Olivier Knox
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1912, the Associated Press informs me, a special subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee opened hearings in New York into the sinking of the Titanic.
The big idea
Lawmakers will (literally) game out a Chinese attack on Taiwan
“Show, don’t tell.” This evening, the House Select Committee on China adapts that old journalism adage to their mission, holding a war game anchored on a Chinese attack on Taiwan in 2027 and simulating an American military, diplomatic and economic response.
Most of the committee’s Republicans and Democrats are expected to gather at 7 p.m. eastern in the cavernous and perpetually freezing House Ways and Means Committee Room for a TTX (“tabletop exercise”) run by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The think tank has run these before.
Under the watchful eye of “game-master” Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the CNAS defense program, the lawmakers will play advisers to the president, a.k.a. the Blue Team.
Becca Wasser, who leads the CNAS gaming lab, and CNAS fellow Andrew Metrick will play Beijing, a.k.a. the Red Team.
The game will unfold in fictional three-day increments and is likely to have a real-world running time of between two and two and a half hours — far shorter than Pentagon war games that can run over several days.
Why would you do this?
Basically, to tease out shortcomings in American policymaking.
“Table-tops aren’t just for military planners — they can be used to game out trade policy, cyber defense and many other issues in Congress’ remit,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said in a statement provided to The Daily 202. “As the military saying goes, ‘the enemy gets a vote.’ How do our policies do after they make contact with our competitor’s strategies?”
Wasser told The Daily 202 the TTX “is to help members look at different potential strategies in a potential future conflict over Taiwan and be able to test these out in a safe-to-fail setting” that may help them identify items that need “additional attention and potential advocacy.”
After a similar war game on the sidelines of the Republican issues conference in mid-March, Gallagher highlighted the need to ramp up munitions and weapons production and accelerate deliveries of arms to help Taiwan deter — or defend against — an attack by Beijing on democratically self-governed island.
A source close to the committee told The Daily 202 the war game was partly timed with the beginning of “NDAA season” — the National Defense Authorization Act, generally seen as must-pass legislation that lays out congressional national security priorities.
The scenario
The game is set in 2027. A political crisis flares up as China thinks Taiwan is edging closer to formally declaring independence.
Beijing, which sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has warned it may use military means to bring it under control, demands immediate unification negotiations. Taiwan refuses. The mainland steps up a pressure campaign.
But ultimately Chinese leader Xi Jinping decides to go to war.
In the game, the president has asked senior advisers for military options to defend Taiwan, Wasser said. Asked whether the scenario envisions an actual war, she replied: The president wants to use “all elements of American power,” and “all of it is going to be used.”
(The fact of the war game was first reported by Politico’s Nat Sec Daily.)
The context
After nearly two years of increasing tensions, President Biden and Xi seemed to take a step back when they met face-to-face in November. They agreed to keep talking. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken each planned to visit China.
Then came the Chinese spy balloon flying over the United States, apparently peering at military installations. Blinken scotched his trip. It has yet to be rescheduled. The White House has been saying Biden wants to get Xi on the phone. The Chinese have shown they’re in no rush to make that happen.
Congress has been turning up the temperature. Over angry Chinese objections, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R) met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in his home state of California. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had met with Tsai in Taiwan in August 2022.)
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul just wrapped up a visit to Taiwan, where he compared Xi to Adolf Hitler and told Taiwan America “will protect you” in case of Chinese attack. (Biden has said on four occasions the United States will defend Taiwan militarily, so the tradition of “strategic ambiguity” in which Washington doesn’t spell out exactly what it would do was already looking pretty threadbare.)
The way forward
On Monday, Bloomberg reported Taiwan will purchase up to 400 land-launched Harpoon anti-ship missiles. It had previously acquired the ship-borne variety.
Bloomberg quoted Chinese Foreign Minister spokesman Wang Wenbin as warning the sale would “undermine China’s sovereignty and security interests” and saying the United States must “stop seeking to change the ‘status quo’” in the Taiwan Strait.
For now, hostility to China appears to be one of the few bipartisan rallying points in domestic U.S. politics. You can bet Beijing is gaming out the potential consequences.
Politics-but-not
What’s happening now
Court hearing delayed for airman accused in documents leak
“Jack Teixeira, 21, was supposed to appear in Boston federal court on Wednesday for a detention hearing after he was charged last week, under the Espionage Act, with unauthorized retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” the Associated Press’s Alanna Durkin Richer reports.
“But the judge canceled the hearing after Teixeira’s lawyer filed a motion requesting that it be delayed for about two weeks. The defense said it ‘requires more time to address the issues presented by the government’s request for detention.’ A new date has not yet been set.”
Tyre Nichols’s family sues Memphis city officials, police officers
“Lawyers for Tyre Nichols’s family filed a lawsuit Wednesday morning against the city of Memphis, its police department, Police Chief Cerelyn Davis and the officers involved in the brutal beating of the 29-year-old after a traffic stop in January. Nichols died three days later,” Robert Klemko reports.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
What went wrong in the banking system? It’s his job to find out.
“[Michael] Barr, 57, is leading the Fed’s internal review of what went wrong. His report, due May 1, is expected to push for stricter laws for midsize banks like SVB, and will probably recommend tougher rules around how much capital they must have in reserve. The report could also propose undoing many of the changes to weaken oversight that Congress and the Fed made before Barr arrived,” Rachel Siegel reports.
“Looming over his probe is the fundamental question of why no one saw this coming. The answer carries enormous weight for the central bank, as it comes under pressure to protect the economy before new threats boil over.”
Jack Teixeira left tracks online, but was seen as quiet in his hometown
“His arrest here last week was shocking for those who remembered Teixeira as patriotic and enamored with military service, someone who skipped his own high school graduation to start basic training. But his alleged motive, to impress others online, didn’t surprise one former classmate who attended school with Teixeira and requested anonymity to discuss him and their hometown candidly,” Justine McDaniel reports.
Feinstein’s health leave is part of a long history of absent senators
“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) returned to the upper chamber Monday after health absences. McConnell, 81, fell and suffered a concussion and a broken rib at a private dinner at a Washington hotel in early March. Fetterman, 53, was treated for clinical depression after checking himself into the hospital in February. Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) both suffered strokes last year that caused them to take brief leaves,” Matthew Brown reports.
… and beyond
How Mexico became the biggest user of the world’s most notorious spy tool
“No place has had more experience with the promise and the peril of the technology than Mexico, the country that inaugurated its spread around the globe,” the New York Times’s Natalie Kitroeff and Ronen Bergman report.
“A New York Times investigation based on interviews, documents and forensic tests of hacked phones shows the secret dealings that led Mexico to become Pegasus’ first client, and reveals that the country grew into the most prolific user of the world’s most infamous spyware.”
Fulton prosecutors offered immunity deals to some GOP electors
“The Fulton County District Attorney’s office has offered immunity deals to some of the alternate GOP electors who met at the Georgia Capitol and cast phony Electoral College votes for Donald Trump following the 2020 election,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin report.
“In a court motion filed Tuesday, the DA’s office also disclosed that it has been interviewing several of those Republicans in recent weeks, and that some of them accused a fellow elector of committing ‘acts that are violations of Georgia law,’ the motion stated, without revealing specifics.”
Supreme Court conservatives seem divided in major religion case
“At the end of the day, it was unclear whether a majority of the court was more worried about imposing a burden on businesses and other employees or whether the court’s conservatives would once again come down on the side of religious interests,” NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports.
The Biden agenda
Biden digs in with Democrats on debt limit, castigates ‘extreme’ Republicans
“President Biden and Democratic leaders are standing firm in their insistence that Congress pass a stand-alone bill to raise the debt limit as House Republicans maneuver to pass legislation as early as next week that would force deep spending cuts and impose other conditions in exchange for their help in averting a catastrophic government default,” John Wagner reports.
Bidens’ tax returns show income of nearly $580,000 last year
“President Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Tuesday released their 2022 tax returns, which showed they had a federal adjusted gross income of $579,514 and paid $169,820 in total taxes, an effective tax rate of 23.8 percent,” Cleve R. Wootson Jr. reports.
Coronavirus vaccine shots will remain free to uninsured under Biden plan
“The Biden administration Tuesday announced a program to ensure that uninsured Americans continue to have access to free coronavirus vaccine shots and treatments through next year, even as the government winds down its pandemic response,” Dan Diamond reports.
Biden’s approval rating edges lower amid economic concerns
“U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval fell to 39% this month, nearing the lowest level of his presidency, as the U.S. economy showed signs of losing steam, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed,” Reuters’s Jason Lange reports.
The secret list of websites that make AI sound smart, visualized
“Chatbots cannot think like humans: They do not actually understand what they say. They can mimic human speech because the artificial intelligence that powers them has ingested a gargantuan amount of text, mostly scraped from the internet,” Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen and Nitasha Tiku report.
“Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So The Washington Post set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.”
Hot on the left
Democrats still face Feinstein dilemma as replacement bid fails
“Democrats’ plan to replace an ailing senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee fell apart amid Republican opposition Tuesday, leaving the party still grappling with a dilemma over stalled judicial nominees that has inflamed some in the Democratic base and complicated the Senate race to succeed her in California,” Liz Goodwin, Maeve Reston and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. report.
Hot on the right
Trump is running up the score with endorsements in DeSantis’ backyard
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Washington on Tuesday to greet a parade of congressional Republicans interested in his emerging presidential campaign. Former President Donald Trump promptly rained on that parade with a shower of endorsements, several of them from their shared home state,” NBC News’s Matt Dixon, Jonathan Allen and Henry J. Gomez report.
“Trump has secured the public backing of seven members of Florida’s congressional delegation, three of whom signed up within hours of each other Tuesday. Reps. Greg Steube and John Rutherford formally threw their support to Trump. Though a formal announcement will come later, an aide to Rep. Brian Mast confirmed that he plans to endorse Trump as well.”
Today in Washington
At 1:20 p.m., Biden will leave the White House for Accokeek, Md., to speak at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 77. His speech will begin at 2:30 p.m.
Biden will leave for the White House at 3:15 p.m. He is scheduled to arrive at 3:45 p.m.
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