Punchbowl News: “The debt limit continues to bedevil Democratic leaders. They were planning to take their funding package to the Rules Committee today but got sidetracked trying to tie up unresolved spending issues and finalizing their plan on the debt limit.”
“The question everyone is asking — and the question we’re asking lawmakers — is what is the Plan B. This bill clearly won’t go anywhere, so where does Congress go from here?”
David Wasserman: “All over the Deep South—in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—the story is familiar: Gerrymandered maps have packed Black voters into a lone Voting Rights Act district, while Republicans dominate every surrounding white-majority seat. In past decades, many of those VRA districts’ Democratic representatives were loath to unravel their own safe seats. But today, Democrats’ prevailing mentality has shifted. And as the 2022 redistricting wars heat up, multiple lawsuits aiming to unpack hyper-minority seats could help determine control of the House.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence is adding staffers for his brand-new office in downtown Washington—inching closer to a possible White House run even as his standing worsens with former President Trump and his supporters, CNN reports.
Top aides to Pence say he “has doubled his team to about 20 people this summer. He’s also added a top Republican fundraiser, John Fogarty, and new office space for his non-profit group, Advancing American Freedom.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that House Democrats “will combine a short-term government spending bill with a suspension of the debt limit in a package slated to hit the floor this week,” The Hill reports.
Washington Post: “The plan could face immediate political headwinds since Republicans previously have pledged to vote against an increase in the country’s borrowing limit, even if it is attached to a measure preventing a shutdown — part of a broader GOP effort to scuttle President Biden’s economic agenda.”
“As they presented their plan, Democrats on Monday once again sounded dire warnings about consequences of failure, which they said could destabilize global markets, shutter critical federal services during a pandemic and hold back assistance to millions of Americans in the aftermath of storms that battered the Gulf Coast and parts of the Eastern Seaboard.”
“For now, I’m not gonna do anything.”
— Former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), quoted by St. Louis Magazine, on whether Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) turn toward Trumpism has discouraged him from mentoring other “rising stars.”
As he launched his campaign for Nevada governor, Dean Heller (R) said he will work to “get the most conservative abortion laws that we can have in this state, regardless with who’s controlling the Legislature at the time,” the Nevada Independent reports.
He added: “I like what Texas did.”
Public health experts criticized San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) “over images of her singing and dancing maskless in a live music venue this week — a violation of San Francisco’s indoor mask mandate,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine “has been shown to be safe and highly effective in young children aged 5 to 11 years,” the New York Times reports.
“Children now account for more than one in five new cases, and the highly contagious Delta variant has sent more children into hospitals and intensive care units in the past few weeks than at any other time in the pandemic… If the regulatory review goes as smoothly as it did for older children and adults, millions of elementary school students could be inoculated before Halloween.”
“The Supreme Court announced Monday it will hear arguments Dec. 1 on a Mississippi abortion restriction that poses a direct challenge to the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade,” The Hill reports.
Politico: “In taking the case, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority signaled its openness to revisiting and potentially overturning the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, with a ruling expected next year.”
A new study from Rand sounds the alarm:
“The vast majority of military personnel and their families are not extremists. But even a small number of people engaged in extremist activities could damage the U.S. military’s reputation, its force, its members, and the larger community. Extremist activities can also be harmful to the individuals who are radicalized and their friends and family.”
Jonathan Last: “The big surprise of the pandemic—the one thing that nobody saw coming—was the resistance to the vaccines. This was a failure of imagination. No one imagined that 30 percent of the country could watch 674,000 of their neighbors die and still refuse to take a free, life-saving vaccine.”
“No one fully understood the power of negative polarity. Understood that one tribe of Americans hates their neighbors literally unto death. Hates them so much that they would rather risk their own lives than be perceived as doing what ‘the elites’ tell them.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “There’s no reason to expect passage or rejection of these bills to have strong electoral effects, and if it does matter in November 2022 or November 2024 there’s no guarantee that success would help Democrats.”
“Perhaps the most obvious comparison would be the aftermath of the Democrats’ failure to pass health-care reform in 1993-1994, and then of their triumph in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010. While those efforts were the most prominent legislative initiatives in both cases, they were surrounded by other fiascos (during the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency) and successes (when Barack Obama was president). In both cases, the electoral results were more or less the same — a disaster for the party in the midterms, followed by re-election for Clinton and Obama two years later.”
“That’s hardly the only relevant historical example. The most successful and productive Congress since the New Deal was the one following the huge Democratic landslide of 1964. The electoral fallout? Big Republican gains in 1966 and a Richard Nixon presidency two years later. It’s not that voters hated what that Congress did. It’s just that voters are willing and able to take even brand-new programs for granted and ask, in effect, what have you done for me lately? And if the answer isn’t peace and prosperity, it doesn’t matter what else has happened.”
Josh Kraushaar: “He’s handpicking weak candidates in key races and making it near-impossible for moderate candidates to succeed on their own. But GOP voters are still along for the ride.”
“Flamboyant Trumpist candidates that pander to the extremes — like Ohio’s Josh Mandel and Alabama’s Mo Brooks — are maintaining leads in upcoming primary contests, while establishment-oriented candidates like Ohio’s Jane Timken or Alabama’s Katie Britt lag behind in early polls. They express support for Trump, but they steer clear of the crazy, and it may doom them.”
“Allen Weisselberg — the former Trump Organization CFO who has been charged by Manhattan prosecutors for an alleged tax evasion scheme — is expecting that more indictments will be filed in the case,” CNN reports.
Said lawyer Bryan Skarlatos: “We have strong reason to believe there could be other indictments coming.”
An American reporter asked actress Gillian Anderson whether she has spoken to Margaret Thatcher about playing her on Netflix’s The Crown — apparently not knowing the former British prime minister has been dead since 2013.
Retired Gen. Don Bolduc (R) told the New Hampshire Today Show that he has begun talking directly with Donald Trump and thinks the former president might endorse his candidacy in the 2022 U.S. Senate race.
A new Monmouth poll finds 54% of Americans disagree with the Supreme Court allowing the Texas law that effectively bans abortions after six weeks to go into effect, while 39% of Americans agree with the court.
When Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) addressed Joe Biden as the president-elect on television, one of the few GOP officeholders that was willing to do so while Trump continued to challenge the election, his action was met with scorn from the president’s supporters across the country, Insider reports.
Writes Duncan, in his new book: “Each time I said ‘No fraud’ or ‘President-elect Biden’ on national television, the insults and hate poured in from across Georgia and from forty-nine other states too. Groupthink — or doublethink — was the goal, and Republican leaders achieved it.”
He adds: “Each time I read messages on the way home, I sure felt good I had two Georgia state troopers with me. People wanted to rip my head off. Friends disappeared or became rabid enemies overnight.”
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.