“I don’t understand why we’re folding. This is a complete capitulation, and the argument made yesterday was, well, this may be more pressure than two Democratic senators can stand, regarding changing the filibuster rules. That, to me, is not a very good reason.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), talking to Fox News about the short term deal to raise the debt limit.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told NBC News his staff tells him that lifting the debt limit by $480 billion should take them to January, not December 3 as the Treasury Department says.
Said Cornyn: “We didn’t want to agree to something where they could just throw it into the omnibus. So keeping it separate is pretty important.”
Meanwhile, a potential hiccup from Politico: “Democrats may need help from at least 10 GOP senators to pass the deal on Thursday. Some Republicans, concerned about letting Democrats off easy, don’t want to allow Democrats to pass the measure with a simple 51-vote majority on the floor.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed two laws banning the use of toxic “forever chemicals” in children’s products and disposable food packaging, as well as a package of bills to overhaul the state’s recycling operations, The Hill reports.
Sara Goddard: What you should know about forever chemicals.
Coming soon: In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP by David Drucker.
What comes next for the Republican Party.
Virginia lieutenant governor nominee Winsome Sears (R) refused to tell CNN whether she was vaccinated.
Said Sears: “My life is very public. It’s just the way it is. But I want to hold certain things close.”
She added: “What are we going to ask for now, HIV status? What else are we going to ask for?”
Derek Thompson: “This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022.”
“The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.”
Ron Brownstein reports on a new study that argues that “to solidify their position in Congress and the Electoral College, Democrats must increase their investment and focus on Sun Belt states that have become more politically competitive over recent years as they have grown more urbanized and racially diverse.”
From the report: “The majority of new, likely Democratic voters live in the South and Southwest, places the Democratic establishment have long ignored or are just waking up to now.”
“The study, focusing on 11 battleground states, is as much a warning as an exhortation. It contends that although the key to contesting Sun Belt states such as North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona is to sustain engagement among the largely nonwhite infrequent voters who turned out in huge numbers in 2018 and 2020, it also warns that Republicans could consolidate Donald Trump’s gains last year among some minority voters, particularly Latino men.”
Washington Post: “In June, the term was mentioned 993 times during Fox News programming, including overnight rebroadcasts of daytime and prime-time shows. In July, it was mentioned 921 times. That was after being mentioned only 132 times in all of 2020.”
“But the network seems to have largely moved on from critical race theory, which conservative activists and right-leaning media companies identified as a pressing threat as part of a backlash to the calls for greater attention to racial disparities that followed the police killing of George Floyd last year.”
“Overall, the drop has also been pronounced on Newsmax and One America News (OAN), two conservative upstart channels seeking to outflank Fox News Channel to the right.”
“A U.S. special-operations unit and a contingent of Marines have been secretly operating in Taiwan to train military forces there, part of efforts to shore up the island’s defenses as concern regarding potential Chinese aggression mounts,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Lobbying efforts by some of the nation’s biggest business groups are falling on deaf ears with House Republicans just a few years after the two worked in lockstep to craft the 2017 tax bill that delivered massive corporate tax cuts,” The Hill reports.
“Even after every major business group in Washington, D.C., urged House Republicans to support the Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, only a handful of GOP lawmakers have said they would vote for the measure.”
“Top Senate Democrats and Republicans said on Thursday that they had struck a deal to allow the debt ceiling to be raised through early December, temporarily staving off the threat of a first-ever default on the national debt after the GOP agreed to temporarily drop its blockade of an increase,” the New York Times reports.
“The agreement would boost the legal debt cap by $480 billion, according to a Senate aide familiar with the details, which the Treasury Department estimates would be enough to allow the government to continue borrowing through Dec. 3. The current limit is $28.4 trillion, since Aug. 1.”
Washington Post: “But it also tees up yet another vicious fight between Democrats and Republicans over the future of federal spending, a battle likely to be all the more fierce in the waning hours of the year — when Congress must confront other challenges including an urgent need to fund the government and prevent a shutdown. An existing agreement to fund federal operations also expires in early December.”
The former Facebook staffer who went public this week with damning allegations against the social media giant is set to meet with House lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, CNN reports.
Mary Beeman, a Republican operative in Connecticut, said that “helping kids of color to feel they belong has a negative effect on white, Christian, or conservative kids,” WFSB reports.
“New York City investigators concluded that Mayor Bill de Blasio misused his NYPD security detail for personal and political purposes and that the NYPD official who runs the detail actively obstructed the subsequent investigation,” NBC New York reports.
Foreign Affairs: “In early 2017, China appeared to be on a roll. Its economy was beating estimates. President Xi Jinping was implementing the country’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and was on the cusp of opening China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti. Most important, Xi seemed poised to take advantage of President Donald Trump’s determination to pick fights with U.S. allies and international institutions…”
“Nearly five years on, Beijing is facing its biggest international backlash in decades. Negative views of China are near record highs across the developed world, according to a Pew Research Center survey from June, which showed that at least three-quarters of respondents in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States now hold broadly negative views of the country.”
“Yet Beijing shows no sign of shifting course. Unlike previous eras of backlash against China, such as the one that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, this one has not prompted a recalibration in Beijing.”
“A Senate Democratic report released Thursday places Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) at the center of efforts to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results,” Politico reports.
“The report indicates that the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservatives with close ties to Trump, took an active role in helping the president strategize about ways to undercut Joe Biden’s victory. But the report indicates that Perry, more than other House Republicans, took a direct role in attempting to help Trump install loyalists in the Justice Department who would assist in undermining the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory.”
A new Gallup poll finds just 44% of U.S. adults say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in people who hold or are running for public office, rivaling the record low of 42% from 2016.
Meanwhile, only 55% express a similar level of confidence in the judgments of the American people under the democratic system, the lowest Gallup has measured to date.
“Pfizer and BioNTech said on Thursday morning that they had asked federal regulators to authorize emergency use of their coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, a move that could help protect more than 28 million people in the United States,” the New York Times reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.