<The Supreme Court on Tuesday handed a defeat to Alabama Republicans for the second time in three months, rejecting their latest attempt to use a congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district.

The court in two related applications refused emergency requests from Republican state officials to block lower court rulings that invalidated the new map. Lower court proceedings to approve a new map are still ongoing.

The decision was in line with the Supreme Court ruling against the state in June that reaffirmed a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. There were no noted dissenting votes and the court did not explain its reasoning.

The Supreme Court's earlier ruling forced the state back to the drawing board. But the new map — like the previous one — includes only one district where Black voters are likely to be able to elect a candidate of their choosing. Alabama has seven congressional districts, and 27% of the state's population is Black.

The new map was thrown out in two different lower court rulings, with the judges saying an additional minority-Black district was required, in line with the Supreme Court's June ruling.

“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district," one of the court rulings said.

A new map with a second majority-Black district could help Democrats in their bid to win control of the House of Representatives in next year's election, with Black people in the state more likely to vote Democratic. There are currently six Republicans and one Democrat in the state's congressional delegation.

The two consolidated cases arose from litigation over the congressional district map the Republican-controlled Legislature drew after the 2020 census. The challengers, including individual voters and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against Black voters.

Lower court judges have now repeatedly ruled that under existing law plaintiffs had shown that Alabama’s Black population was both large enough and sufficiently compact for there to be a second majority-Black district.

Two conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — joined the three liberal justices in the majority in the Supreme Court ruling in June.

But the court did leave open future challenges to the law, with Kavanaugh writing in a separate opinion that his vote did not rule out challenges to Section 2 based on whether there is a time when the 1965 law’s authorization of considering race in redistricting is no longer justified.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall seized upon Kavanaugh's pronouncements in his request to block the lower court rulings.

He also cited the court's decision in June to end the consideration of race in college admissions as an example of why a remedy for historical race discrimination that may have once been lawful and justified is no longer appropriate.

Lawyers for the challengers argued in court papers that the state had made no effort to draw a second majority-Black district even though it is the only remedy under existing law.

The state "is not entitled ... to implement a congressional map that openly defies the clear rulings of the district court and this court," they wrote.>

<One of 16 Michigan Republicans accused of taking part in a fake elector scheme filed a motion Tuesday asking a judge to dismiss charges after the state attorney general said the group had been “brainwashed" and truly believed that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

All 16 are facing eight criminal charges, including forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, that were first announced in July by state Attorney General Dana Nessel. Investigators allege that they met following the 2020 election and signed a document falsely stating they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors.”

President Joe Biden won the state by nearly 155,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021. Michigan is one of seven states where false Electoral College certificates were submitted declaring Trump the winner, despite confirmed results showing he had lost.

On Sept. 18, Nessel, a Democrat, told a liberal group during a virtual event that the false electors had been “brainwashed” and “genuinely” believed Trump won in Michigan’.

“They legit believe that,” Nessel said, according to the video first reported by The Detroit News.

Nessel also said that Ingham County, where the cases will be tried, "is a very, very Democratic-leaning county.”

An attorney for one of the accused fake electors, Mari-Ann Henry, 65, said those comments “nullify the government’s entire case” and the charges should be thrown out.

George MacAvoy Brown, an attorney for Henry, said in a statement that the charges require proof that Henry “intended to cheat or deceive someone” and that Nessel's comments show that wasn't the case.

The motion for dismissal was filed in Ingham County District Court.

Danny Wimmer, a spokesperson for Nessel's office, said in response to a request for comment that the office “will respond to the motion in our filings with the Court.”

Attorneys for others charged in the case have also been critical of Nessel’s comments. Nick Somberg, who represents former Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that they prove the charges hold “no merit” and that this is a “political case.”

In a separate court filing obtained by AP, another defendant, Amy Facchinello, claims that the charges stem from conduct that came “at the direction” of then-President Trump and other federal officers.

All 16 of the defendants have pleaded not guilty. Henry and several others, including Maddock and Kathy Berden, Michigan’s Republican national committeewoman, are scheduled to appear for a preliminary examination hearing on Oct. 12.>

<With little headway being made in negotiations to keep the government’s lights on beyond the end of the week, a shutdown seems all but assured, with Congress shifting into crisis mode as President Joe Biden calls directly on Republicans to help avoid disaster. Rather than respond to that call, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) busied himself on Tuesday preparing a request to have his salary withheld until funding is secured.

“It is my understanding that pursuant to the Constitution, members of Congress will continue to receive their pay during a lapse in appropriations,” Gaetz wrote in the letter to the House’s chief administrative officer.

“Therefore, I am requesting that in the case of a lapse of appropriations beginning at 12:00 a.m. on October 1, 2023, my pay be withheld until legislation has taken effect to end such lapse in appropriations in its entirety.”

The letter was obtained by the conservative Daily Caller, with Gaetz confirming it on social media shortly after.

Despite the sense of doom seeping into the halls of the Capitol, the Florida Republican has remained cavalier about the prospect of a shutdown. “I think it would be a shutdown we could endure,” he told reporters last week. “We would have to own it. We would have to hold accountable the leaders who brought it.”

He is also one of a number of hardline conservatives threatening to stonewall any effort to secure any short-term funding extension, known as continuing resolutions, in the hopes that it will force Congress to pass all 12 single-subject appropriations bills post-shutdown.

Without Gaetz and his allies, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) doesn’t have the votes to ram any stopgap measure through the House—and should McCarthy try to team up with the Democrats, Gaetz has promised to bring a motion to dethrone him.

On Tuesday, McCarthy still seemed unreceptive to the idea of reaching across the aisle. “I believe we have a majority here, and we can work together to solve this. It might take us a little longer, but this is important,” he told NBC News. “We want to make sure we can end the wasteful spending that the Democrats have put forth.”

In lieu of congressional bipartisanship, McCarthy is turning to Biden as a potential savior—or at least someone to blame, should the shutdown come to pass. McCarthy began pushing Tuesday for a sit-down with the president, insinuating that Biden might be easier to work with than the Democrats. “Why don’t we just cut a deal with the president?” McCarthy asked reporters, saying it was “very important” to get a meeting on the books....>

<.....“Listen, the president, all he has to do… it’s only actions that he has to take. He can do it like that. He changed all the policies on the border. He can change those,” McCarthy said, according to NBC. “We can keep [the] government open and finish out the work that we have done.”

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, however, Biden made it clear he expected Republicans to sort their own mess out. “We could be facing a government shutdown if Republicans in the House don’t do their job,” he wrote in one. “Speaker McCarthy and I came to an agreement on spending levels for the government a few months ago.”

“But now,” he continued, “House Republicans refuse to stand up to the extremists in their party—and everyone in America could be forced to pay the price.”

After McCarthy and Biden struck a deal in May to keep funding nearly flat for the next fiscal year, the House Speaker went back on the agreement, announcing that lawmakers would instead try to pass funding at lower levels. The White House and Democrats blasted him for the about-face, accusing him of toadying to the House’s ultraconservatives.

“I need to be very clear, it’s up to the Speaker to twist in the wind. I mean, seriously... a deal is a deal,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, TIME reported.

Meanwhile, over in the upper chamber, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reached an agreement on a bipartisan plan to come to the rescue on Tuesday afternoon, according to The New York Times. The stopgap measure would keep the government open through Nov. 17, allowing lawmakers a longer leash on which to negotiate thornier, longer-term spending matters.

The bill is slated to face a test vote late Tuesday afternoon, the Times reported. Senate leadership hopes to pass it and send it to the House by the end of the week. But with language on the bill providing “billions” in disaster relief and aid to Ukraine—both Biden administration priorities—it is unknown whether McCarthy will even introduce it to the floor, where it will undoubtedly face fierce criticism by Gaetz and Co.

Details on the bill’s exact language were unclear on Tuesday. Sources familiar with talks in the Senate told the D.C. newspaper Roll Call that leadership is “cognizant of the pressures McCarthy is facing and are trying to give him something his conference can feasibly swallow.”

With McCarthy having put the House’s stopgap bill on hold and turned to passing individual bills, the agenda for the rest of Tuesday is expected to include voting on four spending bills. The legislation—which dictates funding for the next year for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State, and Agriculture—imposes steep spending cuts that the Senate is expected to reject outright.

Still, McCarthy seemed to see the votes as a potential bellwether. “I feel we’ve made some progress,” he told reporters, according to CBS News. “We’ll know Tuesday night that we have.”>

<On Monday, Team Trump filed a blistering opposition to the DOJ’s request for the judge overseeing the 2020 election interference case, Tanya Chutkan, to issue a “narrowly tailored” gag order limiting the former president’s ability to make what the DOJ described as “extrajudicial statements that present a serious and substantial danger of materially prejudicing this case.”

With the filings on the DOJ motion now complete, a critical conflict in the 2020 election case is now ripe for decision. The pending ruling is not only crucial to the progress of the D.C. case, but will impact all prosecutions of the former president.

Arguing that any gag order would be a blatant violation of the former president’s First Amendment rights, especially given his role as a candidate for the country’s highest office, Trump’s lawyers assert that Judge Chutkan is barred from doing anything to limit what their client says, regardless of how inflammatory she believes those statements may be.

Notwithstanding the aggressiveness of this black-and-white approach, we already know two important things. First, based on her earlier protective order and previous statements, we know that the judge believes Trump’s screeds threaten the administration of justice and cannot be ignored.

Weeks before the government sought the gag order, Chutkan warned Trump counsel John Lauro about the consequences of his client’s continuing “inflammatory” public statements. Such statements, she said, will require her to “take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.” The second thing we know is that Chutkan is already considering an indirect yet devastating action she can take to punish Trump’s contemptable behavior in a way that has no impact on his First Amendment rights—moving up the trial date.

As Chutkan advised defense counsel in that same session: “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool, the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”

Citing the need to limit the exposure of potential jurors to Trump’s inflammatory statements, she can order the trial to begin on, say, the January 2024 date originally requested by the government.

Objections based on the defense counsel’s inability to prepare in the shortened time can be met by Judge Chutkan’s confidence in defense counsel and the adequacy of the many months already utilized plus the three months going forward. She can also address counsels’ concerns by noting that the additional time pressure of which they complain is entirely the responsibility of their client, who could stop his inflammatory and dangerous rhetoric at any time....>

<....A federal judge’s authority over her courtroom calendar is near absolute, leaving Trump without a valid basis to appeal.

A January trial date would end the infamous delay tactics upon which Trump has always relied. Most importantly, it meaningfully increases the odds that Donald Trump will be a convicted felon before the July 15, 2024, Republican convention—a status likely to give a delegates [sic] cause to pause before supporting his nomination.

Let’s play it out.

Jury selection can take place in the weeks prior to the trial date set. Even if the government’s case takes, say, two months to present, we are now roughly in the first half of March. There is no real defense case, as Trump taking the stand would be an act of self-immolation. There are, at best, a limited number of documents counsel can place in evidence in a defense case, and most all relevant potential defense witnesses, such as John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, have their own legal problems that will force them to invoke their Fifth Amendment privileges and not testify.

Even if we give the defense roughly a week or so to present a case, and add a few days to resolve legal disputes, such as conflicting versions of proposed jury instructions the parties will submit to the court, summations should take place around the middle of April under this timeline.

While predicting the length of jury deliberations is impossible—given the strength of the prosecution’s case and the weakness of the defendant’s, and given the reality that by the time deliberations begin, jurors will have sat anonymously and under the intrusive protection of the U.S. Marshals Service for two and a half months—deliberations by people anxious to get back to their lives should not last more than a few weeks. We are now in early May.

Assuming, as I do, a guilty verdict, even if the trial and/or jury deliberations exceed my guesstimates, Donald Trump would very likely be a convicted felon facing imprisonment before the July 15 Republican convention begins under this calendar.

While MAGA delegates may find that reality yet another reason to support him, other delegates—faced with the prospect of trying to win the 2024 election with a candidate convicted of trying to undo the prior one, and one they now have much less reason to fear—may not feel the same way.

If the pathway about to open proceeds in the direction it is now pointing, Donald Trump’s return to Washington is far more likely to be for his criminal sentencing than his presidential inauguration.>

<On Wednesday night, the Republican Party will hold the second debate in its primary contest. The decisive frontrunner for the nomination, Donald Trump, has once again declined to participate. Instead, the former president will deliver a primetime campaign speech in Detroit to an audience including current and former members of the United Auto Workers union.

The split screen is deeply telling.

Republicans running against Trump aren’t just fighting for the GOP presidential nomination. They’re also fighting for the future of the party. Earlier this month, former Vice President Mike Pence described the primary as a “time for choosing” between a Republican Party oriented toward free markets, limited government and personal responsibility versus a party oriented toward populism. And the populist path, he warned, is a “road to ruin.”

However, the twin insurgencies of Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in recent presidential races have shown that there is a strong appetite for populism in America today. Social science can help us understand why.

Mapping US voters by the extent to which they skew left or right along economic and cultural lines, it’s possible to divide the American electorate into four quadrants. The “traditional Republican” quadrant includes folks who are both socially and economically conservative. The “traditional Democrat” quadrant contains those who are both culturally and fiscally liberal. (That’s part of why it’s an obvious choice for President Joe Biden to also travel to Michigan Tuesday to meet with the striking auto workers.)

And then there are two other quadrants of voters who are liberal in some respects but conservative in others. As political scientist James Stimson emphasized in his landmark book, “Tides of Consent,” these constituents make up the “swing vote” whose ballots play an outsized role in deciding elections.

Political scientist Lee Drutman characterizes one of these cross-pressured quadrants as socially liberal yet fiscally conservative. There aren’t many ordinary voters here. However, elites in both parties tend to inhabit this ideological space. As a consequence, the priorities of this quadrant are overrepresented in the political arena.

The final quadrant can be characterized as “populist.” Central to populism is the sense that unrepresentative and unaccountable elites have diverted systems and institutions that are supposed to serve the common good towards their own personal enrichment. Disdainful of most others’ values and priorities, these elites are accused of leveraging their social position to undemocratically impose their own niche preferences upon society writ large. As redress, populists strive to unite and mobilize “the people” against the ruling class (and its perceived economic and cultural agenda).

Economically, populist politicians tend to push for broad-based public subsidies, entitlements and infrastructure projects. On foreign affairs, they are often skeptical of immigration, globalization, multilateral agreements and foreign adventurism. Symbolically, populists generally emphasize tradition, patriotism, religiousity, [sic] national security and public order, while dispensing with political correctness.

Populist voters, Drutman argues, share similar leanings to most populist leaders: They skew “left” on economic issues and “right” on identity issues. The populist ideological space seems to include a plurality of US voters. Yet there are few politicians on either side of the aisle who represent these constituents well.

On the Democratic side, research shows that college-educated White professionals serve as the party’s primary economic base and increasingly set the party’s agenda and messaging. For them, cultural liberalism is non-negotiable and traditional left economic priorities come in a distant second to symbolic struggles. This renders it difficult for a left-populist candidate, like Sanders, to succeed in the Democratic primaries. Indeed, it’s becoming challenging for Democrats to build a stable coalition at all.

On the Republican side, constituents tend to be significantly more culturally conservative than fiscally conservative. In principle, this creates a strong opportunity for GOP candidates to position themselves as cultural and economic populists without losing much support from the existing base. In practice, however, the party orthodoxy from President Ronald Reagan through the present has been to marry cultural conservatism with tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and austerity, in spite of the economic preferences of ordinary voters....>

<....For a brief moment in the 2016 presidential race, it appeared as though the lack of support for the “traditional” Republican economic platform had been exposed and dramatic change might be afoot. Trump advocated for an “America first” foreign policy. He championed trade and immigration protectionism. He vowed to safeguard entitlements and restore domestic manufacturing. He pledged to make massive investments in infrastructure. He was completely unconcerned about deficit spending. Meanwhile, Republican aspirants who emphasized austerity, privatization and internationalism, such as former Govs. Jeb Bush and Rick Perry, failed to find a significant following.

Upon taking office, however, Trump prioritized a conventional Republican economic agenda: tax cuts, deregulation and repealing Obamacare. The infrastructure plans he proposed largely failed to materialize. Despite Trump’s campaign promises to protect Medicare and Social Security, as president he expressed openness to cutting entitlements as well.

In short, Trump is far from an economic populist, even if he intends to play one on TV this Wednesday. However, the candidates on the other GOP stage this week will, if anything, probably reinforce the perception that Trump is the least-worst option for blue-collar Republicans.

Traditional candidates like Pence have performed abysmally this entire primary cycle. Given their apparent inability to muster meaningful enthusasim [sic] or support from the GOP’s own base, they stand no chance of winning enough independents and vulnerable Democrats to unseat Biden. They’re selling an economic agenda even GOP voters aren’t keen on.

Meanwhile, the Republicans styling themselves as populist alternatives to Trump are just culture warriors promising to defeat “wokeness” in a more technocratic fashion while pushing the same standard Republican economic policies as everyone else.

It’ll be a pretty low bar for Trump to sell himself as more aligned with ordinary voters than any of the folks who will be flailing to gain some traction on the debate stage. But is this really the best the GOP can come up with?

A Republican candidate who more thoroughly combined progressive economic policies with cultural conservatism (or at least moderation) would likely prove to be far more formidable in a general election than Trump or his imitators. They’d be able to energize the existing Republican base while peeling off many of the non-White, working-class and religious-minority voters who’ve been alienated from the Democratic Party. A candidate who managed this feat would probably win in a landslide and durably shake up the coalitions and policy agendas of both parties.

In this sense, Pence is right: Populism likely does pose an existential threat for the Republican Party as he understands it, and the socially conservative-free market project it’s been devoted to for the last half-century. But would it really such a bad thing if it turned out that Reagan Republicanism has, in fact, run its course?

As part of his anti-populism jeremiad, Pence reminded voters that the GOP “did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015” when Trump declared his candidacy. True enough. But neither did the party begin in 1979 in a Hollywood simulacrum of the Oval Office when Reagan launched his campaign.

At the time of its actual founding, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party stood opposed to unconstrained capital and defined itself by its willingness to leverage the federal government to address major social problems. Today’s GOP would likely enjoy far more relevance and electoral success by harkening back to the party’s economic roots.

Instead, what we’ll likely see on Wednesday is a lot of faux populism on one side, hand-wringing about populism on the other, and a shared commitment to tax cuts, austerity and deregulation all around.>

<The mission of a university is to discover truth and transmit that essential knowledge to future generations. That has been achieved by what we call in the West the Socratic Dialogue — that is, ferreting out what is good, true, and beautiful by testing ideas in an academic setting.

None of that is possible in an educational environment controlled by a Marxist Left that denies the existence of truth, that seeks to stop the transmission of past traditions to future generations, that decries Socrates and Western concepts, and that wages war on beauty.

Now that this Left is entrenched in academia, it uses myriad ways to impose its views and suppress others.

The concept that the good, the true, and the beautiful are transcendental “properties of being” goes back to Plato, Socrates’s disciple. It was explored further by St. Augustine in the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages and by St. Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages.

Quoting Aristotle recently, Peter Berkowitz rightly noted that the purpose of right education consists of “cultivating the virtues and transmitting the knowledge that enables citizens to preserve their form of government and way of life.”

But the leftists running America’s institutions no longer want such preservation. Rather, they see it as its quest to “decolonize” the university from Western thinking and believe that class time must be used instead to study non-Western (read “victim”) ways and works.

This particular Left, which focuses on culture, has gained ascendancy in universities since the 1980s when the student radicals of the 1960s discovered that they could carry out their revolutionary mission culturally by taking over academia.

The chant “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go” refers to the time on Jan. 15, 1987, when Jesse Jackson rallied 500 students to march on Stanford University. As Robert Curry at Intellectual Takeout reminds us, “They were protesting Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as ‘Western Culture.’ For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of ‘diversity.’ The faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and ‘Western Culture’ was formally replaced with ‘Cultures, Ideas, and Values.’”

In the past decade and a half, this destructive mission has been accelerated, first with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, then with the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, and finally with BLM’s damaging riots in 2020. The shock was so great that the leaders of key societal institutions surrendered and accepted the facile but bizarre notion that America is systemically racist and oppressive and thus in dire need of systemic overhaul.

During this evolution, the Culturally Marxist Left has increasingly used racial and sexual characteristics as determinants of victimhood status and thus as reasons for the supposedly aggrieved to tear up the system....>

<.....Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 provided a new interpretation of Title IX in its “guidance” on how universities were to judge sexual accusations. John Schoof of the Heritage Foundation explained at the time that this guidance “pressured schools to use the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard of proof rather than the much stronger ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied to sexual assault cases in our criminal justice system.”

This new guidance soon became “about policing and disciplining speech on campus—especially speech that deviates from the orthodoxy of progressive politics,” as professor Adam Ellwanger explained in 2015.

He was in a position to know. Four years after Obama’s letter, Ellwanger had a Title IX complaint lodged against him because he had not sufficiently “affirmed” a student’s homosexual life choice.

“Title IX in its expanded articulation,” he wrote, “is nothing less than an attempt to advance the ideological objectives of the Left on campus. It has been weaponized to silence dissenting speech and chill open debate of leftist ideology on campus.”

The letter led to a second way in which the new Left polices conservative ideas: the boom in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. The letter “exploded upon impact into a thousand Offices of Diversity and Inclusion,” wrote Ellwanger.

These DEI offices employ a growing bevy of officers who are nothing more than political commissars, imposing the Left’s view on faculty and students alike. As Heritage’s Jay Greene and I wrote recently, the University of Virginia alone has 94 of these officials, or 6.5 for every 100 tenured or tenured track faculty members.

One third way (out of many) to suppress thought that does not conform to the Left’s orthodoxy is to demand that faculty sign statements declaring loyalty to DEI and promising to further the mission as a condition of hiring or promotion. These are nothing more than loyalty oaths to the extreme wing of the political spectrum that is dedicated to the victim-oppressor paradigm. They are intended to shut down the Socratic dialogue.

And yet the New York Times informs us that “nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements.”

How do we get out of this fix? First, we need to explain to the public what has happened to create a favorable climate of opinion. That is already happening.

Then political figures must understand that their political longevity depends on delivering solutions. Most universities, public and private, depend on taxpayer money. And the taxpayers have been clear: they want it to pay for the good, the true, and the beautiful.>

<The House Freedom Caucus has certainly received a good bit of attention during the 118th Congress. Not all of that attention has been fair. And none of it has apparently touched on how the group has veered from its founding.

As to fairness, reports, during the election for Speaker of the House in January, that the Freedom Caucus was leading the charge against Kevin McCarthy ignored simple math: While the caucus doesn’t advertise its membership, it is generally accepted that it counts about 40 members of Congress in its ranks. At most, roughly 15 of those voted against Kevin McCarthy at any time during the Speaker’s race. And the “Never Kevin” group was probably closer to five people.

The Freedom Caucus has rules. Some are unwritten, but most exist in writing. I know because I wrote them. I’m also not aware of any official changes to them.

One of those rules is that it takes 80 percent of the membership of the caucus to adopt a formal HFC position on a given matter. The last time I checked, five, or even 15, doesn’t come close to 80 percent of 40. Indeed, nothing less than 20 even comprises a simple majority. Thus, it would be false to say the effort against McCarthy was a Freedom Caucus initiative.

That rule regarding formal caucus positions, and another rule, albeit unwritten, have now come into focus as part of the discussion regarding government funding and the looming government shutdown.

That’s because some members of the Freedom Caucus recently came to an agreement with members of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership on a deal that would temporarily fund the government as part of a deal to reduce spending levels and also adopt certain policy initiatives, such as on border security.

Still, despite that members of the Freedom Caucus cut that deal, and members of the Freedom Caucus such as Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) are actively whipping support for it, some media outlets are still claiming that the House Freedom Caucus is itself pushing a government shutdown.

And this brings us to one unwritten rule of the HFC. When we started the group in 2015, we had an informal test of prospective membership. We were looking, after all, for conservatives who could be counted on to fight when that was necessary, but also to compromise when we thought doing so advanced a conservative agenda. (This approach gave rise to our own short-lived working title for the group: “The Reasonable Nutjob Caucus.”)....>

<.....To screen potential members, we had a two-part test. We were looking for members of Congress who could both vote against a procedural motion (known commonly as a “rule”) and vote for a short-term continuing funding resolution or CR. The former was among the most mutinous maneuvers we could contemplate at the time; the latter was the most obsequious. But doing either had to be conditioned, again, on our belief that doing so would ultimately advance a conservative agenda.

We created that test because we knew there were so-called conservatives who would roll over and vote for any short-term CR that leadership offered, but we also knew that there were others who, while they talked a good game, would never have the spine to vote against a rule.

At the same time, we knew there were some anarchists who would vote against any rule because they wanted to see the world burn. We were looking for solid conservatives who could discern the proper moment to play either one card or the other, and who had the backbone to play whichever one was necessary.

To that end, we excluded some people from the caucus who wanted to join.

But apparently the HFC has changed since 2015 — or at least, its screening process has changed. There are now folks who claim caucus membership who say that they will never vote for a short-term CR, under any conditions.

That’s a shame, as it seemed that Freedom Caucus members had been working with moderates in the party to arrive at something that cuts spending and improves border security. Last I checked, those were supposed to be conservative priorities. And it is the exact sort of compromise and progress that the HFC was established to promote.

I’m not saying the compromise is perfect. No piece of viable legislation likely is. What I’m saying is that, if anything out there right now seems to be more true to the spirit of the founding of the Freedom Caucus, it is the effort to join with moderates to pass something that reflects solid conservative principles.

Yes, it has a short-term CR, but that was always envisioned by the caucus founders as being acceptable under certain circumstances.

At the same time, and for much the same reason, it is wrong to call opposition to the spending proposal, and in turn, opposition to the Speaker, a House Freedom Caucus initiative.

The truth seems to be the never-CR-never-Kevin-burn-the-place-down effort isn’t really coming from an organized group at all. Someone this week called it a collection of “caucuses of one.” Some seem to be using the effort to raise their public profiles on Fox News and social media; others are looking to leverage the newfound attention to run for higher office.

Some really might just want to burn the place down, and some certainly have honest motivations.

But to describe the current situation as something driven by the Freedom Caucus is lazy, inaccurate and unfair.>

<House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) hit back at Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis's response to the committee's investigation into her criminal case against former President Donald Trump, saying her "position is wrong."

Willis blasted Jordan in a letter at the beginning of September, arguing that he was interfering with her prosecution through his records requests. However, Jordan's latest response sent on Wednesday argued that her judgment on congressional authority was incorrect.

"Your letter contends that the Committee, by conducting oversight into apparently politicized local prosecutions, is 'obstruct[ing] a Georgia criminal proceeding' and 'advanc[ing] outrageous partisan misrepresentations.' Your position is wrong," Jordan wrote in the letter obtained by the Washington Examiner.

He said the committee can "only conclude" from her response to the committee's records requests to investigate whether her case against Trump is politically motivated that she is "actively and aggressively engaged in such a scheme."

Willis had argued that her case was a local and state matter and, therefore, Congress did not have grounds to investigate. However, Jordan argued that the prosecution of a former president "implicates substantial federal interests."

"If state or local prosecutors can engage in politically motivated prosecutions of senior federal officers for acts they performed while in federal office, this could have a profound impact on how federal officers choose to exercise their powers," Jordan wrote.

He added that the special grand jury report showed she "contemplated an even more extensive intrusion into federal interests" after jurors recommended charges against senators — including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Wednesday's letter is the latest step in the House Judiciary Committee's investigation into Willis's office and the case against Trump, which was launched on Aug. 24. A grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants on Aug. 14 for racketeering charges related to efforts to overturn Georgia's 2020 election, marking the fifth indictment and fourth criminal case for the former president.

Jordan and House Republicans on the committee have accused Willis of using the 41-count indictment to interfere with the 2024 presidential election, of which Trump is the GOP front-runner. The Ohio congressman's first request for records came hours before Trump turned himself in to Fulton County officials to be arraigned and have his mug shot taken.

The committee has raised concerns about the indictment's legitimacy, with records requests aiming at discovering whether Willis had "coordinated" with the Justice Department — particularly special counsel Jack Smith, who delivered an indictment against Trump for similar reasons to the Georgia case.

"The information that we seek will allow us to assess the extent to which your indictment is politically motivated and whether Congress should therefore draft legislative reforms to, among other things, protect former and current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions," Jordan added in Wednesday's letter.

Jordan said Willis's decision to indict Trump also raises conflict of interest concerns between federal and local law enforcement.

"Federal law requires the United States Secret Service to protect a former President," Jordan wrote. "Therefore, your indictment raises the potential for conflict between the federal law-enforcement officials required to protect President Trump and local law-enforcement officials required to enforce your indictment and exercise control of him throughout his presence in the local criminal justice system."

A judge ruled in mid-September that Willis could not try all 19 defendants together, meaning Trump will not be tried on Oct. 23 and defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro are the only two heading to trial next month.

Trump is also facing several legal cases at the state and federal level across the country. A New York judge ruled on Tuesday that the former president committed fraud for several years while growing the Trump Organization empire.>

<When the Democratic majority in the House held the first public hearing in its 2019 impeachment inquiry targeting President Trump, it heard testimony from members of Trump’s administration who could speak to the central allegation: that the president had sought to coerce Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation of Joe Biden. The inquiry had already conducted a number of interviews that fleshed out the allegation, an allegation that was first raised in an anonymous whistleblower complaint that the administration tried to shield from congressional committees.

The first hearing, held in November 2019, featured testimony from the country’s top diplomat to Ukraine, who said he’d overheard conversations in which Trump mentioned investigations to another official. Another witness, a senior member of the State Department, described efforts by Trump allies to “gin up politically motivated investigations.”

The testimony spoke directly to the issue at hand and came from nonpartisan government staffers with proximity to what was underway. This is not how the impeachment investigation into President Biden is beginning.

That inquiry kicks off this week with a Thursday hearing before the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). The hearing’s aim is not to present evidence that bolsters the central allegation — in part because it’s not clear what the central allegation is. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) public announcement about the inquiry included a half-dozen assertions of potentially dubious activity, several of which involved only Biden’s son Hunter and one of which was explicitly false. So the first hearing in the Biden inquiry will instead attempt to establish the rationale for the inquiry itself. That’s the Oversight Committee’s presentation, not mine; the hearing is titled, “The Basis for an Impeachment Inquiry of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”

It will feature testimony not from witnesses who might present evidence of wrongdoing but, instead, from three individuals who have previously been engaged to make the public case that Biden might have done something wrong.

There’s Bruce Dubinsky, an accountant who appeared on Fox News last month to suggest that “shell companies” used by Hunter Biden and his business partners were themselves suggestive of wrongdoing. Such companies, he said, are “used in nefarious ways to either launder money or hide a transaction.”

The Washington Post has investigated the companies to which payments were made, finding that most had clear, legitimate purposes despite the continued insinuations from Comer.

Another witness is Eileen O’Connor, a member of Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team who in June wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal criticizing the plea deal offered to Hunter Biden centered on alleged tax evasion. Her argument relied on some now-disputed claims from IRS whistleblowers; the plea agreement eventually fell apart.

The third witness is law professor Jonathan Turley, a frequent voice on Fox News and in other right-wing media outlets. Like Dubinsky and O’Connor, he’s established his belief that Joe Biden is intertwined in something nefarious but, like the others, it’s not clear that he has any evidence to that effect.

But Comer’s past willingness to exaggerate and overhype his committee’s work does not bode well for the inquiry. He’s presented confused allegations about missing informants, misrepresented timelines to impugn the president, moved the goal posts repeatedly in accusing Biden of taking a bribe, alleged secret plots based on easily explained emails and repeated already disproven allegations. He is, in short, not a reliable voice of criticism against the president....>

<.....He demonstrated that again on Tuesday. His committee has been working for months to tie Hunter Biden’s business activity to President Biden, without success. Until, that is, they stumbled onto something offered up as a smoking gun: money sent by Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partners in mid-2019 that listed Joe Biden’s house as the receiving address! Comer posted on social media about it with the requisite siren emojis; Fox News filed a story.

But even in that story, an asterisk was presented: Hunter Biden had long used his father’s Delaware address as his own, particularly in the 2018-2019 time frame. Comer himself had been quick to point out that Hunter Biden used the address as his own when trying to imply that maybe the president’s son was intertwined with the discovery of documents marked as classified in Joe Biden’s garage. In that period, Hunter Biden was actively abusing alcohol and illegal drugs; in his memoir, he describes spending the early months of 2019 in various Los Angeles area hotels. In 2018, he’d used his father’s address on his driver’s license.

To CNN, Hunter Biden’s attorney made this exact argument.

“This was a documented loan (not a distribution or payout) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Abbe Lowell said in a statement.

A source who has seen the documentation of the payments but wasn’t authorized to speak publicly confirmed that the payments were wire transactions and not checks. This means the transfer of money was between two financial institutions — the recipient address was not in any way determinative: the destination was the bank, not a house. And the listed beneficiary for the recipient account, according to the documentation? Robert Hunter Biden.

In the committee’s press release, Comer tried to imply that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter Biden’s relationship with his Chinese business partners. He noted that Hunter’s former partner Devon Archer offered testimony that Joe Biden “wrote college recommendation letters for his children.” What Archer actually testified was that Hunter did get his father to write a recommendation for the man’s daughter — but when asked if Joe Biden had taken action to benefit the man’s company, Archer stated flatly that he hadn’t.

This latest example of Comer getting out over his skis will not serve as a disincentive, of course. He’s seen repeatedly that his false claims and exaggerations are ignored by his ideological allies in the right-wing media, where the unassailable narrative of Biden’s obvious culpability is both assumed and defended relentlessly. Instead of moving forward with new caution given the presumed solemnity of potentially impeaching a president, he’s just doing the same thing under a new banner. Like putting a sign in the window of a McDonald’s claiming that it has a Michelin star. Still the same food and atmosphere.

It is important to note that there may still emerge new, indisputable evidence showing that Joe Biden was directly involved in his son’s business in some way, or that he leveraged his authority to benefit his kid. Just because you cry wolf doesn’t mean a wolf won’t show up.

But it might be useful to have someone else be the guy telling the public that a wolf has been sighted.>

<As the Senate marches ahead with a bipartisan approach to prevent a government shutdown, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is back to square one — asking his hard-right Republicans to do what they have said they would never do: approve their own temporary House measure to keep the government open.

The Republican speaker laid out his strategy Wednesday behind closed doors, urging his unruly Republican majority to work together. He set up a test vote for Friday, one day before Saturday's shutdown deadline, on a far-right bill. It would slash federal spending by 8% from many agencies and toughen border security but has been rejected by Democrats and his own right-flank Republicans.

“I want to solve the problem,” McCarthy told reporters afterward at the Capitol.

But pressed on how he would pass a partisan Republican spending plan that even his own right flank doesn't want, McCarthy had few answers. He rejected outright the Senate's bipartisan bill, which would fund the government to Nov. 17, adding $6 billion for Ukraine and $6 billion for U.S. disaster relief while talks continue. Instead, he insisted, as he often does, that he would never quit trying.

Congress is at a crossroads days before a disruptive federal shutdown that would halt paychecks for millions of federal workers, leave 2 million active duty military troops and reservists to work without pay, close down many federal offices, and leave Americans who rely on the government in ways large and small in the lurch.

President Joe Biden in California at a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said Wednesday he didn’t think a federal shutdown was inevitable.

“I don’t think anything is inevitable when it comes to politics,” he said.

But later at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Biden said of McCarthy: “I think that the speaker is making a choice between his speakership and American interests.”

As the Senate pushes ahead in bipartisan fashion, McCarthy is demanding that Biden meet to discuss border security measures. But the speaker has little leverage left with the White House without the power of his House majority behind him. The White House has panned his overtures for talks after McCarthy walked away from the debt deal he and Biden reached earlier this year that is now law.

On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned of the right-wing extremes that “seem to exult in shutting down government.”

The Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was in rare agreement with the Democratic leader, urging his House colleagues to consider the Senate's stopgap approach, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, and move off the shutdown strategy.

McConnell said that he, too, would like to do something about the “Democrats’ reckless spending” and boost border security. But he said, “these important discussions cannot progress” if the functions of government “end up being taken hostage.”

When McConnell mentioned a vote against the bill would mean voting against pay for border patrol agents and others, it sparked a response from Biden on social media.

“You know, I agree with Mitch here. Why the House Republicans would want to defund Border Patrol is beyond me,” Biden wrote.

With the Senate expected to spend the rest of this week working to pass its bill over the objections of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others on the right flank. Like their House colleagues, the conservative senators want to halt aid to Ukraine and push for steeper spending cuts, all action in Congress is crushing toward a last minute deadline.

The federal government would begin to shut down if funding is not secured by Sunday, Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year.

A new economic assessment from Goldman Sachs estimated a federal shutdown would subtract 0.2 percent points from fourth-quarter GDP growth each week it continues, according to a report issued Wednesday.

Running out of options, McCarthy revived the border security package he first tried to attach to a temporary government funding bill earlier this month. But he still faces a handful of hard-right holdouts led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who say they won't vote for any CR, denying a majority for passage.

It's late in the process to be pushing the border security provisions now, as McCarthy tries to salvage the strategy. He is seeking to shift blame to Biden and Democrats for not engaging in an immigration debate about the record flow of migrants at the Southern border with Mexico....>

<.....Facing holdouts in his own ranks, McCarthy is trying to cajole his hard-right members who have refused to vote for any temporary spending bill — even with the border provisions. He told reporters, “I don’t understand where somebody would want to stand with President Biden on keeping an open border and not keep government open.”

The holdouts are determined to force the House to debate and pass all 12 individual funding bills for all the various government agencies. It's a grinding weeks-long process with no guarantee the bills will even pass with days to go before a shutdown.

“If that means we close and we shut down, that’s what we’re going do [sic],” said Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican who wants the House to vote on all 12 bills, as he exited the morning Republican meeting.

On Wednesday the House slogged through debate over four of those bills — to fund Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture and State and Foreign Operations.

One amendment to gut $300 million for Ukraine was backed by 104 Republicans, more than ever as resistance to war funding grows, but it — and another like it — overwhelmingly failed. One from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to cut the Defense Secretary's salary to $1 was approved without dissent.

But late at night, facing the prospect that the Defense bill would fail with any Ukraine aid intact, the Republicans held an emergency Rules meeting to strip the $300 million — a stunning maneuver that the committee's top Democrat called “pathetic,” since the House had already decided the issue.

Republicans defended the action, saying the Ukraine money, which is routine and separate from Biden's larger request for funds, now will be voted on separately — and will likely pass with overwhelming support.

Lawmakers are prepared to work into the weekend, but one leading Republican, Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, said he believed Congress was headed towards a government shutdown.

“Somebody is going to have to flinch or break, or there will have to be something negotiated,” he said.

But the hard-right is threatening to oust McCarthy if he joins with Democrats and Womack, who is not among the holdouts, explained such a move could be “problematic for the speaker.”

While the White House has said it's up to McCarthy and the House Republicans to “fix” the problem they have created, Biden's chief rival in the 2024 election, Donald Trump, is urging the right flank to fight for steep spending cuts. If Republicans don't get what they want, Trump the former president says, they should “shut it down.”>

<Last week, a Fox News reporter caught Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) in a moment of candor declaring, “I honestly don’t know what to say to my fellow Republicans other than you’re going to eat a s*** sandwich, and you probably deserve to eat it.” For months, House Republicans have squabbled over discretionary spending cuts.

To be clear, we need to have an adult conversation about spending, deficits and debt. As a nation, the time for kicking the can down the road on our spending is over. It’s time for action. As demonstrated in recent weeks, there is not a general consensus among Republicans on where spending should be cut, and the goalposts continue to shift within the various sects of the Republican Party whenever there seems to be a hint of an agreement coming together.

The current breakdown in the GOP Conference means there is a real opportunity for break away Republicans to look to Democrats for solutions by way of a discharge petition, effectively ending Republican control of the House. The discharge petition would allow Democrats to bring a continuing resolution to the House floor for a vote that would temporarily fund the government while bypassing regular order.

Government funding is set to expire on Sept. 30, and the House has passed only one of 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2024. In an ideal world, Congress would create an annual budget on time and it would reduce the cost and size of the government. Sadly, the last time Congress passed all of the regular appropriations bills on time was in 1996 for FY 1997. The question must also be asked: why did GOP leadership wait until the last minute to bring the appropriations bills to the floor for a vote when the House Appropriations Committee reported 10 of the 12 regular appropriations bills for consideration more than 100 days ago?....>

<....The current display of dysfunction on Capitol Hill is a reason why millennials and Gen Zers identify as politically independent. The largest voting bloc in the 2024 elections longs for a Congress that can get things done without the political drama. And the irony is that the millennial voter will be the one to pick up the tab for both higher taxes and a lower standard of living as a result of this generation’s failure to address spending.

Republicans want to keep control of the House in 2024, but they should focus on not losing it before then. If a breakthrough is not made within the coming days, we know a handful of Republicans are looking to unite with Democrats on a resolution that does nothing to cut spending. This is a legitimate threat that fiscal conservatives must take seriously.

There is a real threat that a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair will be filed, and should it be filed, there is a legitimate possibility the outcome could be Republicans forced to share governing authority with Democrats. House Democrats are playing the long game. They know that if they let Republicans fall into self-inflicted chaos, gaining control of the House in 2024 is that much easier.

Independent voters in the critical swing districts determine which party holds the majority every cycle. They want to see a serious effort to address our spending problem. As the economy softens, Republicans have an opportunity to show how trillion dollar deficits drive up inflation and interest rates, hitting independent suburban voters directly—making kitchen table economics more difficult. Connecting on this issue is the path for Republicans to hold the House in 2024.

The immediate danger for the House GOP is to stop working as a conference, cultivating an “every man for himself” mindset. Democrats strategically want to see something like that take place so they can pick off Republicans one by one in swing districts.

Everyone in Washington knows that some Republicans are working with Democrats to secure a deal. The consequences of a deal could result in a power-sharing agreement between a handful of Republicans and the Democratic caucus for the remainder of the 118th Congress. Committees would be split evenly—forcing Republicans to relinquish their power, and an evenly controlled House would be a massive help to the Biden agenda.

Our nation’s financial situation is in bad shape. The national debt that we now face, more than $33 trillion, is irresponsible and unsustainable. If Congress cannot find solutions to basic discretionary spending cuts, there is no chance of tackling the true reforms in mandatory spending that must be addressed. By 2035, we will exceed $50 trillion in debt. Our interest payments alone will exceed $1.5 trillion, our market competitiveness will dissolve, and our standard of living will deteriorate.

Now that Congress is back, it is time for the GOP Conference to settle on a spending deal that includes real cuts, and take it to the negotiating table with President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-N.Y.).

The GOP can show the American people, specifically the independent voter, they are serious about fixing our budget and averting an approaching sovereign debt crisis that would fundamentally reshape the American way of life. Good policy will make good politics ahead of 2024.>

<A government shutdown appeared all but inevitable as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy dug in Thursday, vowing he will not take up Senate legislation designed to keep the federal government fully running despite House Republicans' struggle to unite around an alternative.

Congress is at an impasse just days before a disruptive federal shutdown that would halt paychecks for many of the federal government's roughly 2 million employees, as well as 2 million active-duty military troops and reservists, furlough many of those workers and curtail government services.

But the House and Senate are pursuing different paths to avert those consequences even though time is running out before government funding expires after midnight on Saturday.

The Senate is working toward passage of a bipartisan measure that would fund the government until Nov. 17 as longer-term negotiations continue, while also providing $6 billion for Ukraine and $6 billion for U.S. disaster relief.

The House, meanwhile, has teed up votes on four of the dozen annual spending bills that fund various agencies in hopes that would cajole enough Republicans to support a House-crafted continuing resolution that temporarily funds the government and boosts security at the U.S. border with Mexico. It's a longshot, but McCarthy predicted a deal.

“Put your money on me; we're going to get this done,” he said in a CNBC interview. “I think we can work through the weekend. I think we can figure this out."

Lawmakers were already weary from days of late-night negotiating. The strain was evident at McCarthy's closed-door meeting with Republicans Thursday morning, which was marked by a tense exchange between the speaker and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., according to those in the room.

Gaetz, who has taunted McCarthy for weeks with threats to oust him from his post, confronted the speaker about conservative online influencers being paid to post negative things about him. McCarthy shot back that he wouldn’t waste his time on something like that, Gaetz told reporters as he exited the meeting.

McCarthy's allies left the meeting fuming about Gaetz’s tactics.

With his majority splintering, McCarthy is scrambling to come up with a plan for preventing a shutdown and win Republican support. The speaker told Republicans he would reveal a Republican stopgap plan, known as a continuing resolution or CR, on Friday, according to those in the room, while also trying to force Senate Democrats into giving some concessions.

But with time running out, many GOP lawmakers were either withholding support for a temporary measure until they had a chance to see it. Others are considering joining Democrats, without McCarthy's support, to bring forward a bill that would prevent a shutdown.

With his ability to align his conference in doubt, McCarthy has little standing to negotiate with Senate Democrats. He has also attempted to draw President Joe Biden into negotiations, but

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Congress and the White House had already worked out top-line spending levels for next year with an agreement this summer that allowed the government to continue borrowing to pay its bills. But McCarthy was deviating from that deal and courting a shutdown by catering to Republicans who say it didn't do enough to cut spending, he said.

“By focusing on the views of the radical few instead of the many, Speaker McCarthy has made a shutdown far more likely,” Schumer said.

McCarthy reiterated to CNBC that the House will have its say. “Will I accept and surrender to what the Senate decides? The answer is no, we’re our own body.”

He acknowledged divisions within his own conference, saying members have made it difficult to pass appropriations bills. But he added that he still is working with the Republicans who won't support short-term funding legislation.

"Well, if you won’t do any of that, it’s hard to govern," McCarthy said, before adding, “I don’t give up on any single one of them, and I try to find a place that we can bring it all together.”

President Joe Biden also sought to apply more pressure on McCarthy, urging him to compromise with Democrats even though that could threaten his job.

"I think that the speaker is making a choice between his speakership and American interests," Biden said....>

<....The White House, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, notified staff on Thursday to prepare for a shutdown, according to emails obtained by The Associated Press. Employees who are furloughed would have four hours on Monday to prepare their offices for the shutdown.

The White House plans to keep on all commissioned officers. That includes chief of staff Jeff Zients, press secretary Karine Jean Pierre, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior-level personnel, by declaring them “excepted” during a shutdown, according to the White House email.

Military troops and federal workers, including law enforcement officers, air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration officers, will also report to work because they are essential to protecting life and property. They would miss paychecks if the shutdown lasts beyond Oct. 13, the next scheduled payday, though they are slated to receive backpay once any shutdown ends.

Many Republicans have voiced fears they would be blamed for a shutdown — including in the Senate, where many GOP members are aligned with Democrats on a temporary bill.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said he agrees with many of the goals of the House Republicans, but warned a shutdown will not achieve any of them.

“Instead of producing any meaningful policy outcomes, it would actually take the important progress being made on a number of key issues and drag it backward," McConnell said.

But McCarthy's House allies were hoping the threat of a shutdown could help conservatives with their push to limit federal spending and combat illegal immigration at the U.S-Mexico border.

“Anytime you have a stopgap situation like this, you have an opportunity to leverage," said Rep. Garret Graves, R-La. “This is another opportunity. America does not want an open Southern border. The polls are crystal clear. It’s having a profound impact on us.”>

Like this one, do ya, <stalker>?

<Republican Kari Lake, a Donald Trump ally who has refused to acknowledge her loss in last year's race for Arizona governor, will soon launch her campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by independent Kyrsten Sinema, a senior adviser said Thursday.

Lake's entrance in one of next year's top Senate contests likely complicates Republican efforts to nominate candidates with a broader appeal after a disappointing showing for the party in last year's midterms. She will enter the race as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, confirmed that she will open her campaign with an Oct. 10 rally. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

A charismatic former television anchor who is well known in the Phoenix market, Lake built an enthusiastic following among Republicans with her unflinching support for Trump and her steadfast promotion of false claims of election fraud.

Lake's star power stretches far beyond Arizona. Lake is seen as a potential running mate for Trump, who is leading polls for the Republican presidential nomination.

The Arizona race is a top target for Republicans looking to regain the Senate, where Democrats hold a 51-49 edge that includes Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in 2022 but still receives her committees [sic] assignments from Democrats. The 2024 Senate map heavily favors the GOP, with Democratic-held seats up for grabs in three states that Trump won in 2020.

Courts have repeatedly rejected Lake's lawsuits challenging last year's election results. The litigation has juiced Lake's fundraising but not advanced her false claim to be the “duly elected governor” Arizona, rather than Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Lake joins Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in the Republican Senate primary. Several other Republicans have considered running but have stayed out of the race while Lake considered her plans. They include Blake Masters, Jim Lamon and Karrin Taylor Robson, all businesspeople who lost 2022 races for Senate or governor.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Iraq War veteran and one of the most prominent Latino officials in Arizona, is the only major Democrat in the race.

Sinema is raising money for a potential reelection campaign and is stepping up her public appearances in Arizona, but she has said she's in no hurry to decide whether to seek a second term in the Senate. Her party switch came after she had infuriated many Democrats who saw her as too close to business interests and an impediment to progressive change.

Lake's presence in the race could help Sinema if she chooses to mount an independent campaign for reelection. Lake alienated many establishment Republicans during her campaign for governor, even telling “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out” of a campaign event, describing the late and beloved Arizona Sen. John McCain a “loser.”

To win, Sinema will need to win over a sizable chunk of Republicans and Democrats along with a majority of independents.

Until Trump's presidency, Arizona had been a reliably Republican state since World War II. Republicans still maintain a registration edge over Democrats, but the GOP lost three consecutive Senate races and last year watched Democrats win the top state offices over a slate of Trump-endorsed election deniers, including Lake.

The state is emblematic of the party's struggles to win over suburban voters turned off by Trump. In Lake's loss last year, 11% of voters who identified as Republicans backed Hobbs, including 25% of Republicans who identified as moderate or liberal, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 3,200 voters in Arizona.

Democrats posted surprising success in last year's Senate races despite a tough economic picture and an unpopular Democratic president after voters rejected Trump-backed Republican nominees in battleground states, including Arizona. Republicans in Washington have pledged to take a more active posture in primaries next year, hoping to ensure the party nominates candidates who can win in November.

GOP officials in Washington have taken a wait-and-see approach to the Arizona race, viewing Lake as the odds-on favorite to win the primary but fearing the serious baggage she would carry into a general election.>

<Representative Matt Gaetz is using a looming federal funding deadline to force the government into a shutdown unless his demands are met. He’s also using it as an opportunity to raise money for his reelection bid.

The Florida Republican is a vocal member of a group of hardline House conservatives blocking deals to fund the government, which is all but certain to shut down on midnight Sunday without Congressional action.

He described the spending battle as a “historic fight to stop a corrupt government funding system” that’s been in place since the 1990s, according to an email his campaign sent to supporters Wednesday.

“Unlike Swamp politicians and their media puppets, we aren’t holding the government hostage. We are holding this Speaker to his word,” the email, captured by Pundit Analytics, said. He asked for donations in amounts ranging from $5 to $100.

Gaetz, one of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s toughest critics, is opposing temporary measures to keep the government open that would allow more time for negotiations. Gaetz says McCarthy promised votes on individual year-long spending bills, which have no chance of being considered in the Democratic-controlled Senate. He has repeatedly threatened to force a vote on ousting McCarthy from his job as speaker if McCarthy doesn’t acquiesce to his demands.

A federal shutdown would mean that federal agencies will cease many functions and government employees will go unpaid for the duration of the shutdown, though they are likely to receive back-pay when it reopens. A prolonged shutdown could affect many households in Gaetz’s district in the Florida panhandle, where nearly 7% of working adults are federal employees.

Gaetz isn’t the only Republican who is using the looming shutdown as an opportunity to ask their supporters for cash.

Wisconsin Republican Scott Fitzgerald asked supporters to tell him whether “Washington’s spending problem needs to be addressed.”

Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told donors on Wednesday that he “would vote against any short-term bill to keep the government open.” Because of the $33 trillion national debt, he promised to dig in his heels and send something tough to the Senate. He asked for $15.>