AOC hopeful her anti-explicit deepfake bill can make Congress’s final cut
Plus: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the state of play in her race to lead House Oversight Committee Democrats and how lawmakers dragged their feet on AI regulation and kids online safety legislation.
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👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will host the first-ever White House Conference on Women’s Health Research today to bring together business and philanthropic leaders, academic researchers, women’s health advocates, investors and federal agencies. The stakeholders will discuss the administration’s work to advance the issue and how to continue making progress on improving women’s health. The conference is organized in collaboration with the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research and the Milken Institute.
Incoming Democratic Women’s Caucus Chair Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.) told me that medical research has ignored women's health issues for too long and that if we don’t ask questions about women’s health, we will never know the answers.
“Investing in research and raising awareness about health conditions that impact women, including endometriosis and menopause, is a key priority of the Democratic Women’s Caucus,” Leger Fernandez said. “We are proud of the administration’s historic investment in this critical research, including new initiatives that have dramatically increased the public and private sectors’ focus on women’s health research. Heading into the next Congress, we will keep fighting for a better future for women.”
The conference will feature remarks from the president and first lady and include lightning talks on cutting-edge women’s health research. Separate panel discussions will also discuss the business case for investing in women’s health research and innovation and the importance of driving progress in women’s health.
The president and first lady created the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research to fundamentally change how our nation approaches and funds women’s health research. Despite making up more than half the population, women have historically been understudied and underrepresented in health research.
A White House official said the initiative has galvanized nearly $1 billion in funding to close gaps in research on women’s health since 2023 to advance research to improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases and conditions that affect women uniquely, disproportionately, and differently—from menopause to brain disorders to cardiovascular disease.
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While Congress is set to complete the major tasks on its pre-Christmas to-do list by the end of next week, lawmakers in one of both chambers will more than likely leave town without passing meaningful legislation to regulate artificial intelligence, help keep kids safe online or empower survivors of digital sexual violence from taking action against perpetrators.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told me that despite a ticking countdown clock there’s still momentum for the DEFIANCE Act—a bill that would discourage the spread of sexually explicit AI-generated deepfakes and empower survivors to take civil action against perpetrators who generate and distribute the material using AI and other technologies—can clear the House before the holiday recess. She pointed to Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), a member of the House AI task force, joining the bill as a bipartisan cosponsor and recent conversations with Republican leadership as reasons for optimism.
“I think there’s a possibility given the fact that DEFIANCE passed via [unanimous consent] in the Senate. All Republican members right now have effectively voted for it. So that gives us a path in the Senate,” she said. “And we, of course, I think may potentially have a path here in the house, so we’ll see.”
Ocasio-Cortez said her preference would be to pass it as a stand-alone bill instead of as an attachment to a must-pass legislative vehicle like the National Defense Authorization Act or continuing resolution to keep the government open.
“But I do hope that we’re going to be able to move it whether it's via UC or floor vote,” she said. “You know, I think our goal is to get this thing moving.”
AOC told me in September that she had encouraging conversations right until Congress broke for the August recess and that momentum carried through the six-week adjournment. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) became the first Republican co-lead on the bill and Ocasio-Cortez said she would be meeting with the AI Task Force, which is chaired by Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) whom AOC said has expressed openness to trying to move the bill forward.
The Kids Online Safety Act is another bill that’s stalled in the House despite overwhelming bipartisan support across the Capitol.
KOSA would require tech companies to enable the strongest privacy settings for kids by default. It would provide kids under 16 with options to protect their personal information, turn off addictive product features and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced KOSA in 2022 after reporting from The Wall Street Journal revealed tech giants' repeated failures to protect kids on their social apps. The lawmakers led five Senate subcommittee hearings that explored the harms of these failures.
The bill would also provide parents with new controls to help protect their children, spot harmful behaviors and offer parents and educators a dedicated channel to report it. Additionally, KOSA would establish an obligation for companies to prevent the promotion of self-harm, eating disorders, bullying and child sexual abuse material while authorizing the federal government to create a program for the National Academy of Sciences to access data from companies so it can further study tech’s potential harm to children and teens.
Although the Senate passed KOSA in a 91–3 vote this summer, it’s bogged down in the House due to free-speech concerns from civil liberties groups and conservative think tanks. Despite pressure from a bipartisan group of senators who support KOSA, House Republican leadership seems disinclined to bring the bill to the floor this Congress, although it’s likely to pass with the same bipartisan support we saw in the Senate.
“We are very optimistic that if it's not done this year that we can do that early next year with our Republican majorities,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters on Tuesday.
In a Senate floor speech on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blamed Senate Republicans for withdrawing from negotiations on bipartisan AI legislation after the November elections and lamented the lack of progress made in creating such legislation after a year of efforts that included a working group of senators from both parties, nine forums with experts and bills drafted to keep the US a leader in AI while ensuring safeguards against misuse.
Surveys indicate that the majority of Americans feel more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. Their primary worries are data privacy, job displacement and the potential for misuse in areas like political advertising and identity theft.
Speaker Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) established a bipartisan task force on AI in February. The body is set to release its report with policy recommendations by the end of the year. White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients said in a memo to his team this week that the administration would have an announcement on AI in the final weeks of President Biden’s term. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped internet technology entrepreneur and investor David Sacks to be his AI and cryptocurrency czar, a first-of-its-kind appointment that could give him enormous sway on two transformative technologies with little congressional oversight or accountability.
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Ocasio-Cortez, of course, is running to lead Democrats on the House Oversight Committee next Congress after current ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) bumped Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) aside atop the House Judiciary Committee.
She told reporters on Tuesday that she is pleased with her colleagues' responses and that she thinks the Democratic Caucus's three contested races on Oversight, Natural Resources and Agriculture are healthy as they chart a path forward after a disappointing general election.
“I think that having multigenerational leadership in the party sends a strong message that we can really rely on the leadership of seasoned senior leaders and that we are also a party that cultivates new generation of leadership to help carry that work forward as well,” she said. “And so to me, it’s not just an either-or proposition. It’s about the fact that as a collective, we are on the cusp of potentially adopting a multigenerational suite of leaders that can really speak to the entirety of the country.”
AOC is competing against Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a senior member of the committee who says his experience on the panel gives him an advantage in the race.
“As I’ve said before and will continue to say, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Rep. Connolly and I’m a major admirer of this work on the committee,” she said. “That being said I think that this has been a really great conversation to have with the Democratic Caucus and for us to really talk about how we can lay out a vision for the future of the party and a future for how we're going to fight for people, especially in the context of an incoming Trump administration.”
She said she understood the value of seniority but pointed to the fact that the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the former top Democrat on the committee, drafted her to sit on it and that Raskin made her his vice ranking member this term.
“I know how to do this job,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “I’ve run investigations that have taken on Big Pharma, defense contractors and the Trump Organization themselves. And so in terms of having the experience necessary to execute this job well, I would not be running in this race if I did not believe that I had that.”
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The White House said President Biden would veto a bill that would create 63 new permanent federal district court judgeships over the next decade and three temporary judgeships next year to address rising caseloads. The administration accused House GOP leadership of playing politics by refusing to take the bill up after the Senate passed it in August until after the election. The White House acknowledged the importance of judicial staffing but called the legislation unnecessary to the efficient and effective administration of justice and enable senators to create new judgeships in states where they have sought to hold existing judicial vacancies that could be filled by the next Trump administration. House Democrats are formally whipping members against the bill, which is scheduled to be voted on this week.
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Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) led a group of colleagues and advocates to renew their calls for President Biden to commute the death sentence of the 40 individuals on federal death row and resentence them to prison. Pressley and Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) sent a letter to Biden last month urging him to clemency action before leaving office, a call she reiterated after the president pardoned his son Hunter last week. Pressley and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) reintroduced a bill that would ban the use of the death penalty at the federal level and require re-sentencing of those currently on death row.
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A group of House Democratic women called on President Biden to direct the US archivist to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA would guarantee equal rights under the law and explicitly prohibit sex discrimination. Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Rep. Pressley launched the ERA Caucus in March 2023—100 years after the ERA was first introduced in Congress—to affirm the ERA as the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution.
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Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) received the Carl Levin Award for Effective Oversight from the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy on Tuesday for his bipartisan congressional investigations of the federal prison system, culminating in Ossoff passing into law his bipartisan Federal Prison Oversight Act. This prison reform legislation followed a 10-month investigation in 2022 into corruption, abuse, and misconduct at an Atlanta federal prison that uncovered long-term failures of Federal prison administration that likely contributed to the loss of life, jeopardized the health and safety of inmates and staff and undermined public safety and civil rights incarcerated Georgians. Ossoff led a separate eight-month investigation later in 2022 into sexual abuse of female prisoners in federal custody, which uncovered that Board of Prisoners employees sexually abused female prisoners in at least two-thirds of federal prisons that have held women over the past decade. Ossoff is up for reelection in 2026.
Do you have questions about the lame-duck session or the incoming Trump presidency? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll report back with answers.
Happenings
The House will meet at 10 a.m. with first and last votes expected at 4 p.m.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. to assess the State Department’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Senate will meet at 11 a.m. and vote at 12 p.m. to limit debate on the nomination of Lauren McFerran to be a member of the National Labor Relations Board.
The Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing at 2:45 p.m. to examine the US Capitol Police.
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