Today’s notice: Leave the basement dwellers alone. Defense authorization sails along. More drama in the NYC mayoral race. And: “Weekend at Bernie’s” for congressional campaigns.
THE LATEST
Big, beautiful no-nos: “Stop making fun of lazy folks who live in the basements” was how one Republican lawmaker characterized the advice Karoline Leavitt and White House deputy chief of staff James Blair gave House Republicans during a messaging briefing yesterday on the Hill, NOTUS’ Reese Gorman reports.
The gist: Talk about the tax cuts, not the Medicaid cuts, the White House told Republicans.
Republicans know they have a problem. Public perception of their budget law’s cuts to Medicaid is not good, and it overall still has low public support in polling.
“What I picked up from the conversation was, I think we missed an opportunity to call it the working families’ tax cut bill,” Rep. Eric Burlison said after attending the briefing.
This is a change. An NRCC memo from July told lawmakers to go on offense over the law’s Medicaid cuts and immigration provisions.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, a group of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers shared harrowing tales of abuse and called on Congress to push for the release of more files from the case into the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. The event was organized by Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, whose discharge petition is still just a few signatures shy of the 218 needed to compel a vote on the House floor.
Not happy: The scene clearly irked Donald Trump, who told reporters in the Oval Office that the push for greater disclosure on the Epstein case was a “Democrat hoax that never ends.”
“They’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant,” the president added.
Open tabs: Florida moves to kill vaccine mandates (Tallahassee Democrat); West Coast States Will Issue Their Own Vaccine Schedule (NOTUS); House GOP Weighing Drastic Changes to D.C. Home Rule (WaPo); Heritage backs its own for BLS (Semafor); Tillis Won’t Consider a Replacement for Lisa Cook (NOTUS)
From the Hill
No reservations on the NDAA: “The National Guard is not for local law enforcement. Everybody knows that. And to pass a defense authorization under these circumstances is very difficult,” Sen. Brian Schatz told NOTUS’ Haley Byrd Wilt on Tuesday night.
“Difficult” is a relative term here. Only 11 other Democrats joined Schatz on Tuesday in voting against moving this year’s defense policy bill forward. “I don’t think we’re rethinking the NDAA,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who voted for moving forward, told Haley. He favors “safeguards to prevent use of the military for policing” in a future bill.
In the House, the censure vote against Rep. LaMonica McIver, who has protested a DOJ indictment following a scuffle at a New Jersey immigration detention center in May, led to one unforced error.
Rep. Mike Turner was among the five Republicans whose votes helped Democrats block Rep. Clay Higgins’ resolution to remove McIver from the House Homeland Security Committee. A spokesperson for Turner told NOTUS’ Oriana González that he “intended to vote no to table and submitted a correction immediately,” but it was too late.
From New York
Trump’s NYC mayoral race play? “He is not dropping out of the race,” Eric Adams spox Todd Shapiro told NOTUS partner The City yesterday after the NYT reported that Trump advisers have considered offering the mayor an administration job and been in touch with Adams allies.
One job offer for Adams was at HUD, Politico reported. The New York Post also reported on talks between Trumpworld and Adamsworld. Adams met with Trump’s team earlier this week in Florida.
“We always thought nothing is for free, and when Trump comes to collect the check, what is it going to be for?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told NOTUS’ Shifra Dayak of Trump earlier this year ordering his DOJ to drop the indictment against Adams. “It looks like right now, Trump wants to collect what he’s got on Eric Adams in order to defeat the Democratic nominee from New York City.”
From the campaign trail
Bigg(s) feelings: “2026 is an eminently winnable year for Republicans in the gubernatorial race,” Barrett Marson, a longtime Republican consultant in Arizona, told NOTUS. “The only way they could potentially blow it is if we nominate Andy Biggs.”
Among the concerns: Fundraising. Biggs raised $1.38 million during the last election cycle, which is less than most members of Congress raise — let alone what he would need to unseat an incumbent governor like Democrat Katie Hobbs.
THE BIG ONE
The dead don’t stop spending: NOTUS reporters Amelia Benavides-Colón and Violet Jira reviewed the campaign committee finances of more than a dozen deceased members of Congress, most of whom served in the past decade. And they found prolific, and sometimes irregular, zombie spending.
Family matters: The family of the late Rep. Alcee Hastings (d. 2021) was disbursed thousands in remaining campaign funds, according to the filings. After the FEC flagged $2,000 coded as “Transfer excess funds to Congressman Alcee Hastings Daughter Ms. Maisha Williams,” the report was amended to say the payment to his stepdaughter was for “storing campaign office items in storage.” A later $4,000 disbursement to Williams was labeled as a “disposal” of campaign and office materials.
Other irregular posthumous spending discovered by NOTUS was for funeral and medical expenses. The campaign of the late Rep. Sylvester Turner (d. 2025) reported spending roughly $2,800 on airline tickets and $350 at a Ritz-Carlton after Turner’s death. A former consultant for Turner told Amelia and Violet the campaign funds were tapped because the spending was “related to the planning and execution of the congressman’s funeral services.”
The list goes on, exposing an unplumbed area of campaign finance. There are rules governing how these funds can be spent, but “what counts as personal versus nonpersonal can be fuzzy, and the FEC doesn’t really have the bandwidth and/or political will to track this and really enforce that difference,” Omar Noureldin of Common Cause said.
NEW ON NOTUS
Donut worry: Kash Patel says his $50,000 investment in Krispy Kreme has “no current conflict,” according to the disclosure of his stock buy to the Office of Government Ethics. The FBI director’s investment came just before the bureau began investigating a data breach at the donut company that exposed the data of more than 160,000 people in 2024, Dave reports for NOTUS.
New stock ban push: “Why? Because the opportunity for corruption is just so great,” Rep. Seth Magaziner said at a bipartisan presser Wednesday to announce the Restore Trust in Congress Act. The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy and would bar members and their spouses and dependent children from trading and owning individual stocks.
More: New Testimony Shines a Light on Trump Admin’s Effort to Deport Guatemalan Minors, by Jose Pagliery
Trump Floats Sending Troops to New Orleans, by Amelia Benavides-Colón
NOT US
- Inside the Democratic plan to recapture the House majority in 2026, by Marianna Sotomayor for The Washington Post
- Why Lawmakers Don’t Want to Ban Their Own Stock Trading, by Katy Stech Ferek for The Wall Street Journal
- Coming soon: A primary in the media capital of the world, by Jeff Coltin for Politico
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