Representative Jim Banks, the Republican Study Committee’s chairman, argued that the massive industrial-policy bill would restrict U.S. attempts to fight the Chinese Communist Party. Banks and the RSC instead advocate an approach more concentrating on malign Chinese activities and on expanding U.S. spending on defense and law enforcement.
Although proponents of the legislation explained that the bill is meant to turbocharge U.S. competitiveness against China, critics have claimed that the package is more of a massive industrial-policy measure than an attempt to shore up the U.S. effort to compete with China.
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“Senate and House conferees are starting to negotiate a final version of Democrats’ fake China bill. As written, both the Senate and the House versions harm the United States and help China,” wrote Banks today in a memo to RSC members, according to National Review.
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Banks and the RSC led messaging campaigns against those bills, the most relevant aspect of which could be the RSC’s Countering Communist China Act. That bill could be a hallmark GOP proposal if Republicans win the House in November.
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The bill initially passed the Senate last year on a bipartisan basis, and the House passed a different, more comprehensive version of the package on a near party-line vote in February. Earlier this month, congressional leaders appointed dozens of lawmakers to a bicameral committee that will deliver an ultimate version.
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That $252 billion Senate-approved proposal mostly comprised a massive injection of funding into National Science Foundation research on critical, emerging technologies and $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor chip manufacturers.
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The House bill, like its Senate counterpart, features many provisions on critical technology research and semiconductor funding. It includes a bevy of other noteworthy provisions handling outbound investment flows to China, the processing of asylum seekers fleeing the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, and, to the chagrin of House conservatives, climate change.
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President Biden and other top officials have leaned on the Administration’s allies in Congress to move swiftly to pass a version reconciling the two texts sometime over the following several weeks. “We have a great opportunity ahead of us, with the Bipartisan Innovation Act I mentioned, which is going to provide 90 billion dollars in research and development. STEM education, manufacturing, all those elements of the supply chain that we need to produce and products right here in America,” he announced last week, throughout an address in North Carolina.