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After nearly a decade of high tensions between Republicans running the state and leaders of the states bluer urban areas, some mayors of major Texas cities are trying a new playbook: play nice with the state.

Republican lawmakers and local officials have little they havent fought about, sparring in recent years over matters like hurricane relief funds, local police budgets, voting access and COVID-19 response measures. After years of trying to undo local progressive policies they disagreed with, GOP legislators this year passed a sweeping law intended to block cities from enacting them in the first place.

To some, the contentiousness between city and state leaders hasnt been productive for either side. In his successful bid for Houston mayor this year, John Whitmire, a longtime Democratic fixture in the Texas Senate, promised to mend the relationship between the states largest city and lawmakers in Austin.

I just want to fix things regardless of who you have to work with, Whitmire said at a November debate.

That echoes the more diplomatic tone struck by Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, another veteran Democratic state legislator who served as mayor in the late 1990s and returned to the seat this year. Austin has often been in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers and the citys previous mayor openly feuded on social media with Gov. Greg Abbott over pandemic measures like mask mandates and occupancy restrictions.

In his first months as mayor, Watson has also sought collaboration with state officials to solve local problems, including securing $65 million from the states housing agency to combat homelessness.

I'm working very hard to make sure that that relationship is a good one because it benefits my constituents, Watson said during a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in September.

In an unusual show of amity after Whitmires election, Abbott, who has long warred with cities over adopting policies he sees as hostile to businesses, congratulated the new mayor after his win in a runoff for the seat. Whitmire bested the more progressive U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, by a wide margin, in part by relying on a coalition of Republicans and independents as well as funds from well-known GOP donors.

A couple of factors have guided this shift in tone, political analysts told the Tribune. For one, after years of conflict with the state, local officials are tired of their cities being punching bags for state lawmakers.

Mayors want to take the temperature down, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. And they don't want to be political targets.

Voters in Texas cities have also had enough of the feud, analysts said. In big cities that have leaned blue for some time, theyre picking Democratic candidates considered to be more moderate and who have a track record of working with Republican lawmakers in the Texas Capitol.

To actually advance the agendas of their cities, [local leaders] are going to need the support of the state, said Steven Pedigo, who heads the University of Texas at Austins LBJ Urban Lab, which focuses on urban policy. Why fight with the state?

Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based GOP strategist who chairs the Travis County Republican Party, had another explanation.

The hard-left policy experiment in major cities has clearly failed, he said. So when you have candidates who recognize that those policies have failed, who are pledging to be more mainstream, there's a market for that among voters in many of these cities.

Republicans also picked up a mayoral seat this year in the states third largest city. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, who served in the Texas House as a Democrat, switched to the Republican Party in September after winning an uncontested reelection bid in May. Though municipal seats are technically nonpartisan, Republicans now lead two of the states biggest cities; Republican Mattie Parker has been mayor of Fort Worth since 2021.

Tensions between state leaders and city officials have been high for many years as GOP lawmakers have sought to limit how cities govern themselves.

In recent years, the GOP-controlled Legislature limited how much cities budgets can grow each year and forbade local leaders from banning fracking or requiring landlords to accept low-income tenants with federal housing vouchers.

State lawmakers also enacted a law that blocks cities from trimming their police budgets without first asking voters a direct response to the Austin City Council trimming its police budget in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests. State officials later used that law to probe whether Harris County had cut public safety spending.

Local officials unsuccessfully turned to the courts to overturn Abbotts pandemic-era directive barring local governments from adopting public health measures like mask mandates. The Texas Supreme Court sided with Abbott in June, but not before legislators forbade local officials from requiring masks, vaccines or business shutdowns in the event of another COVID-19 surge.

The fight between state and local leaders reached a new peak this year. Legislators passed a wide-ranging bill that attempts to significantly curtail city officials abilities to enact progressive policies drawing a legal challenge spearheaded by Houston officials.

As the Houston region emerged as a Democratic stronghold in the last decade, Republican state lawmakers stepped up their scrutiny of local officials, including recently targeting Harris County over voting access issues.

Whitmire sees opportunities to work on relations between Houston and the state. During the campaign, Whitmire said he would seek to repair the citys relationship with the General Land Office. The state agency, under then-Land Commissioner George P. Bush, shut the city out of federal relief funds to help hard-hit areas recover from Hurricane Harvey.

Whitmire cited a particular factor in his favor: his relationship with current Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, who previously served with Whitmire in the Senate.

I can bring resources to Houston like no one else has ever served as mayor, Whitmire said at a November debate. Working across the aisle gets results.

Local officials this year have looked for more opportunities to partner with the state to solve local problems. Whitmire, who takes office in January, wants to allow 200 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to patrol Houston as the city deals with an officer shortage an idea backed by nearly two-thirds of Houston voters, according to a recent poll from the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

Watson already did something similar this year partnering with the state to allow state troopers to patrol the city amid Austins own persistent officer shortage. The idea sprung out of a conversation with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Watson said during the September TribFest panel.

While Watson has credited the DPS deployment with reductions in violent crime and traffic deaths, the enforcement efforts have fallen disproportionately on communities of color. Watson ended the formal partnership in July but Abbott later sent additional troopers to patrol the city.

There was no benefit gained by cutting deals with state leadership, or pretending that being nice to them will give your city any additional leeway to conduct business how it sees fit or any less meddling in the city's affairs, said Chris Harris, Austin Justice Coalition policy director.

To Watson, there will always be some political tension between the city and state given that Austin does see things with a different point of view than the majority of people that are in the state Legislature, he said at the TribFest panel.

We're going to stand up for Austin values, and I'll always do that, Watson said. But one of my rules of politics is, Don't make unnecessary enemies.

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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After years of losing battles with GOP leaders, some big city Texas mayors strike friendlier tone - The Texas Tribune

A state high courts decision that the Republican front-runner for the White House is disqualified from office might seem like a pretty good opening for his ostensible G.O.P. challengers.

But in an era of smashmouth politics, ushered in by former President Donald J. Trump, only Mr. Trump appears capable of smashing anyone in the mouth. So, with under four weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the Colorado Supreme Courts ruling on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was disqualified from the states primary ballot under a section of the 14th Amendment that holds that no person shall hold any office, civil or military who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion was apparently off limits.

Mr. Trump still seems to be the one setting the parameters for legitimate debate in the G.O.P., even if he doesnt participate in the partys actual debates.

We dont need to have judges making these decisions, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is rising in the polls but still far behind Mr. Trump, told reporters in Agency, Iowa, on Tuesday.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida not only refrained from attacking his chief rival, but he also spun out a conspiracy theory to suggest the ruling was a plot against him to aid Mr. Trump.

What the left and the media and the Democrats are doing theyre doing all this stuff, to basically solidify support in the primary for him, get him into the general, and the whole general election is going to be all this legal stuff, Mr. DeSantis said on Wednesday, speaking at the Westside Conservative Club Breakfast in Iowa.

At a restaurant outside Des Moines, he asked reporters, Were going to be litigating this stuff for how many more years going forward? I think weve got to start focusing on the peoples issues.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who has clung most tightly to Mr. Trumps pant legs throughout the primary season, went so far as to pledge solidarity and withdraw his own name from the Colorado ballot, and he demanded the other candidates follow suit. A biotech financier who has spent millions of his own dollars on his campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy railed against the unelected elite class in the back of palace halls as he sat in the back of his well-appointed campaign bus.

Even Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose long-shot run for the Republican nomination has centered on questioning the front-runners fitness for office, demurred, engaging not on the Colorado justices conclusions but their timing.

I dont think a court should exclude somebody from running for president without there being a trial and evidence thats accepted by a jury that they did participate in insurrection, he said on Tuesday night during a town hall event in New Hampshire.

The heart of the Republican primary season is now just weeks away: Voters in Iowa will caucus on Jan. 15, with the first primary of the year, New Hampshires, coming Jan. 23. If anything, the former presidents lead seems only to grow. He clobbers his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, in a new New York Times/Siena College poll, drawing 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide.

Yet his rivals remain apparently unwilling to take any real risks that could shake the dynamic. Republican primary voters have overwhelmingly decided that each new legal challenge to Mr. Trumps actions to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, each ruling in cases involving the way he has conducted business, treated women or handled classified material all of it is simply not relevant to their votes.

More than one in five Republican voters think Mr. Trump has committed crimes, and 13 percent of Republicans believe that he should be found guilty in court of trying to overturn the 2020 election, yet most of those voters also say they would still cast their ballots for him.

So, his rivals figure, why dwell on it?

I guess that state has that right to remove Trump from the ballot if they feel like it, Tim Robbins, 72, a farmer and Iowa Republican, said of the Colorado ruling after an appearance by Ms. Haley. But I think the people need to decide. Its the peoples decision, not the states decision.

He added that he agreed with Ms. Haleys hands-off approach: I dont need somebody to tell me what to think of somebody else, he said. Ill draw my own conclusions.

It seemed on Wednesday that only two people in the race for the White House wanted to talk about the Colorado ruling: Mr. Trump, who sent fund-raising appeals in emails with the subject lines BALLOT REMOVAL and REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT, and President Biden, who said Mr. Trump certainly supported an insurrection.

You saw it all, the president told reporters on Wednesday. Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, Ill let the court make that decision.

There is no evidence suggesting that Mr. Biden has any ties to the Colorado case, or that he has meddled in any of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump. But on his social media network, Mr. Trump was spinning the story that has either paralyzed his rivals for the nomination or elicited hosannas from the competition.

BIDEN SHOULD DROP ALL OF THESE FAKE POLITICAL INDICTMENTS AGAINST ME, BOTH CRIMINAL & CIVIL, he wrote. EVERY CASE I AM FIGHTING IS THE WORK OF THE DOJ & WHITE HOUSE.

Michael Gold, Jazmine Ulloa and Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.

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With Trump Declared an 'Insurrectionist,' His Rivals Pull Their Punches, Again - The New York Times

When Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, was asked about former President Donald J. Trumps now-standard stump line claiming that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, Senator McConnell delivered an indirect but contemptuous response.

Well, it strikes me it didnt bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao secretary of transportation, Mr. McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said. Ms. Chao, who was born in Taiwan and immigrated to America as a child, is married to Mr. McConnell.

Mr. McConnell referred to a feud that has simmered for more than a year over the former presidents racist attacks against Ms. Chao. Mr. Trump, often referring to her by the derisive nickname Coco Chow, has suggested that she and by extension her husband, Mr. McConnell are beholden to China because of her connections to the country.

Mr. Trump repeated his poisoning the blood claim at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, prompting an outburst of criticism from Senate Republicans this week.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine told a reporter for The Independent that the former presidents remarks were deplorable.

That was horrible that those comments are just they have no place, particularly from a former president, Ms. Collins said.

Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, denounced Mr. Trumps language as unacceptable.

I think that that rhetoric is very inappropriate, Mr. Rounds said, according to NBC News. But this administrations policies are feeding right into it. And so, I disagree with that. I think we should celebrate our diversity.

Mr. McConnells own oblique retort, which did not directly criticize Mr. Trumps language, signaled that even some of the former presidents boldest Republican critics on Capitol Hill are treading lightly, as he dominates the polls in the Republican presidential race.

Mr. McConnell has spent years trying to steer the party away from Mr. Trump after the riot at the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in large part because he views the former president as a political loser. Often when Mr. McConnell criticizes Mr. Trump he does so by saying his behavior would make it hard for him to win another presidential election.

Senate Republicans are also trying to negotiate a deal with the White House, proposing sweeping restrictions on migration in exchange for approving additional military aid to Ukraine and Israel, a top priority for President Biden.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate majority leader, denounced Mr. Trumps remarks on Tuesday as despicable but signaled that Senate Democrats would push forward with negotiations on border restrictions.

We all know theres a problem at the border, Mr. Schumer said. The president does. Democrats do. And were going to try to solve that problem consistent with our principles.

Other Senate Republicans more delicately admonished Mr. Trump for his remarks, referring to either their own immigrant heritage or the principle that America is a nation of immigrants.

My grandfather is an immigrant, so thats not a view I share, John Thune, the second-ranking Senate Republican, said in a CNN interview on Monday. He added, We are a nation of immigrants, but were also a nation of laws, describing illegal immigration as a runaway train at the Southern border.

But other Senate Republicans embraced Mr. Trumps language. Senator Tommy Tuberville, who had defended white supremacists serving in the military before retracting his remarks this year, said that Mr. Trumps attacks on immigrants did not go far enough.

Im mad he wasnt tougher than that, Mr. Tuberville told a reporter for The Independent. When you see whats happening at the border? Were being overrun. Theyre taking us over.

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio said it was objectively and obviously true that illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country. He also scolded the reporter who asked him about Mr. Trumps remarks, accusing her of using Mr. Trumps words to try to narrow the limits of debate on immigration in this country.

Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the lone Republican in a House seat in New York City, denied that Mr. Trumps remarks were referring to immigrants.

He didnt say the words immigrants, I think he was talking about the Democratic policies, she said in a CNN interview on Monday. Look, I know that some are trying to make it seem like Trump is anti-immigrant. The reality is, he was married to immigrants, he has hired immigrants.

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McConnell and Other Senate Republicans Criticize Trump's Talk on Immigrants - The New York Times

The Senate quietly closed out its year on Wednesday by punting many of its most difficult issues into 2024. It failed to deliver on aid to Ukraine. It could not agree on a border policy plan. And a government shutdown is on the horizon.

The fizzle at the finish line guarantees that Congress will be ensnarled in policy and fiscal battles as lawmakers fight for control of the House and the Senate in Novembers elections.

The chief disappointment for leaders of both parties was the failure to agree on delivering more military aid to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia after the assistance got tied up in Republican demands for stringent new border controls.

It was a setback for Democrats, who had hoped that by keeping the Senate in Washington this week, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, could force votes on a measure speeding tens of billions to Ukraine and addressing Republicans push for immigration policy changes. But a breakthrough did not materialize.

Mr. Schumer, in an interview, said he remained hopeful that an agreement would be ready for a quick vote when the Senate returns next month. He cited greater participation in the talks by the Biden administration and a recognition by Republicans that Democrats are willing to make serious concessions to stem the flow across the southern border.

I think the Republicans have seen that were serious about the border, and that were willing to do some things that maybe they thought we wouldnt do, he said.

Mr. Schumer said the major question for Republicans was whether opposition from Donald J. Trump, the G.O.P.s presidential front-runner, would deter them from striking a deal, even though most Republicans acknowledged that helping Ukraine was the best approach to confronting Russia and avoiding a wider conflict.

They have the looming specter of Donald Trump, who they know in their hearts has been not just irrational but nasty on this issue, trying to use it to appeal to the worst political instincts of people, Mr. Schumer said. He added that Republicans would face a choice between Mr. Trump and the specter of history looking down on them should the United States abandon Ukraine.

The lack of resolution came as no surprise to Republicans, some of whom jeered Mr. Schumer for thinking he could outmaneuver them in just a few days time on an issue as vital to their base as border security particularly given that the G.O.P.-led House left town last week for the holiday break.

But Mr. Schumer and Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, issued a joint statement saying they were committed to addressing needs at the southern border and to helping allies and partners confront serious threats in Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

Mr. McConnell also acknowledged Democratic movement on border policy, saying on Wednesday that theres no longer any disagreement that the situation at the southern border is unsustainable and requires the Senate to act.

After a flurry of legislating the previous two years with Congress under Democratic control, productivity in Congress declined sharply in 2023 under divided government. The Democratic-led Senate was spared the internal power struggles that paralyzed the Republican-led House on multiple occasions, but major legislation was scarce.

I dont think the Senate has been nearly as productive as it could have been, Mr. McConnell told reporters on Tuesday.

Mr. Schumer said Democrats deserved credit for preventing congressional Republicans from overturning their accomplishments of the previous two years and averting fiscal chaos by forcing the G.O.P. into compromise agreements on raising the debt limit and temporarily funding the government.

We prevented them from doing the worst stuff, he said.

But Congress only postponed what looms as a messy spending showdown by passing a stopgap bill in mid-November. Almost immediately upon returning next month, the House and the Senate will face two staggered deadlines for funding the government on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

With most of the focus on Ukraine, little progress has been made on the annual spending bills and lawmakers of both parties are increasingly sounding the alarm about the dangers of cuts that would occur if no agreement can be reached. But Speaker Mike Johnson, who was installed after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy in October, has indicated that he might be willing to accept the cuts, a prospect that Mr. Schumer warned could spur an election-year backlash.

We have Senate Democrats, House Democrats and Senate Republicans sort of aligned, he said. Johnson will learn that it has to be bipartisan.

It is unclear if the threat of the back-to-back government shutdown deadlines will infuse talks over the national security package with needed momentum. Lawmakers will have only 10 days once they return to Washington to resolve a series of critical differences, including the most basic question of what size the rest of the governments 2024 fiscal year budget should be. Congress also kicked into next year contentious fights over federal aviation safety policy and the renewal of an antiterrorism surveillance policy.

A sweeping Pentagon policy bill was a rare bright spot for Congress this year. Both the House and the Senate passed the bill in December, despite objections from conservative lawmakers that it omitted a series of measures they had sought to curtail Pentagon programs providing abortion access, transgender health services and diversity training. The legislations passage maintained Congresss more than 60-year streak of authorizing spending for the military.

The Senate also managed in its waning hours to overcome a nearly yearlong protest from Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, who had blocked the promotions of hundreds of senior military officials. Mr. Tuberville had demanded that the Pentagon reverse a policy ensuring that service members needing to go long distances to obtain abortions or other forms of reproductive health care would be given time off and have their travel expenses reimbursed.

On Tuesday, Mr. Tuberville allowed the last of the delayed promotions to proceed without, Mr. Schumer said, getting one bit of what he asked for only a lot of pain to military families.

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Senate Wraps Up Year, Punting Ukraine Aid and Other Issues to 2024 - The New York Times

Representative Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, had a positive spin on the five days and record-breaking 15 voting rounds it took him to win the gavel in January. Because it took this long, he said after the ordeal, now we learned how to govern.

But as the first year of the 118th Congress draws to a close, the numbers tell a different story one that doesnt involve much governing at all.

In 2023, the Republican-led House has passed only 27 bills that became law, despite holding a total of 724 votes.

That is more voting and less lawmaking than at any other time in the last decade, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a far less productive record than that of last year, when Democrats had unified control of Congress. The House held 549 votes in 2022, according to the House clerk, and passed 248 bills that were signed into law, according to records kept by the Library of Congress, including a bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades.

The list of this years accomplishments is less ambitious and more bare minimum, such as legislation to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits that helped pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe. The tally also includes two temporary spending measures to avoid government shutdowns. The House cleared the must-pass annual military policy bill last week before leaving for the year, though it is not known when President Biden will sign it into law.

The numbers reflect the challenges that have plagued Republicans all year and are likely to continue, and maybe even get worse, in 2024: a tiny majority that requires near unanimity to get anything done; deep party divisions that make unanimity all but impossible; and a right wing whose priority is reining in government, not passing new laws to broaden its reach.

The raw number of laws passed is not always the best way to capture the productivity of a Congress, because some catchall bills incorporate dozens of smaller, sometimes highly significant, bills that hitch a ride. But this year was grossly unproductive even by the lower standards of whats possible in divided government and after taking into account the reality that not all bills are created equal. In 2013, for example, when Republicans controlled the House and Democrats controlled the Senate, just as they do today, the House passed 72 bills that were signed into law.

Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Congresss productivity issues this year reached a low point. She attributed it to deepening political polarization and to the fractured House Republican conference with its too-slim-to-govern majority.

Democrats as a party are much more interested in having government do things, Ms. Reynolds said. A lot of what Republicans are motivated by is the pursuit of ideological purity. The ideological difference around the role of government makes it harder to imagine the sets of things on which the Republican House, especially with its divisions, would get together with a Democrat-led Senate and a Democrat president.

Despite the low number of bills signed into law, the House saw a frenzy of activity on the floor. That included numerous votes for numerous speaker candidates (19 across two historic speaker elections), multiple attempts to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress (three), failed and successful votes on censuring Democratic lawmakers (six) and dozens of votes on hard-right amendments to appropriations bills that ultimately did not pass, or proved to be non-starters in the Senate because they were laden with conservative policy priorities.

The mismatch between the number of votes taken and the number of laws passed is something far-right House Republicans might consider a win. One of the demands the faction made of Mr. McCarthy in January as they were withholding their support to make him speaker was to open up the legislative process and allow more votes on the floor.

And some of the votes happened because House members defied the speaker and forced them against his wishes, like a resolution to impeach Mr. Biden over his border policies and a move to censure Representative Adam B. Schiff of California and fine him $16 million.

Its a good reminder that not every vote is in pursuit of an actual legislative product, Ms. Reynolds said.

Some Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at their inability to get things done. If we dont change the foundational problems within our conference, its just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver, Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota vented to reporters in October after Mr. McCarthys ouster.

But those foundational problems remain.

Rebellious right-wing Republicans, angry at Speaker Mike Johnson for relying on Democrats to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown, voted to block two major spending bills from coming to the floor.

That marked the fourth time this year that House Republicans broke a longstanding code of party discipline by refusing to back procedural measures proposed by their own leaders that must be passed to bring legislation to the floor. That did not happen once under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the House for a total of eight years, or under the previous two Republican speakers, Paul D. Ryan or John A. Boehner.

When it came to the politics of retribution and revenge, however, the House had a historically productive year. It sometimes took multiple attempts, but Republicans were ultimately successful at formally censuring three Democratic members of the House: Mr. Schiff and Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

Before this year, only two members had been censured in almost four decades.

I suspect that has something to do with the breakdown on the Republican side of party leadership, said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University. Theres no restraining of members from going to the floor.

It took the House three tries, but it also made history when it voted to expel Mr. Santos, making him the first person to be expelled from the House without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.

Republican leaders tried to frame the year as productive, in its own way.

In his end-of-year recap, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, said Republicans had succeeded in passing legislation to confront rising crime, unleash American energy, lower costs for families, secure President Bidens wide-open border, combat executive overreach and burdensome agency rules, and refocus our military on its core mission of national security.

But many of those bills amounted to political messaging tools that would stand no chance of passage in a Democratic-controlled Senate.

Other than the must-pass bills, those that did make it into law addressed the smallest of small-bore issues, such as the 250th Anniversary of the United States Marine Corps Commemorative Coin Act and a bill to designate the clinic of the Department of Veterans Affairs in Gallup, N.M., as the Hiroshi Hershey Miyamura V.A. Clinic. On Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden signed into law the Duck Stamp Modernization Act of 2023, which allows waterfowl hunters the use of electronic federal duck stamps instead of physical ones to meet licensing requirements.

In his farewell speech to Congress, Mr. McCarthy highlighted as one of his hallmark achievements of the year a successful effort to prevent a new law. The measure blocked a rewrite of the criminal code for the District of Columbia that would have reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses while increasing them for others.

The president threatened to veto it, Mr. McCarthy said, but we did it anyway, and we stopped him and it became law.

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House Dysfunction by the Numbers: 724 Votes, Only 27 Laws Enacted - The New York Times