Good Thursday evening. In this edition: Senate panel votes to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after pleading the Fifth.
Plus, birthright citizenship, Senate crunch, farm bill and McConnell.
Contempt of Congress
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8–5 along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer questions about the origins of COVID-19 during a hearing last week.
The vote is the latest chapter in the longstanding feud between Dr. Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the committee's chair, who has accused the infectious disease expert of funding "dangerous" gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, and then misleading Congress about it.
In a highly unusual and legally untested move, Sen. Paul said he plans to send the contempt resolution directly to the Justice Department for possible prosecution without first seeking approval from the full Senate, a step Democrats decried as a break with longstanding Senate precedent.
"It's the committee's verdict that he should be held in contempt, and it will be sent. But no one said that we won't bring it before the Senate," Sen. Paul told reporters after the vote. "There is some precedent for doing it that way."
Dr. Fauci, who retired in 2022 after a decades-long run as director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during last week's hearing, arguing that Sen. Paul's longstanding calls to prosecute him made it impossible for him to testify without legal risk.
"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars,'" he said in his opening statement last week.
"Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."
Sen. Paul rejected that argument, saying a sweeping pardon issued to Dr. Fauci in the final days of the Biden administration eliminated the risk of prosecution.
"Seeking the truth is not a witch hunt," he said ahead of the contempt vote. "Accountability is not vengeance. Accountability is what stands between the American people and a repeat of the mistakes and the very real consequences of the past."
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the committee's ranking member, urged members to oppose the contempt resolution, arguing it lacked a sound legal basis and threatened Congress's future investigative authority.
"Following a one-sided investigation and a rushed process that has repeatedly excluded the minority and other members of this committee, the chairman is now asking the committee to take a vote that could harm our ability to conduct future investigations and disregards constitutional protections long recognized by the U.S. Senate," he said.
The Michigan Democrat argued that penalizing a witness for invoking the Fifth Amendment would discourage future witnesses from cooperating with congressional investigations.
"What it will do is create a damaging precedent that future witnesses will use to resist legitimate congressional oversight and weaken this committee's ability to compel testimony," Sen. Peters said.
Sen. Peters also criticized Sen. Paul's plan to send the contempt referral directly to the Justice Department rather than first bringing it before the full Senate, where Republicans would almost certainly be unable to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
"No individual senator and no committee speaks for the entire Senate as a whole," he said. "Allowing one chairman to unilaterally assert those powers would invite future chairs, in both parties, to bypass the Senate whenever they cannot secure the support of their colleagues."
Sen. Paul acknowledged there was little precedent for such a move, but said he wanted the Justice Department to immediately begin looking at the case and didn't rule out bringing it to the Senate floor when senators return from their break.
"We will hand-deliver it today to the attorney general and we will hand-deliver it today to the District of Columbia, to the U.S. attorney there — and from there, we'll find out," he told reporters. "But this way, we don't sit a month waiting to determine whether we bring it to the Senate floor."
Whether the Justice Department could pursue a criminal contempt case based solely on a committee referral without Senate approval remains an open legal question.
It could undercut prosecutors' ability to bring charges against Dr. Fauci and would likely kick off a lengthy court battle over the limits of witnesses' Fifth Amendment rights.
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In other news…
President Trumpsigned a pair of executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court struck down his previous executive order seeking to redefine who is considered an American citizen. "We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright," he said in the Oval Office. "So, we're making adjustments because it's very unfair." One of the orders seeks to ban so-called birth tourism, the practice of traveling to another country for the primary purpose of giving birth there so a child can obtain automatic citizenship. The other order expands the categories of people considered ineligible for automatic citizenship to include "alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments."
Senators are facing a legislative and time crunch as they hope to clear the decks before heading home for the August recess, which is set to begin at the end of the week. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) hopes to pass a stopgap funding measure, confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, clear a package of judicial nominations, approve a college sports bill, pass a Russia sanctions measure and greenlight a crypto bill. Other GOP senators are hoping to make progress on the SAVE America Act and a budget resolution for a third reconciliation package. It's unclear how much they will be able to get done before heading home, and making a dent in the workload would require time agreements with Democrats. Weekend work is possible.
The Senate Agriculture Committeerejected a GOP-led farm bill over Democrats' objections to federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), with the vote failing 10–11. Republicans' "big, beautiful" reconciliation bill, approved last year, requires any state with a SNAP payment error rate of 6% or higher to pay a share of the program's costs. Republicans offered a one-year delay of the provision, but Democrats held firm in seeking a two-year delay to allow states more time to stabilize their budgets and address error rates. "We are spiraling into a deficit and a debt, and our big idea to solve that problem is to go after the most struggling Americans," Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said. "That is hypocrisy when there's huge ways to save money out there that nothing is being done about." The committee is expected to resume work on the measure when senators return in September.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced he has been discharged from a rehabilitation center and will continue his recovery at home after he was hospitalized in mid-June following a fall. "On the advice of my doctors, I'll maintain an intensive regimen of physical therapy from home during the state work period, and I'll continue to engage with my staff and colleagues on important Senate business," he said in a statement. He did not provide a timeline for his return to the Senate, which is set to soon begin a five-week recess.
For your radar…
President Trump hosts over 100 athletes at the White House on Thursday evening to celebrate their achievements representing Team USA during the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games in Italy. Watch LIVE on C-SPAN at 7pm ET.
The Senate is set to return Friday morning to continue working through its agenda. Watch LIVE on C-SPAN2 at 10am ET.
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