Source: Blog – Alliance for American Manufacturing
The first meeting of the House China select committee in February 2023. | Getty Images
Its bipartisanship is what made it go. We hope that energy continues.
A new Congress is installed in Washington and, just like the last Congress, there is unlikely to be a lot of bipartisan legislation passed out of it. In 2025, the two parties just don’t see eye to eye on many things!
But this is not the case when it comes to the House’s China committee, which has been reauthorized and will meet in the 119th Congress. During the last Congress, when it was founded, the committee was one of the few spots on Capitol Hill where you could reliably find genuine bipartisan collaboration.
You can chalk this up to a couple of things. First, it’s a select committee, not a standing one, meaning it must be authorized in each session of Congress, and as such it’s not part of the legislative sausage-making; rather, it’s investigative, and makes recommendations about what kind of legislation Congress should pursue.
Second is the subject. The committee, whose full name is the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, is meant to train lawmakers’ focus on the United States’ economic and military rivalry with China. And this is something that in recent years both parties have been able to get behind.
Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) President Scott Paul testified at its first hearing, and the committee has done a lot since then. Here’s how Politico described its work in a recent article:
The committee launched in January (2023) with a two-year mandate and quickly produced bipartisan legislative proposals on Taiwan, fentanyl, human rights and countering China’s growing military might. That turned into bills targeting everything from U.S. investment in China and the so-called de minimis import tax loophole amid partisan impasse elsewhere in Washington, which have bipartisan support and are expected to pass into law.
The China committee has been “by far the least partisan” on Capitol Hill, said Rush Doshi, former National Security Council official on China policy in the Biden administration.
It was never a sure thing that the China committee would be back. That Politico article, for example, argues the bipartisan juice that made the committee go was at risk after Republicans won both chambers of Congress and the White House in the 2024 elections.
But back it is. AAM stumped for it in a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) last month. And its spirit of bipartisanship is what we stressed, too:
The Select Committee is uniquely equipped to represent the shared concern among Americans regarding the economic and security challenges presented by the policies of the CCP. Thus, as the 119th Congress approaches, we hope that the Select Committee will continue its bipartisan work on identifying and examining key issues and policies in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship so that committees of jurisdiction are better positioned to advance legislative solutions to those challenges.
Suffice to say, the U.S.-China bilateral relationship is deeply important and deserves congressional attention. We’ll be watching the committee’s agenda closely in the coming months.
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