D.C. Dispatch: What N.J.’s members of Congress did in Washington this week

With the One Big Beautiful Bill in the rearview mirror, Congress returned this week to more standard business – which, of course, means that it was still plenty chaotic.

A Senate panel advanced a critical New Jersey appeals court nominee, both chambers approved controversial legislation targeting PBS and foreign aid, and the House had a multi-day meltdown over a cryptocurrency package that resulted in the longest roll-call vote in House history. Here’s some of what New Jersey’s members of Congress did in Washington this week.

A 12-0 vote? The guy must be super uncontroversial!

Third Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Emil Bove has Democrats hopping mad – mad enough, in fact, that they decided to abandon a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting en masse yesterday rather than cast a vote on his nomination.

As they were walking out of the committee room, Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) plowed ahead with a roll-call vote, and Bove was favorably sent to the full Senate 12-0. Senator Cory Booker, meanwhile, spent the vote excoriating both Bove and the process that got him there.

“This is unbelievable, this is unjust, this is wrong, it is the further deterioration of this committee’s integrity,” Booker said. “What are you afraid of?”

Bove’s nomination is controversial for a myriad of reasons: a whistleblower’s allegation that he suggested to subordinates at the Justice Department that they should ignore court orders; his key role in the controversial decision to drop federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams; and his past temperament and conduct as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

For Booker and Senator Andy Kim, the Bove nomination is especially galling, since Bove is nominated for a New Jersey-based seat (the circuit covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) despite having no real ties to the state and despite the fact that the two senators never gave his nomination their approval. But their efforts to convince Republicans to vote against Bove’s nomination have, so far, proven fruitless; every Republican on the Judiciary Committee voted in favor of Bove yesterday, with Grassley tweaking Democrats for their treatment of him.

“What we’re witnessing has all the hallmarks of a political hit job, timed for maximum media splash with minimum substance,” he said.

Bove isn’t even the only Third Circuit fight on the horizon; President Donald Trump also announced this week that he’ll nominate Jennifer Mascott, who currently works in his counsel’s office, to a Delaware-based seat on the same court.

Journalism is super profitable these days, I’m sure PBS will be fine

Running right up against today’s deadline, both the House and the Senate approved a bill rescinding $9 billion in funding that had already been approved by Congress: $7.9 billion for foreign aid and $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which funds PBS and NPR), cuts that proponents of those two programs say will be devastating.

Like in so many other critical votes this year, the New Jersey delegation split on party lines: all eleven Democrats against, all three Republicans in favor.

“You can draw a straight line from the mass decline of local media outlets and Americans’ growing national alienation and distrust,” Rep. Pou (D-North Haledon) said in a statement shortly after the bill passed at midnight last night. “This misguided bill will make the problem even worse by gutting funding for public broadcasters from coast to coast. Closing local stations will further erode Americans’ community bonds and shut off some of the last channels Americans possess to receive news about their cities and towns. I view this bill as an attack on democracy itself and strongly oppose it.”

The bill that ultimately passed was slightly less far-reaching than the one the Trump administration put forward; after negotiations in the Senate, cuts to the global HIV/AIDS program PEPFAR were taken out.

Cryptonomicon

The other big legislative focus this week was the House’s Crypto Week, which got off to a rough start when conservative holdouts declined to support a series of procedural motions before eventually giving in and allowing two landmark cryptocurrency-related bills to pass.

The two bills, the CLARITY Act and the GENIUS Act, create new federal rules and regulations on stablecoins and cryptocurrency markets; the latter already passed the Senate in June, and Trump signed it today. (The New Jersey Globe recommends reading a publication that is not the New Jersey Globe for details on what the bills do.)

Republicans, among them New Jersey’s three GOP congressmen, overwhelmingly supported both bills, which Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield said) “provide the confidence and transparency businesses need to innovate, create new opportunities, and grow – in New Jersey and across the nation.”

But as is frequently the case when it comes to cryptocurrency policy, the Democratic Party was far more divided, and not always cleanly along ideological lines. Five of the state’s Democratic House members supported the bills – among them Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), who helped to negotiate them on the Financial Services Committee – while Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), and Donald Norcross (D-Camden) opposed them. (Senators Booker and Kim also supported the GENIUS Act when it came up in the Senate.)

“These bills are a scam to help President Trump cash in on his crypto dealings,” Watson Coleman said, explaining her no vote. “Trump has been lobbying members of Congress to pass these laws to make himself and his family richer while he’s President. Since launching his crypto ventures, President Trump and his family have gotten half a billion dollars richer off their schemes by selling access to the President.”

The North Dakota battery association

The House Armed Services Committee, as is its charge every year, on Wednesday passed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which lays out the Defense Department’s annual budget and programs. The vote was 55-2, with both of the panel’s New Jerseyans, Reps. Norcross and Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), voting in favor, though that bipartisanship could eventually disappear if Republicans add a number of controversial amendments later on as they’ve done in past years.

“One of my chief responsibilities is to craft national defense legislation that strengthens our fighting forces across the globe, bolsters the New Jersey economy by investing in Picatinny Arsenal, and expands protections for our service members and their families,” Sherrill said. “With Pete Hegseth, the most incompetent Secretary of Defense in history, leading our armed forces, it’s more important than ever that we pass commonsense legislation that invests in our fighting forces and the men and women who have stepped up to serve our country.”

As Norcross noted on social media, this NDAA could also be Sherrill’s last thanks to her campaign for governor, a potentially bittersweet moment for the congresswoman who has made her work on the committee a top legislative priority in Congress.

“Great to pass another NDAA out of committee with [Rep. Sherrill],” Norcross said. “Hopefully that’s the last one for New Jersey’s next governor!”

On base

Back in February, it came to light that the Trump administration was considering expanding its nationwide network of immigrant detention facilities to include military bases, among them Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington and Ocean Counties. This week, the Department of Defense confirmed those plans in a letter to Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran) – who represents around half of the base – though the timing and nature of the plans remain unclear.

“I am writing to inform [you] that the provision of Department of Defense real property at Camp Atterbury, Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens will not negatively affect military training, operations, readiness, or other military requirements,” Hegseth wrote on Tuesday to “Representative Conway.”

Conaway and every other Democrat in the New Jersey delegation condemned the plan, calling it an inappropriate use of military resources. (The base’s other congressman, Republican Rep. Chris Smith, has been more supportive of the idea in the past.)

“Using our country’s military to detain and hold undocumented immigrants jeopardizes military preparedness and paves the way for ICE immigration raids in every New Jersey community,” reads a statement signed by ten members of New Jersey’s Democratic delegation. “We have the greatest military in the world and using it as a domestic political tool is unacceptable and shameful.”

Anti-fada

Alongside a Republican colleague from Indiana, Rep. Gottheimer introduced a resolution this week that condemns the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a controversial slogan sometimes used by pro-Palestine activists. The resolution is fairly par for the course for Gottheimer, one of his party’s most strongly pro-Israel members.

But in this case, there are obvious political connotations: namely, the fact that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, has been criticized for declining to condemn the phrase. Gottheimer has made his own feelings on Mamdani clear, saying on CNBC that New York doesn’t need a “job-killing socialist who wants to raise taxes and supports antisemitic rhetoric” in the mayor’s office.

“There should be no ambiguity – ‘Globalize the Intifada’ is hate speech, plain and simple,” Gottheimer said of his resolution. “‘The Intifada’ refers to a horrific wave of terror attacks that killed thousands of Jews. Globalizing it is a direct call for violence against Jews, and it must be condemned. I’m against hate speech targeting anyone — and everyone should be. It’s insane and unacceptable to me that this antisemitic rhetoric is spreading rampant across our country.”

Communication is key

Gottheimer also got one of his own bills passed through the House this week, boosting cooperation between the United States and Israel in combating so-called “killer drones”; the bill passed as part of the Defense Department appropriations bill (which Gottheimer voted against).

Reps. Kean and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) also got bills passed: Kean’s Promoting United States Wireless Leadership Act, which encourages U.S. involvement in setting standards for wireless communications networks, and Menendez’s Communications Security Act, which permanently establishes a Federal Communications Commission council focused on network security and reliability. Kean’s bill passed on a voice vote; Menendez’s passed 380-33.

“As threats to our nation’s critical infrastructure continue to rise, we need expert collaboration at the FCC to ensure our communications networks remain reliable when we need them the most,” Menendez said. “Time and again, [the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council] has improved the reliability and performance of our networks during natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and cybersecurity attacks. It’s common sense to make this council permanent, and I’m grateful to my colleagues for moving this forward on a bipartisan basis.”

Other Garden State plots

• The House passed the FY2026 Department of Defense appropriations bill (which is different from the NDAA) on a 221-209 vote; the New Jersey delegation broke down on party lines, with Democrats opposing a variety of partisan Republican provisions included in the bill.

“The annual defense budget is one of the most important matters we consider in Congress and today House Republicans have rendered in just one more partisan farce,” Rep. Pou said. “How does attacking women’s health care improve our national defense? How does shielding Russia protect Americans’ freedom? How does empowering the voices of far-right extremists help democracy flourish at home abroad? How does targeting gay Americans help anyone?”

• Senator Booker led the state’s entire Democratic delegation on a letter to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon criticizing her “unlawful” decision to withhold $162 million in K-12 and adult education funds for New Jersey (and nearly $7 billion nationwide).

“Congress lawfully appropriated these funds to address critical education needs, including student achievement, afterschool enrichment, teacher training, and adult literacy,” the letter states. “Withholding these funds is a reckless decision that jeopardizes the education of millions of students, resulting in layoffs, program delays, disrupted planning cycles, and delayed hiring.”

• Rep. Smith chaired a hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Tuesday focused on political repression in Pakistan, which Smith says is riven by conflict between former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the country’s military.

“Life in Pakistan today is marked by rampant government violations of basic freedoms, particularly freedom of speech and media freedom, and the denial of free and fair elections,” Smith said.

• Rep. Kean celebrated a decision this week to designate the Norfolk Southern Lehigh Road Crossing in Branchburg as a partial Quiet Zone through 2027, which he said he advocated for after hearing from local residents awoken by nighttime train horns.

“Branchburg families will soon be able to enjoy quiet mornings and peaceful evenings once again,” Kean said. “For too long, loud train whistles have disrupted the daily lives of residents throughout our community. I have heard from countless constituents, through emails, phone calls, and conversations, about the toll this constant noise has taken on their basic quality of life. That is why I have worked hard at the federal level to advocate for a solution, and I am glad to have delivered results.”