Hours after Wednesday’s bipartisan Senate vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., revealed that they have struck a deal on a sweeping reconciliation bill.
“It’s been a momentous 24 hours here in Congress, a legislative one-two punch that the American people rarely see,” Schumer said in a post-vote victory lap Thursday afternoon.
Schumer and Manchin hope to pass their reconciliation package next week with just a simple majority in the Senate, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats with Vice President Kamala Harris casting any tiebreaking votes.
Shortly after that deal was announced, House Republican leaders urged their members to vote down the Chips and Science Act. They argued against giving multibillion-dollar subsidies to chipmakers at a time of historically high inflation, while also noting the timing of the Democrats’ reconciliation deal.
“The partisan Democrat agenda has given us record inflation, and now they are poised to send our country into a crushing recession,” the office of House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a memo Wednesday night.
Republicans echoed that new stance during floor debates before the vote. Rep. Frank Lucas, the top Republican on the House Science Committee where many of the bill’s provisions had first been hashed out, said he would regretfully vote against it because it has been “irrevocably” linked to the reconciliation plan.
That committee’s chairman, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, responded with a plea for all lawmakers to “put aside politics” and vote for the bipartisan bill.
Some Republicans who opposed the bill on its own merits said it lacked “guardrails” to prevent any of the funding from winding up in China’s hands. Other critics have argued that the U.S. would have to spend many billions more to have a real chance at competing with the world’s leading chipmakers.
But the bill’s advocates say it is vital to America’s economy and national security to build more chips, which are increasingly critical components in a vast array of products including consumer electronics, automobiles, health-care equipment and weapons systems.
The chips have been in short supply during the Covid-19 pandemic. Factory shutdowns at the beginning of the outbreak sidelined chip production in Asia while consumer demand for autos and upgraded home electronics that need the chips surged during the lockdowns. The U.S. share of global chip production also has fallen sharply in recent decades, while China and other nations have invested heavily in the industry.
The U.S. also makes few of the most advanced types of semiconductors, which are largely produced in Taiwan, the epicenter of rising political tensions with China.
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/28/china-competitiveness-and-chip-bill-passes-house-goes-to-biden.html