Principals

☞White House: Both Biden and top members of his national security team are expected to meet with Zelenskyy Wednesday, as the Ukrainian leader makes the rounds in Washington.

☞Chuck Schumer: The majority leader is intent on finishing up work on the omnibus before the looming Friday deadline — and the threat of a Nor’easter. So far, no sign conservatives upset with the bill are about to gum up the works on procedural votes. 

☞Mitch McConnell: Facing conservative criticism, McConnell boasted that Republicans held the line on blocking new domestic spending in the omnibus while securing more dollars for defense. “I’m pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities,” he said.

☞Nancy Pelosi: Zelenskyy’s address to a joint session of Congress later this evening is likely to be the last that Pelosi presides over as speaker.

☞Kevin McCarthy: Still can’t get no respect. On Tuesday, the minority leader threatened to sandbag future legislation by GOP senators who are backing the omnibus, tweeting: “When I’m Speaker, their bills will be dead on arrival in the House.” That got an icy retort from Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D, who told CNN such statements from House Republicans were “the very reason that some Senate Republicans feel they probably should spare them from the burden of having to govern.”

The House Ways and Means Committee voted Tuesday evening to release six years of former President Trump’s tax returns, after deliberating behind closed doors for more than three hours. It might be days before the panel actually unveils the meat of all of the returns, but some details are already coming to light. One intriguing crumb: The committee’s investigative report claimed the IRS did not audit Trump during his first two years in office despite a law mandating it.

The other big headline: A report from the Joint Committee on Taxation seemed to further confirm the years of speculation and outside reporting that Trump hasn’t been paying much, if anything, in taxes. It showed that Trump and his wife Melania reported negative income in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020. A big outlier was 2018, when the Trumps declared over $24 million in income and paid about $1 million in taxes.

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to let Title 42 end, pushing back on a lawsuit from Republican-led states seeking to keep in place the pandemic public health order that speeds up the expulsion of migrants at the border. The administration in its filing acknowledged the policy’s expiration “will likely lead to disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings” but argued the solution “cannot be to extend indefinitely a public-health measure that all now acknowledge has outlived its public-health justification.” The Supreme Court could rule as early as today.

A new investigative priority? Two Republicans expected to chair national security committees in the next Congress wrote to Biden administration officials demanding information on an ongoing internal review of TikTok.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: Pelosi first raised the idea of Zelenskyy visiting Congress during an October meeting with Ruslan Stefanchuk, the head of Ukraine’s parliament.

Playbook: A group of House lawmakers has quietly delivered a message to Steve Scalise to “be ready” if McCarthy fails to secure the votes needed to become speaker. The No. 2 House Republican isn’t acting on those pleas yet, Politico reports, and instead is in “listening mode.”

The Early 202: It’s not only Republicans who are criticizing the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who just won reelection, told the Washington Post the administration “has not executed a credible plan or presented even a credible plan on the border” and that he opposes lifting Title 42.

Zelenskyy takes Washington

THE NEWS

Hello, man of the year: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is making a major trip to Washington today to meet with President Biden and address lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

In addition to holding a press conference with the Ukrainian president, Biden will also announce a new aid package for Ukraine that includes Patriot missile systems, a senior Biden administration official told reporters. The advanced weaponry will help Ukraine better defend against a barrage of Russian missile attacks that have left swaths of the country intermittently without power.

The visit will be Zelenskyy’s first known journey outside of Ukraine since Russia attacked his country in late February. The plans were being laid for some time, despite being kept secret until Tuesday evening, according to the official, who said Biden discussed the idea with Zelenskyy on a Dec. 11 call.

MORGAN’S VIEW

The visit is significant for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that Zelenskyy will be able to make the case for continued Ukraine support as skepticism bubbles on the right.

Enthusiasm for Ukraine’s cause has been waning among the most conservative Republicans, particularly in the House, with a vocal minority protesting additional assistance to the embattled country. One of those lawmakers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. reacted to the news by accusing Zelenskyy of being a “shadow president” and demanded Congress “put America first.” Others have demanded more oversight of the funds.

Still, the White House insists that support for Ukraine in Washington remains strong and bipartisan, pointing to a $45 billion in additional assistance Congress is poised to pass as part of a giant funding bill before the end of the week. Key Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have stalwartly supported aid to Ukraine ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

“This isn’t about sending a message to a particular political party. This is about sending a message to Putin and sending a message to the world that America will be there for Ukraine as long as it takes,” the senior administration official told reporters.

Evelyn Farkas, executive director at the McCain Institute who served at the Pentagon under President Obama, told me that Zelenskyy’s decision to travel to Washington “is interesting because he either has a new different request or feels that it’s important at this moment in time before the new Congress comes in to rally the members.” She also said the trip probably wouldn’t raise any serious safety risks for the leader.

“There have been people going in and out of Ukraine so it’s not necessarily risky for him physically, nor is it risky politically because his people are firmly behind him,” Farkas said.

Other groups of Ukrainian officials descended on Washington in recent weeks to meet with lawmakers and members of the foreign policy establishment. Maria Mezentseva, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told me at the time that she made clear to lawmakers she met with that Ukraine was conducting stringent oversight of funds provided by the U.S.

“Being transparent is a priority and I think it will maintain our friendship and our support in the future, which we highly rely on,” she said in an interview earlier this month.

THE VIEW FROM MOSCOW

In an unusual moment of candor, Putin recently appeared to admit that the combat in Ukraine’s occupied eastern regions wasn’t going smoothly. “The situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions is extremely difficult,” the strongman said in a taped address to his country’s security services, according to Reuters.

Republicans may want George Santos to stick around, despite everything

It’s been days since Republican Congressman-elect George Santos was caught by the New York Times allegedly faking just about every element of his biography and the GOP response has been muted so far — most notably, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has yet to weigh in.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for the party to push Santos out. He may be the beneficiary of an unusual Congress in which almost no crime is worth losing a functional vote in the House.

With 222 votes, a still-undecided race for speaker, and some of his most headache-inducing members integral to his majority, McCarthy is likely to have little space to worry about political hygiene. In fact, Santos resigning might be a worst-case scenario, leaving an empty seat for months and a special election Democrats might be favored to win.

“I honestly don’t know what to make of it,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, said. “My expectation is they let him move forward while all this is investigated. It’s hard to see Rs being willing to give up that seat with such a tiny margin.”

Santos noticeably reiterated his support for McCarthy’s speakership bid on Twitter just before the New York Times story came out, a reminder of his unusual potential importance as a freshman backbencher.

McCarthy knows the value of a well-timed push. He urged Jeff Fortenberry to resign this year after he was convicted of lying to the FBI and previously kicked Steve King off of his committees over the Iowa Congressman’s white nationalist rhetoric.

Disciplining members for embarrassing the caucus or breaking with leadership this time is “surely tricker now,” one Republican Congressman told Semafor.

Democrats see an opportunity in McCarthy’s more recent struggles to police his caucus. Dumping troubled members serves a purpose after all — it helps minimize distractions and keep the high ground in fights with the other side. McCarthy booted King, for example, just as he was leading the caucus into a fight with Rep. Ilhan Omar. D-Minn. over remarks about Israel that were widely derided as antisemitic.

Facts First USA, the David Brock-led group formed to rebut the House’s investigations, released a strategy memo after the election urging Democrats to portray McCarthy as forced into a “corrupt bargain” with “ultra MAGA extremists” to maintain his weak majority. And they’re already eager to slot Santos into that frame.

“He doesn’t even have the speakership locked in yet and so they can’t afford to throw anybody under the bus, unlike in prior situations,” Brock told Semafor on Tuesday. “Now he needs every vote he can get.”

— Kadia Goba and Benjy Sarlin

One Good Text with ... Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

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WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: A federal appeals court ruled that the Biden administration can’t enforce its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: The select committee investigating Jan. 6 is reportedly cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the Trump probes for the Justice Department

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— Steve Clemons