“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better. We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”
— Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), in an interview with CNBC, on why he now supports President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
“The Supreme Court is diving back into the culture war issue of transgender rights, adding a potentially blockbuster case on transgender athletes to its next term,” USA Today reports.
“The court’s July 3 announcement that it will review Idaho’s and West Virginia’s bans on transgender athletes joining female sports teams came just weeks after the court’s conservative majority upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors.”
New York Times: “The justices agreed to hear the cases during the court’s next term, which begins in early October. They have not yet set a date for oral argument.”
“Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, passed the four-hour mark on Thursday morning in a marathon speech in the House opposing Republicans’ signature legislation carrying out President Trump’s domestic agenda,” the New York Times reports.
“Beginning his remarks before dawn, Mr. Jeffries said that he was ‘planning to take my sweet time’ with his speech.”
“It was not a filibuster, the Senate tactic that allows a member to speechify for unlimited time, delaying action indefinitely. But Mr. Jeffries was making use of his prerogative as a leader to stretch his allotted 60 seconds of speaking time for far longer, in a House tradition known as a ‘magic minute.’ In doing so, he was attempting to seize a pivotal moment for Democrats — who have toiled to find a cohesive strategy, message and messenger for countering Mr. Trump — to make a forceful case against the president and his agenda.”
Punchbowl News: “If Hakeem Jeffries speaks until 1:26 p.m., he will break the record for the longest floor speech. That record is held by Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy spoke for eight hours and 32 minutes.”
“Drought is pushing tens of millions of people to the edge of starvation around the world, in a foretaste of a global crisis that is rapidly deepening with climate breakdown,” The Guardian reports.
“More than 90 million people in eastern and southern Africa are facing extreme hunger after record-breaking drought across many areas, ensuing widespread crop failures and the death of livestock. In Somalia, a quarter of the population is now edging towards starvation, and at least a million people have been displaced.”
Wall Street Journal: “On June 3, Hunter Biden reported to a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Del., to face three felony charges for lying on a federal firearms application and possessing a gun while abusing drugs. Beyond the danger to Hunter’s liberty, the trial was sure to embarrass the Biden family, airing sordid secrets from the painful years after Hunter’s brother Beau Biden died of cancer.”
“Much of the public was unaware of the depths of turmoil within the Biden family—affairs, addiction, alcoholism—and now it would all spill out, five months before the election. To prove Hunter Biden was abusing drugs when he purchased the gun, prosecutors planned to call three star witnesses: his ex-girlfriend, whom he met when she was a stripper; his ex-wife, the mother of three of his daughters; and Beau’s widow, with whom he started a romantic relationship after his brother’s death.”
The Bulwark: “Last week, the White House insisted Iran’s nuclear program had been totally ‘obliterated’ and went to war against a low-confidence preliminary intelligence assessment that the program had only been set back a couple months. Now, the Pentagon has refined its timetable: Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters yesterday the strikes had set Iran back by up to two years.”
“Years beats months, of course. But the new estimate is an official acknowledgment that Trump—despite his asserting that ‘I don’t see them being back involved in the nuclear business anymore’ and his other claims about the success of the bombing—will likely have tough choices ahead.”
The White House is planning a Friday 9 a.m. ET signing ceremony for the budget reconciliation bill, Punchbowl News reports.
Paul Krugman: “And that’s why I was a deficit dove in, say, 2011. America needed to run substantial deficits to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. But I didn’t think this would cause trouble down the road, because we were a serious country run by serious people, easily able to do what was necessary to stabilize the debt once the economic emergency was past.”
“But that, as I said, was then.”
“Right now we are running big budget deficits even though we aren’t fighting a war, facing high unemployment, or dealing with a pandemic. We should be taking action to bring those deficits down. Instead, Republicans have rammed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will add trillions to the deficit even as it causes mass misery. Money aside, the way Congress was bullied into passing that bill and the lies used to sell it show that we are no longer a serious country run by serious people.”
“Republicans are using transparently dishonest accounting to hide just how much they’re adding to debt — hey, we aren’t really cutting taxes, just extending tax cuts that were scheduled to expire. And they’re also claiming that the OBBBA’s tax cuts (the ones that they say aren’t really happening) will generate a miraculous surge in economic growth… Add in Trump’s bizarro claims about what his tariffs will achieve. Again, do we look like a serious country run by serious people?”
The U.S. added 147,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department reported Thursday, above the gain of 110,000 jobs economists had expected, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% from 4.2%.
“I suppose I don’t like being called ugly by Donald Trump, but not everybody can live up to his exquisite levels of handsomeness and personal physical grace. I would consider myself probably in the large majority of American men who simply can’t live up to the exquisite standards that he set and his extraordinary popularity with American women.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), quoted by the Daily Beast, responding to President Trump calling him “ugly.”
NOTUS: “Trump hosted a meeting with some moderates and some members of the Main Street Caucus on Wednesday, where he listened to concerns and touted the wins in the legislation.”
“But Trump still doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp about what his signature legislative achievement does. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the comments, the president told Republicans at this meeting that there are three things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.”
Said one member to Trump: “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill.”
Politico: “Louisiana is poorer, sicker and hungrier than most states, and the deep cuts to Medicaid have a growing number of Republicans in Louisiana worried that Congress and the White House are going too far. They are anxious that rural hospitals whose finances are highly dependent on federal Medicaid funds would face crippling revenue losses and be forced to shut down, depriving all residents of accessible health care.”
“The blowback over Medicaid represents the most significant crack between GOP leaders in Washington and in the states so far in this administration, according to interviews with nearly two dozen Louisiana state leaders.”
In his second term, a “freewheeling” President Trump likens the Oval Office to New York’s Grand Central Station, full of people coming and going (regardless of their security clearances), NBC News reports.
“I’m going to take my time.”
— House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), quoted by Politico, using his “magic minute” before the final House vote on President Trump’s megabill.
Playbook points out that Thursday’s vote on President Trump’s megabill may give rise to a new phrase: “Congress always chickens out.”
Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is still weighing where he wants his political career to take him next: to the governor’s mansion or back to the Senate, Semafor reports.
Said Brown: “Everything’s on the table.”
He added: “I’m concerned about the direction of my state; I’m concerned about the direction of my country. So I don’t know.”
Playbook: “Polling and strategy firm JL Partners asked 1,000 U.S. voters if they support or oppose replacing the current president of the United States with the British monarch. The survey found 19 percent of Americans supported the idea, with 48 percent opposed and the rest on the fence.”
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.