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National

House members finally reached their August recess this weekend after a string of unusual, and at times contentious, incidents that clouded efforts to avoid a government shutdown — and signaled that they needed a timeout.

Why it matters: The House has had a long year, from January's marathon speaker election to May and June's close call on defaulting on the federal debt — not to mention conservatives' unprecedented tactics to grind the House floor to a halt.

Add a surge in personal confrontations and bizarre incidents, and you've got a recipe for dysfunction.

Freshman Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) was slammed by members on both sides of the aisle following a profanity-laced encounter involving the Wisconsin Republican screaming at a group of teenage Senate pages.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) shocked some of her colleagues by talking about her sex life during her remarks at the South Carolina Prayer Breakfast on Wednesday morning.

Speaker McCarthy and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) — who have long had a combative relationship — reportedly threatened to fight each other, with Swalwell calling McCarthy a p**** on the House floor in June, according to the Daily Beast.

In another House floor incident,  conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) a “little b****” after she introduced a competing impeachment bill. The incident contributed to Greene being booted from the House Freedom Caucus.

Taylor Greene also infuriated Democrats during a congressional hearing by showing sexually explicit photos of Hunter Biden.

The big picture: Multiple congressional staffers told Axios it was clear members need to get out of D.C.

Lawmakers and aides have long abided by the notion that members of Congress have cooler heads after spending time in their districts.

What's next: The end of recess will be followed by a frantic sprint to get all 12 appropriations bills done before a government shutdown in October.  

Congress gets a timeout after dysfunctional summer

Congress

Politics & Policy

A federal judge has dismissed former President Trump's $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which he accused the network of associating him with Hitler by describing his false 2020 election claims as "the big lie."

Driving the news: The former president's lawyers said when they filed the suit in October that this term was associated with Nazi propaganda that was used in the persecution of Jewish people, but the Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal ruled this was not defamatory.

"CNN's use of the phrase 'the Big Lie' in connection with Trump's election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people," Singhal wrote in his decision in South Florida late Friday. 

"Being 'Hitler-like' is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim," the judge said. "CNN's statements while repugnant, were not, as a matter of law, defamatory."

The big picture: Defamation suits have become increasingly common as high-power figures look to challenge the media's First Amendment power, though such cases can be hard to prove in the U.S.

A spokesperson for CNN declined to comment on the lawsuit. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment.

Flashback: Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against New York Times

Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against New York Times

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Judge tosses Trump's "big lie" defamation lawsuit against CNN

"Being 'Hitler-like' is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim," Trump-appointed judge said.

Former President Trump at an event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, earlier this month. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

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After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

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Many of the GOP's leading Senate recruits are speaking out against U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia — sounding a downright isolationist note and breaking from the views of party leaders.

Why it matters: The emerging Republican rhetoric from up-and-coming candidates on Ukraine is a signal on where the party's foreign policy views are headed.

Such skepticism of U.S. engagement is still a minority opinion among Republican elected leaders, but it is now embraced by the GOP's top two candidates for president (former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis).

Calling for defunding American military aid to Ukraine is becoming something of a litmus test within contested GOP primaries — a far cry from Republicans' instinctive hawkishness in the post-9/11 era.

The latest: Trump yesterday called on Republicans in Congress to “refuse to authorize a single additional shipment” of weapons to Ukraine until "the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over" evidence in the House’s Biden family investigation. 

Zoom out: Former Vice President Mike Pence, who recently returned from Ukraine, was booed at an evengalical event in Iowa — moderated by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — over his support for Ukraine's defense against Russian aggression.

Pence, a traditional conservative hawk, is now trailing entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in the national primary polling average, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Ramaswamy, a virtual unknown before running, has campaigned on fully ending U.S. support for Ukraine.

Driving the news: Former Navy SEAL and businessman Tim Sheehy, the party-backed candidate challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), raised eyebrows in a statement issued to a local conservative radio host this month.

Sheehy called for the U.S. to end its involvement in Ukraine and “compel an immediate peaceful outcome” to the ongoing conflict.

"We are a year into this war and America has done our duty in stopping this vicious and unprovoked attack and we must now demand a settlement which ends the killing of innocent people and the unlimited supply of arms from the United States," Sheehy said.

Between the lines: That's a sharp reversal from Sheehy's position before he jumped in the race. Just last year, Sheehy wrote on his LinkedIn page: "Sweden and Finland are next? We’ve seen this movie before ... stop him now before the price tag for putting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin down will be a lot higher,” he wrote.

Sheehy faces the possibility of a primary challenge against Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), an outspoken isolationist in the House who introduced legislation prohibiting further aid to Ukraine until America's southern border is secured.

Go deeper: Sam Brown, the party's favored candidate in the Nevada Senate race, is a decorated military veteran whose injuries in Afghanistan have turned him deeply skeptical of American military engagement abroad.

“At a time where there’s so much domestic unease on so many issues, the media and our politicians want to turn our eyes to places like Ukraine or Afghanistan,” Brown said during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign, according to reporting from Jewish Insider.

Brown went on: "Less than one year after pulling out of Afghanistan in such a disastrous, horrific way, we have war hawks out of D.C. trying to push us into another conflict.”

Zoom in: Businessman Bernie Moreno, running in a competitive Ohio Senate primary, also sounded a skeptical note on Ukraine funding in a recent interview with Breitbart News.

"We spent [trillions] in the Middle East since 9/11, and what did we get for it? Nothing. Everything is objectively worse. So we can't allow that to happen in Eastern Europe," Moreno said.

As a Senate candidate in 2022, Moreno expressed frequent criticism toward the Biden White House for its support of Ukraine. "[Biden] and the media obsess over the territorial integrity of Ukraine, and ignore the invasion at our border," Moreno wrote in January 2022.

Moreno is the fundraising leader in a competitive three-way primary for the GOP nomination in the race against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). He was endorsed by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), one of the Senate's leading critics of Ukraine aid.

Both Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Sen. Matt Dolan — Moreno's primary opponents — have expressed unequivocal support for Ukraine in its efforts to fend off Russian aggression.

By the numbers: A June Pew Research poll found 44% of Republican or GOP-leaning voters believe the U.S. is providing too much aid to Ukraine, while just 34% believe it's "about right" or "not enough." That's the highest level of GOP skepticism for Ukraine aid since the war began.

Overall, only 28% of Americans believe the U.S. is giving too much aid to Ukraine — a relatively small minority of voters.

70 House Republicans voted last month to prohibit all Ukraine security aid, while 89 voted in favor of cutting $300 million in Ukraine funding in amendments to the defense authorization bill.

The bottom line: Republican leadership is still solidly behind supporting Ukraine, but the grassroots of the party are moving in the opposite direction.

If that trend continues, expect more newly elected Republicans to sound more like Vance and Trump than Pence.

The GOP's Ukraine evolution

They're sounding a downright isolationist note and breaking from the views of party leaders.

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Eliminating legacy and donor-based admissions won't be enough to maintain diversity at colleges after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told Axios in an interview.

Driving the news: Cardona, who appeared at the NAACP Convention in Boston, said the Biden administration is looking to education leaders for input on legal workarounds after the affirmative action decision.

He hosted hundreds of education officials in Washington last week and said he has more smaller, regional meetings in the works.

Why it matters: The ruling has raised concerns that colleges will admit fewer Black and brown students, which is what happened when California banned affirmative action in 1996, Cardona said. 

It has also drawn scrutiny on legacy and donor-based admissions practices that researchers have found disproportionately benefit the top 1%, who are overwhelmingly white. 

What he’s saying: Cardona praised colleges that have eliminated legacy admissions, such as Wesleyan University, but he said that alone won’t change "that there are Black and brown kids that now with this affirmative action decision are going to feel like they're not wanted."

Catch up fast: The Education Department opened an investigation last week into Harvard College’s admissions regarding students whose relatives attended or donated to the school, following a complaint by Boston-area activist groups and attorneys. 

Cardona declined to comment on the probe directly. 

Zoom in: He suggests other ways to level the playing field might include uplifting HBCUs, creating college pipelines for K-12 students, offering dual enrollment credits and engaging parents of first-generation college students early.

That’s as important as ever, he told NAACP members Saturday, as "we are in danger of a new Jim Crow era in some parts of this country."

What’s next: The Education Department plans to release guidance in a few weeks to help colleges navigate admissions practices.

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Cardona: Ending legacy admissions won't solve affirmative action fallout

Cardona appeared at the NAACP Convention in Boston this weekend.

A close up of U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

Secretary Miguel Cardona. Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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As tech companies begin to weave AI into all their products and all of our lives, the architects of this revolutionary technology often can't predict or explain their systems' behavior.

Why it matters: This may be the scariest aspect of today's AI boom — and it's common knowledge among AI's builders, though not widely understood by everyone else.

"It is not at all clear — not even to the scientists and programmers who build them — how or why the generative language and image models work," Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote recently in The New York Times.

What's happening: For decades, we've used computer systems that, given the same input, provide the same output.

Generative AI systems, by contrast, aim to spin out multiple possibilities from a single prompt.

You can easily end up with different answers to the same question.

The element of randomness in generative AI operates on a scale — involving up to trillions of variables — that makes it challenging to dissect how the technology arrives at a particular answer.

Sure, ultimately it's all math. But that's like saying the human body is all atoms. It's true! When you need to solve a problem in a reasonable span of time, though, it doesn't always help.

AI's scariest mystery

Even the people who build AI systems can't always predict what they'll do.

Axios

Sunday's top stories

Congress gets a timeout after dysfunctional summer

Judge tosses Trump's "big lie" defamation lawsuit against CNN

The GOP's Ukraine evolution

Cardona: Ending legacy admissions won't solve affirmative action fallout

AI's scariest mystery

Destination weddings are booming

GOP candidate Will Hurd booed for anti-Trump comment at Iowa event

Why the U.S. economy is so immune to rate hikes

Weight stigma infiltrates work

GOP rivals prepare to take on "happy warrior" Tim Scott

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