction.
As for frustrations, Amodei did not call anyone out by name, but noted that the high rate of turnover in the House can contribute to some of the interparty squabbles that Republicans have faced.
“Starting with the speaker election, it’s like, hey, you’ve got different factions that you have to deal with each time,” Amodei said. “And so that requires going to practice. And we’re going to have to deal with all of that.”
Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV)
On two issues Titus has been passionate about — designating Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument and expanding disability rights in the transportation industry — the longtime congresswoman found a willing partner in the Biden administration this year.
President Joe Biden designated Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument in March. Titus, as well as the other Democrats in the delegation, celebrated at an event in April in Las Vegas alongside Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
“I was honored to carry the baton across the finish line on Avi Kwa Ame, preserving the cultural heritage of our Native American tribes and protecting these treasured lands for future generations to enjoy,” Titus said in a statement Friday.
And she marked another victory this week when the Department of Transportation issued a new rule requiring airplane bathrooms to be big enough to accommodate wheelchair users.
But as a member of the minority, Titus said she has been frustrated by House Republicans’ actions to undo the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate and health care law passed by Democrats last year.
“The GOP needs to come to the table and work with us instead of pushing ‘culture wars’ that are out of touch with the American people,” she said.
Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV)
This is Lee’s first term as a member of the minority. And despite describing herself as an optimist and expressing openness to working with Republicans, she said this year has been a frustrating one.
As a member of the Appropriations Committee, Lee’s had a front-row view of the partisanship that has ensnared the budget process, as House Republicans have written spending bills below the level agreed upon by McCarthy and Biden in the debt limit deal.
“The thing that’s so frustrating is the debt limit deal, which we all worked hard on,” Lee said in an interview. “And then to watch them walk it back, say ‘this [agreed-upon spending topline] is the ceiling, not the floor’ — it’s very disappointing, because you can’t get to an area where you can trust them to make another agreement.”
She described a robust debate in the Appropriations Committee’s Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee over a proposed new National Museum of the American Latino at the Smithsonian that ended with Republicans voting to bar funding for. She said the subcommittee’s chair told Democrats to trust that they could find a way to restore the funding later on, but to her, the damage had been done.
“Relationships don’t work that way,” she said.
And she’s concerned about a government shutdown in the fall, given the House has only passed one of 12 spending bills. Even if those are passed, they need to be reconciled with Democrat-approved Senate bills by Oct. 1. A government shutdown would jeopardize her office’s ability to execute what she described as one of her biggest accomplishments this year — a strong constituent services casework operation that her office says has closed 1,068 cases already in 2023.
Lee also made major strides in leadership this year, successfully adding a new “battleground representative” position to House Democrats’ leadership team, being named vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers’ Caucus, the Colorado River Caucus, and the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus, as well as becoming the whip of the New Democrat Coalition, a center-left group with dozens of members.
And she’s had some legislative success, getting five amendments added to the National Defense Authorization Act, securing more than $19 million in community project funding for Nevada in the first round of appropriations bills, and advancing two of her bills — one focused on veterans’ suicide prevention and the other on expanding telehealth — through committees.
Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV)
Horsford had a quick answer for his biggest accomplishment this year — “I’m leading the effort to save our democracy,” he said in an interview.
As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Horsford has been front and center on myriad high-profile issues including after the killing of Tyre Nichols, the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action, and various voting rights cases. He called out the Senate for procedures that allow Republicans to hold up judicial nominations in their states, and spoke out when the Tennessee state house expelled Black members.
“I asked one of my Republican colleagues on the floor recently, what are you so afraid of?” Horsford said in a press conference Thursday. “Is it the fact that shifting racial demographics are eroding the supremacy some believe they have? When they use the word ‘woke,’ do you really mean Black?”
His biggest frustration, unsurprisingly, has been efforts to undermine civil rights and racial equity, including recent changes to the educational curriculum in Florida that portray slavery as having had positive effects on enslaved people.
“The attacks against Black people and Blackness are coordinated, well-funded, coming from every side, and they are about race,” he continued.
Those include “the attacks on our institutions, from public schools and the banning of books and the erasure and rewriting of history, to the actions of the Supreme Court, and the undermining of our voting rights,” he added.
House alien investigation
Amid fantastical conspiracy theories over vaccines, D.C. pizza parlors and stolen elections surges, conspiracies around aliens — theories about which have long centered around Nevada and Area 51 — have perhaps become passé. But a congressional hearing this week on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), or UFOs, brought the issue back into the spotlight.
A House Oversight subcommittee hosted three military whistleblowers in a hearing Wednesday, who testified about UAP sightings. A former Air Force intelligence official alleged that the military had recovered “non-human biologics” from unidentified crafts — an allegation the Defense Department has denied.
But while Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) proposed a congressional delegation trip to Nevada, the hearing was relatively light on talk of Area 51. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who has long been interested in UFOs, is leading the Republican investigation into the issue. In an interview with The Nevada Independent, Burchett expressed skepticism that congressional interest in Area 51 would yield anything fruitful to his investigation.
“I might do some burn pits or something out there, and I know everybody’s talking, we’re going to do a co-del [congressional member trip], and they want to go out there [and] get a T-shirt and go to the Little A’Lee’Inn…
“[But to] announce where we’re going to go out, and then we’re gonna find some secret spaceship or something is bogus,” he continued, saying the congressional pace was far too slow. “Because we move like a glacier.”
When asked if he had spoken to Las Vegas-based Republican megadonor and UFO believer Robert Bigelow, Burchett said he’d “heard from everybody in the world” interested in the subject.
Amodei hesitant on potential impeachments
Since House Republicans took the majority in January, some of the caucus’ most incendiary figures have been calling for a series of impeachments — from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to President Joe Biden himself.
On Tuesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy fanned the flames of impeachment, saying he was open to the idea of an impeachment inquiry into financial allegations surrounding Biden’s son Hunter — which he acknowledged have yet to be proven by House oversight members.
When asked his thoughts on a potential impeachment, Amodei said he would want to see proof through committee investigations that President Biden violated a criminal standard — something he said he wished had happened during the Trump impeachment process.
“If you’ve got the majority you can do it, but at least have the respect for the system and follow the rules,” he said.
He said he would be OK with an impeachment if, in fact, Biden’s alleged wrongdoings met the “high crimes and misdemeanors” metric outlined in the Constitution. But he wants House Republicans to avoid the impulse to open an impeachment inquiry without meeting that standard just because they think Democrats did.
Democrats impeached Trump twice — first, in 2019, when Amodei was the first House Republican to indicate support for investigating Trump’s wrongdoings related to Ukraine, and second, in 2021, when House Democrats impeached him over his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Amodei eventually voted against both impeachments.
“It will never be my objective to try to right whatever we think the wrongs [were] by doing [what] the people we thought were wrong [did],” Amodei said.
Protections for workers in extreme heat?
Cortez Masto joined Sens. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to sponsor a bill creating workplace protections for extreme heat, as temperatures in Las Vegas tied a record for consecutive days over 110°F this month.
The bill, named for Asunción Valdivia, who died in 2004 from heat stroke after picking grapes for 10 hours straight and collapsing on the job, was also introduced last Congress. It would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set enforceable safety standards for workers in high-heat environments and create guidance for employers on recognizing and treating heat illness.
“Extreme heat exposure is deadly and too often puts our essential workers in dangerous environments,” Cortez Masto said. “As we continue to experience record-high temperatures, it’s critical we pass this bill to protect our workers.”
KTNV reported that as of last week, 16 people have died from heat-associated illnesses in Clark County this year. At the state level, Nevada lawmakers failed to advance a heat bill that would have created regulations for employees working in extreme heat.
Extreme heat has been on Biden’s mind as well. At a press conference Thursday on the issue, Biden announced a series of actions his administration will take to protect workers, including the Department of Labor issuing a heat hazard alert laying out workers’ rights, greater enforcement of heat-related inspections in high-risk industries, and billions of dollars in grant funding for tree plantings, cooling centers, and water storage capacity.
Cortez Masto led a letter with more than 100 members of Congress urging Biden to use the Labor Department to enforce a heat protection standard.
Funding for these programs came through bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, provisions of which Biden noted Republicans are trying to undo through the appropriations process.
“We should be protecting workers from hazardous conditions, and we will,” Biden said. “And those states where they do not, I’m going to be calling them out, where they refuse to protect these workers in this awful heat.”
Around the Capitol
- The Recruit and Retain Act, a bipartisan bill of which Rosen is a co-sponsor, passed the Senate Thursday. The bill, supported by sheriffs and police chiefs in Nevada’s two biggest cities, aims to aid police recruitment efforts by expanding a grant departments can apply to for recruitment-related activities.
- Horsford re-introduced the Break the Cycle of Violence Act, some provisions of which were included in the bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed last year. The bill would invest $6.5 billion in community-based organizations engaging in violence intervention initiatives.
- Titus led a letter with two Democratic colleagues urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to extend portable Medicare benefits to American retirees living abroad.
- Two bills cracking down on fentanyl that Rosen co-sponsored passed the Senate as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
- Cortez Masto co-led legislation to expand tribal access to nutritional assistance by allowing Native Americans to use both Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and a tribal-only food assistance program in the same month.
- Rosen popped off in an MSNBC interview about Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)’s hold on military promotions. Tuberville is blocking action over a policy that allows servicemembers to travel to receive reproductive care including abortions, and Rosen interrupted the host to clarify what the policy permits and say Tuberville is “putting our entire nation’s security at risk.”
- Cortez Masto introduced bipartisan legislation to target fraud against veterans.
- Rosen introduced bipartisan legislation to reauthorize a telehealth grant.
Notable and Quotable
“Twenty people [are] holding the country hostage, and really bringing us to the brink of a government shutdown.”
- Rep. Susie Lee, on the House Freedom Caucus holding up passage of appropriations bills and deviating from the agreed-upon spending targets in the debt limit deal
Legislative Tracker
CATHERINE CORTEZ MASTO
Legislation sponsored:
S.2503 — A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to enhance penalties for certain crimes committed against veterans, and for other purposes.
Legislation co-sponsored:
S.1 — A bill to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box and reduce the influence of big money in politics, and for other purposes.
S.2493 — A bill to require the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) submit to Congress two reports on arrangements with pharmacy benefit managers with respect to prescription drug plans MA-PD plans.
S.2501 — A bill to direct the secretary of labor to promulgate an occupational safety and health standard to protect workers from heat-related injuries and illnesses.
S.Res.326 — A resolution recognizing Aug. 23, 2023, as “National Poll Worker Recruitment Day.”
S.Res.327 — A resolution designating Aug. 16, 2023, as “National Airborne Day.”
S.2563 — A bill to amend the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 to allow for dual enrollment in the supplemental nutrition assistance program and the food distribution program on Indian reservations.
S.2585 — A bill to establish the National Office of New Americans within the Executive Office of the President, and for other purposes.
S.2608 — A bill to provide for the long-term improvement of public school facilities, and for other purposes.
S.2627 — A bill to amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to provide for greater spousal protection under defined contribution plans, and for other purposes.
S.2688 — A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to extend health information technology assistance eligibility to behavioral health, mental health, and substance abuse professionals and facilities, and for other purposes.
S.2712 — A bill to provide funding for the deployment of Next Generation 9-1-1, and for other purposes.
JACKY ROSEN
Legislation sponsored:
S.2584 — A bill to establish a commission on long-term care.
Legislation co-sponsored:
S.1 — A bill to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box and reduce the influence of big money in politics, and for other purposes.
DINA TITUS
Legislation sponsored:
H.R.5058 — To amend the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014 to require the president to establish a semiconductor supply chain working group in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and submit reports to Congress on potential future disruptions to the supply chain.
Legislation co-sponsored:
H.R.4895 — To amend title XI of the Social Security Act to expand the drug price negotiation program, and for other purposes.
H.R.4897 — To direct the secretary of labor to promulgate an occupational safety and health standard to protect workers from heat-related injuries and illnesses.
H.R.4916 — To amend the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to repeal restrictions on onshore wind and solar.
H.Res.624 — Recognizing the self-determination of Gibraltar to determine its status as a British Overseas Territory.
H.R.4953 — To reduce the health risks of heat by establishing the National Integrated Heat Health Information System within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Integrated Heat Health Information System Interagency Committee to improve extreme heat preparedness, planning, and response, requiring a study, and establishing financial assistance programs to address heat effects, and for other purposes.
H.R.4963 — To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow workers an above-the-line deduction for union dues and expenses and to allow a miscellaneous itemized deduction for workers for all unreimbursed expenses incurred in the trade or business of being an employee.
H.R.4977 — To amend the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act of 2018 to provide support in high-income economy countries for projects involving development or processing of certain critical materials.
H.R.5003 — To authorize the secretary of Health and Human Services to build safer, thriving communities, and save lives, by investing in effective community-based violence reduction initiatives, and for other purposes.
H.R.5010 — To require the secretary of Health and Human Services, in coordination with the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to submit to the Congress an annual report on the effects of gun violence on public health.
H.R.5048 — To protect our democracy by preventing abuses of presidential power, restoring checks and balances and accountability and transparency in government, and defending elections against foreign interference, and for other purposes.protect our democracy by preventing abuses of presidential power, restoring checks and balances and accountability and transparency in government, and defending elections against foreign interference, and for other purposes.
H.R.5049 — To provide for the long-term improvement of public school facilities, and for other purposes.
H.R.5064 — To establish a grant program to provide amounts to public housing agencies to install automatic sprinkler systems in public housing, and for other purposes.
SUSIE LEE
Legislation co-sponsored:
H.R.4963 — To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow workers an above-the-line deduction for union dues and expenses and to allow a miscellaneous itemized deduction for workers for all unreimbursed expenses incurred in the trade or business of being an employee.
STEVEN HORSFORD
Legislation sponsored:
H.R.5003 — To authorize the secretary of Health and Human Services to build safer, thriving communities, and save lives, by investing in effective community-based violence reduction initiatives, and for other purposes.
Legislation co-sponsored:
H.R.4889 — To provide for increases in the federal minimum wage, and for other purposes.
H.Res.618 — Recognizing Aug. 11, 2023, as the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.
H.R.5010 — To require the secretary of Health and Human Services, in coordination with the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to submit to the Congress an annual report on the effects of gun violence on public health.
H.R.5054 — To amend title 10, United States Code, to prohibit discrimination in the Armed Forces.
