Democrats After the Shutdown

Today’s notice: Will Democrats fixate on the shutdown betrayal or forget it ever happened? Mike Johnson’s victory lap. A Maine campaign scoop. The CFPB may finally be out of lives.

THE LATEST

The hangover cure: How should angry Democrats stew over the ignominious end to the government shutdown? Two schools of thought are emerging.

Option 1: Be mad at each other for a long time. There’s plenty of anger to go around, and it is matriculating in Senate races, where Chuck Schumer is being torched for letting eight Democrats vote with Republicans to open the government. Democrats could certainly make this a *we need generational change* moment.

Option 2: Memory-hole this, now. “Please stay disciplined and focused” on Republicans, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene said in a note to her colleagues this week. It even listed 25 Republican members that Democrats could mention in media hits.

On Option 1, is Schumer becoming a litmus test? We called around yesterday and found that the Senate candidates calling for Schumer to step down were, for the most part, doing that before the shutdown too. As for the others…

In Texas, former Rep. Colin Allred’s campaign sent us a clip of Allred calling the Senate deal “the betrayal” at a Dallas County Democratic Party dinner Monday. He didn’t mention Schumer. “Position remains the same as here,” an aide texted, linking to a Dallas Morning News story from September about Allred neither calling for Schumer to quit or supporting him.

In Minnesota, Rep. Angie Craig told NOTUS’ Alex Roarty she remained uncommitted to anyone for leader. An aide for Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s campaign, which recently received backing from Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Alex she’s “made no commitments at this time.”

Which brings us to Option 2. The thinking behind this, according to a source familiar with said thinking, is that the health care iron is hot and Democrats should not miss the chance to strike it. Mike Johnson has very clearly refused to make the same promise John Thune made about an Affordable Care Act subsidies vote, and that is a political opening.

The idea of moving on will not sit well with many Democrats. But the take is, “Be pissed, that’s OK, they did let us down,” the source said of the Senate. But now, “We have the opportunity to fuck shit up” for the GOP, they added.

Open tabs: MAHA Is Embracing Elizabeth Holmes (Politico); UK suspends some intelligence sharing with US over boat strike concerns (CNN); Fannie Mae Watchdogs Probed How Pulte Obtained Mortgage Records of Key Dems (WSJ); F.D.A. Names Agency Veteran to Run Drug Division (NYT)

From the Hill

Adelita Grijalva finally gets her day in Congress: Speaker Johnson announced he will swear her in at 4 p.m., just as the House is expected to begin voting to open the government back up.

If there is one clear winner this week, it’s Johnson. “Mike Johnson has done a PHENOMENAL job of keeping our Republican Party informed and united,” Rep. Ralph Norman texted the NOTUS Hill team. Yes, the Ralph Norman who Donald Trump had to persuade to vote for Johnson’s speakership earlier this year.

From the courts

The Supreme Court effectively chose the path of least resistance in deciding whether the Trump administration would have to abide by a lower court order to issue full SNAP payments for November. SCOTUS extended its temporary pause for two more days while eschewing a definitive ruling, just as the government appears poised to reopen (and effectively resolving the case in question).

Objection: The high court came to its decision despite dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who rejected her colleagues’ decision and said she would have denied the case altogether, effectively upholding the lower court’s ruling. Neither side explained their reasoning.

From the campaign trail

Schlossberg is really doing it: “We are OFFICIALLY launching Jack For New York,” Kennedy clan poster-boy extraordinaire Jack Schlossberg wrote in an email to close allies last night, a copy of which was obtained by NOTUS. His campaign announcement is expected today, and will kick off his candidacy to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The email was a pitch for allies to dig deep. “In order to be competitive in this race, we need to put up a huge fundraising number” on Day 1, Schlossberg wrote.

He previewed his campaign logo: Jack for New York 12, with the “New” underlined. The field is already crowded and expected to grow.

Golden opportunity: That Democratic Senate primary in Maine you may have heard about is going to get a lot more interesting. Alex reports that Jordan Wood, who served as chief of staff to former Rep. Katie Porter, is seriously considering dropping out of the race to run for the House seat that will be left vacant by the retirement of Rep. Jared Golden. That would create a Democratic primary for the seat, and also turn the Senate primary into a two-person race between Graham Platner and Gov. Janet Mills.

NEW ON NOTUS

The bell tolls for the CFPB: “I don’t think anything from Vought is at all that surprising at this point,” a CFPB staffer told NOTUS’ Jade Lozada after the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel dropped a memorandum that would effectively defund the agency for good starting next year. The move backs up Russ Vought’s take that the CFPB has to ask Congress for money because there are no profits at the Federal Reserve to fund it with. Congress, especially this one, is unlikely to give the agency any money.

The Mamdani bump: The day Zohran Mamdani won, the Democratic Socialists of America gained 5,000 members. Mamdani “aligned with the politics of a generation that has grown up throughout the financial crisis in 2008, the Iraq War, Trump and a genocide where we had students — our friends — being deported throughout all of this,” a Young DSA co-chair, Sara Almosawi, told NOTUS’ Avani Kalra and Adora Brown.

The economy’s lost October? “We’ll perhaps never even know what happened in that month,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNBC on Tuesday. He said key economic data was barely collected during the shutdown, so reports on it will probably never be released.

More: The Race to Replace Nancy Pelosi Could Be All About Tech Regulation, by Samuel Larreal

Utah Judge Approves Congressional Map That May Advantage Democrats, by Robert Gehrke for NOTUS and The Salt Lake Tribune

GOP Congressman Rides His Motorcycle Nearly 1,000 Miles to D.C. to Avoid Air Travel, by Amelia Benavides-Colón

NOT US

• Working at the CDC Is a Living Hell, by Allison Quinn for New York
  
• Trump has promised peace for Gaza. Private documents paint a grim picture. By Dasha Burns, Felicia Schwartz, Nahal Toosi and Paul McLeary for Politico
  
• A tattoo artist found herself in an unexpected role in Maine’s Senate race, by Kimberlee Kruesi for The Associated Press

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