R&R: A new law I guarantee you haven’t heard about

Paying attention to when the system works.

Good morning! It’s Sunday, December 22, 2024. Welcome to R&R, a weekly roundup for paid subscribers looking at some of the under-the-radar news stories of the past week.

One quick housekeeping note: This will be the last newsletter of 2024. I’ll be back in your inbox on January 3, the first day of the 119th Congress. Thank you so much for reading Wake Up To Politics throughout the year; it’s been an honor to help you navigate this topsy-turvy (to say the least) twelve months in American politics. I hope you have a very happy holidays and a great start to the new year. But don’t go far: something tells me we’ll have a lot to talk about in 2025…

And two quick pieces of news before we dive in…

① A government shutdown has been averted. Yesterday morning, President Biden signed the American Relief Act into law, extending government funding through March, providing $110 billion in disaster relief, and extending federal farm programs for one year. It passed the Senate, 85-11, and the House, 366-34. In each chamber, all or most of the opposition came from Republicans.

It was an anticlimactic end to 2024 that presages a potentially chaotic 2025. The first order of business for the new Congress will be electing a House speaker — an outcome that appears suddenly in doubt after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) frustrated his fellow Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, with his handling of the near-shutdown. “Come January, we will need to revisit how Congress operates…Whether that requires personnel changes, process reforms, or both will be a critical discussion we must have,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) wrote on X this week, representing the sentiments of many in the House GOP.

Even if Johnson is re-elected — possibly after making more of the concessions that made his and his predecessor Kevin McCarthy’s lives so difficult — life won’t get easier from there. If you thought keeping the government open was hard, try rewriting federal tax and immigration law with an even slimmer House majority, as Republicans are hoping to do via reconciliation in the new year…

② That wasn’t all Congress did in its final meeting of 2024. The Senate also approved, via unanimous consent, a slew of other House-passed bills, which will now be sent to the president’s desk. The year-end legislative spree included two bipartisan bills that were stripped out of the original continuing resolution (CR) proposed and disposed of last week:

• The Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0, which will authorize $12.6 million in funding for pediatric cancer research each year through 2028. The bill is named for a 10-year-old girl from Virginia who died of a rare brain cancer.

• The D.C. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act, which will transfer control of the site of the former RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., from the National Park Service to the local government. The D.C. government hopes to turn the dilapidated 174-acre riverfront property into a mixed-use development with restaurants, shops, housing, park space — and possibly a new stadium to lure the Washington Commanders back from Maryland.

One other bill sent to Biden’s desk: the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act. This bipartisan bill is the first major overhaul of America’s child welfare system in more than 15 years, infusing $75 million more annually into the federal program tasked with combatting child abuse/neglect and protecting children in the foster care system.

Under the bill, for the first time, states will be able to use federal child welfare dollars to give funds to families experiencing an economic emergency, in order to “prevent children from being separated from parents solely on the basis of poverty-related circumstances” that might otherwise lead to the parents being deemed neglectful (and their children being taken into foster care).

The measure would also expand mental health services for children in foster care; ease the transition out of foster care by offering assistance to former foster children until they reach the age of 26; increase funding for the 2.5 million grandparents and relatives raising children who would otherwise go into foster care; create a new requirement that states consult with affected children and parents when crafting their child welfare policies; seek to improve the relationships between incarcerated parents sand their children in foster care; and reduce the administrative burden of child welfare caseworkers by 15%, so they can focus more on children and less on paperwork.

This bill could be a big deal for parents and families, and it’s a bipartisan triumph. As I noted in September, the bill is the result of a year-long congressional review of the child welfare system; 16 different proposals from Democrats and Republicans are included in the package.

And yet, as far as I can tell, not a single other article has been written about this legislation by any news outlet, anywhere. (Feel free to check for yourself.) That’s wild to me, and profoundly disappointing.

These three bills also tell you a lot about the media incentives involved in congressional reporting. The RFK Stadium bill has involved a lot of inter-state drama (D.C. vs. Maryland vs. Montana) and has received a fair amount of coverage as a result. The pediatric cancer bill is a pretty typical (but obviously impactful) reauthorization, so it hasn’t gotten much coverage — until this week, when it was included and then stripped out of the CR, and suddenly journalists started covering it. (“Elon Musk kills pediatric cancer bill” is a much sexier headline than “Congress passes pediatric cancer bill.”)

And the child welfare bill? No drama at all, just responsible legislating from both sides of the aisle. Ergo: crickets. News coverage of the country’s legislative output should not be dictated by how much squabbling went into the passage of the bill. But when it does — when all people hear about is the dysfunction, not the function — it massively skews Americans’ perceptions of their representatives, and means people miss out on learning about bipartisan achievements like the Supporting America’s Children and Families Act that could truly improve the lives of millions of Americans.

Here’s to hoping that political media, as a group, will try a little harder to teach Americans about these important pieces of legislation in 2025. I will certainly try to do my part.

If you support that mission, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber as we head into a new year of political reporting. Not only do you get to support my work, but you also get access to my weekly news recap and recommendations (R&R), which starts right now:

BIGGEST STORY YOU MAY HAVE MISSED: Donald Trump was elected president this week. I know, you thought that happened in November. But, per the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, the electors of the Electoral College meet in their respective state capitals on the “first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December,” which was this past Tuesday. As expected, Trump won 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’ 226.

Related to the above, there’s an interesting story to be told here about what gets covered and what gets deemed pro forma. In 2020, the Electoral College meetings sparked a bevy of news coverage because of Trump’s challenges to Joe Biden’s victory (and the parallel meetings of fake electors). In 2016, too, there was a fair amount of coverage, because of the novelty of Trump’s victory and the unusual number of faithless electors who cast ballots for everyone from John Kasich to Faith Spotted Eagle.

In 2024, the New York Times did not even devote a single article to the Electoral College formalizing Trump’s victory. This is a case where the lack of news coverage probably make sense: it’s a normative good that no one challenged this election, and both parties believe in the legitimacy of the results. You probably don’t want to have to know about the ins and outs of the election certification process, because if you do, something is going wrong.

But it’s still interesting to dwell on. When political processes work — even ones as important as electing a president — we don’t hear about them. (Similarly, you likely wouldn’t have heard much about government funding this week if a CR had easily been passed.) Often, it’s only when the systems we take for granted break down that we start paying attention to them.

CRAZIEST STORY, WASHINGTON EDITION: Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), 81, is in the final weeks of her decades-long career. She unexpectedly stepped down as chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee in April, and she hasn’t voted in the House since July. This week, she was finally located…