Pelosi, Hoyer Oppose Passing Senate Chips Bill, Want Bicameral Package

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Wednesday they’re against passing the Senate’s chips package.

The suggestion from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for the House to “simply” take up the Senate’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) (S-1260) isn’t how Congress “ought to work,” Hoyer told reporters. There are “good things” in both USICA and the House’s America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act (America Competes) (HR-4521), and Congress “needs to put those together,” Hoyer said.

The America Competes Act will help reduce inflation, Pelosi told reporters: “I wish [the Senate] had more in there that we had in the House on supply chain and the rest, but nonetheless, the bill that we have negotiated will go a long way to helping us with inflation.” Hoyer said he wants to “put a bill on the floor that can pass both the Senate and the House.”

The best path forward is for the House to take up USICA, Senate Republicans told us Wednesday. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., insisted the final bill will look like the Senate’s version. “They need to rethink their position,” Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., said about comments from Pelosi and Hoyer. “That’s the next step. They need to come to terms with the fact that the most obvious and easiest path is for the House to take up the Senate bill.”

The bill that got 68 votes in the Senate "is a piece of legislation the president and the Democratic leader in the Senate were enthusiastic about, and I don’t know what has caused their enthusiasm to wane,” Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told us Thursday. Asked whether there’s a path forward for the chips aspect alone, he said, “Not in my judgment.” Schumer’s office didn’t comment.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, D-Va., said it’s possible Congress could move the chips portion of the legislation, based on recent comments from McConnell. “I read that from some of my Republican friends’ and Sen. McConnell’s comments,” said Warner.

“A chips-only approach is not going to meet the satisfaction of enough members based on my reading of our conference at this point,” said Young. There's a number of "closed out provisions" in the current bill "across various committees of jurisdiction that are very important to our national security,” he said.

Hoyer criticized McConnell’s announcement there would be “no bipartisan USICA as long as Democrats are pursuing a partisan reconciliation bill” (see 2207050068). “This business of making" it dependent upon whether Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., continue talks about Build Back Better is "un-American,” said Hoyer. “It’s anti-American.” He told us he expects there to be compromise and Republicans are making an “arrogant, unreasonable demand.”

“The path forward would be for Sen. Schumer to say we’re going to delay any action on his build back broke bill, and we’ll just move to deal with the chips bill before we leave,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “It’s very important that we pass it, and we pass it soon because there’s a closing window here. If we don’t make a decision to encourage reshoring of semiconductors, they’re simply going to be built somewhere else.”

House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and his Republican colleagues on the committee introduced a bill last year that copied the USICA trade title. But he didn't endorse the bill as a whole as worthy of his vote. "I question whether there would be Republican support for that in the House," Brady said during a phone call with reporters Thursday. "My thought is always stay at the table, try to find common ground on this," he said but added, "I have always wondered if a conference committee comprised of 107 members of Congress was designed to succeed."

Pelosi has a “perfectly good, bipartisan, Senate-passed bill” she could bring to the floor “at any point,” said Young. “Everyone can claim a win. It’s hard to see” how there could be a negotiated bill between the House and Senate, he added. “There are principled disagreements about a hundred different ideas about how to move forward right now. But there’s roughly 70 senators who have already given sanction to the Senate bill. That seems a more obvious path to me.”

If chips funding isn’t appropriated in the “coming weeks,” the U.S. will “miss out on the current wave of semiconductor investment,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote congressional leaders Wednesday. “Chip producers must make capital expenditure decisions now to meet the enormous increased demand. If we do not act, they will expand in countries that are already aggressively offering incentives, rather than here in the United States.”

They wrote in support of the Bipartisan Innovation Act, the joint bill the two chambers have been trying to negotiate since May. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said Tuesday he will scale back or delay plans to spend $20 billion to build two semiconductor fabs in Ohio if Congress fails to pass the $52 billion in chips incentives by the August recess (see 2207120045).