Today’s notice: A deportation case tests political will. A House funding bill seemingly does not. The U.S. and Canada test each other. And D.C. just gets got.
Common Sense vs. Uncommon Acts
How far will Democrats bend in their pursuit of “common sense” policy shifts after Donald Trump’s victory? We may be finding a limit in the case of Mahmoud Khalil.
A court has temporarily stopped the Trump administration from deporting the Palestinian activist, but officials all the way up to Trump himself say deportation remains their intention. The politics are pretty clean for the White House: Khalil is an immigrant, was until recently a student at Columbia and regularly criticizes the Israeli government. All facts that make prosecuting him unlikely to cause internal MAGA rifts, and may potentially grant broad public support beyond the GOP base.
But the Khalil case at least on paper touches more than one third rail for Democrats. Since the election, the party has been locked in an internal argument over how aggressively to pursue “common sense” approaches to issues like immigration and campus protests, where polling of the Democratic base paints a more complicated picture. Democrats also of course had serious internal issues over the war in Gaza, not to mention the campus protest movement that stemmed from it. But in the last few days, a significant number of Democrats have come out on Khalil’s side of the fight.
The case has awoken the kind of Trump opposition we haven’t seen in a while. “I am actually on a cruise this week, but I believe this is an important subject that deserves attention,” Steven Nekhaila, chair of the Libertarian National Committee, emailed NOTUS. Some of that political stripe have been MAGA friendly since the election, especially after Trump pardoned the Silk Road guy. Not today, Nekhaila says: “The government is leveraging immigration law as a tool of political retaliation, just as it did with Vietnam War protesters, civil rights activists, and dissidents of past decades,” he wrote from the ship.
Some see a political I-told-you-so moment.
“Abusing immigration law to punish people for their speech is not common sense,” Naureen Shah, a senior official at the ACLU, told NOTUS. “It’s unconstitutional.”
The challenge for Democrats pushing for “common sense” changes, of course, is, who defines “common”? Move rightward, and by the time you’re there, you find the right has moved even further away. It got us thinking about a story by NOTUS’ Casey Murray days before Trump was sworn in, as immigration lawyers were busily prepping for the slew of executive actions that quickly showed up. Eric Lee, an attorney who has argued immigration cases before the Supreme Court and started a nonprofit to support legal residents like Khalil, said he wasn’t expecting much from the beaten up Democratic Party. “We’re certainly on our own, politically speaking,” he said.
We reached out to Lee yesterday to ask what he made of Democrats publicly expressing revulsion at the Khalil arrest. Has “common sense” run its course?
“In short: No,” Lee DM’d us. He pointed to Democratic votes for the Laken Riley Act and the unanimous confirmation of Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who has said it is within his purview to deport legal residents like Khalil whom he deems “Hamas supporters” — as signs that Democrats have not yet gotten with the program as Lee sees it.
“Millions of Americans who oppose Trump’s ongoing attempt to establish a dictatorship are livid at the Democrats for their unwillingness to respond,” he said.
—Evan McMorris-Santoro | Read reporting from NOTUS’ Emily Kennard.
Jet Fumes Are One Hell of a Drug
Members of the House may have largely voted along party lines on Speaker Mike Johnson’s funding package, but it was on a bipartisan basis that they packed up and jetted off to all corners of the country after calling it a week on Tuesday.
Lawmakers voted 217-213 on a GOP spending package that contained just enough spending adjustments to win the praise and votes of nearly all Republicans who regularly rail against and vote down continuing resolutions, NOTUS’ Riley Rogerson reports.
Johnson — with a clutch boost from Trump — not only succeeded in passing his partisan spending package, he also managed to stick Senate Democrats in a no-win bind: Either support the GOP spending package or risk a government shutdown.
Read the story.
Front Page
- DOGE Is Changing California — And Democrats Worry It’s Just the Start: “I have seen a lot of devastation, and it seems like they’re just getting started.”
- Trump Is Cutting Roughly Half of the Department of Education’s Staff: 1,315 employees are being given the boot, per senior Education Department officials.
- Katie Porter’s Former House Colleagues Aren’t Racing to Back Her: “I think I’ll sit on the sidelines for a while.”
Diplomacy, Eh / Diplomatie, Hein
At the White House briefing Tuesday, NOTUS’ Jasmine Wright asked directly, “Does this administration still consider Canada to be a close ally of the United States?”
“Canada is a neighbor, it is a partner, they have always been an ally but perhaps it is becoming a competitor now,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt replied. Trump, she continued, “believes that Canadians would benefit greatly from becoming the 51st state of the United States of America.”
The White House has repeated this enough times at this point that congressional Republicans are starting to take it a little seriously. Senate Republicans told NOTUS’ Mark Alfred they’d welcome Canada’s admission to the union, even if that meant adding two new liberal senators — disregarding decades of hand-wringing over adding Puerto Rico or D.C. as states. Some GOP lawmakers even offered up their pitch to Canada to abandon its status as a sovereign nation.
“It’s so interesting to even be invited to join another country,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis said.
In a closer reality, though: NOTUS’ Anna Kramer reports on the “extremely delicate and inextricably interdependent” power transmission system that connects Canada and the northern U.S. states. Tariff talk has led to threats of shutting down that system, which was (literally) inconceivable not that long ago.
Watch Jasmine at the White House. | Read Mark’s story. | Read Anna’s story.
Shot/Chaser
One day, you’re capitulating to House Republicans’ anti-DEI campaign by ordering the removal of your own Black Lives Matter Plaza in an effort to protect D.C’s autonomy. The next, you’re raising alarms about House Republicans passing more than $1 billion in cuts from D.C.’s budget.
Mayor Muriel Bowser said the cut was a “$1.1 billion problem” that would result in the city’s public safety and school systems taking the largest hits.
Right before the vote, Appropriations Chair Tom Cole told NOTUS he hadn’t heard about the mayor’s concerns but just wanted the funding bill passed regardless: “Everybody will be better off if the government’s funded.”
—Emily Kennard
Not Us
We know NOTUS reporters can’t cover it all. Here’s some other great hits by… not us.
- How to Dine Like a Washington Insider by Jessica Piper for Politico
- Are Foodborne Illnesses and Deaths in the U.S. Worsening? New Data on Recalls Explain by Lori Youmshajekian for Scientific American
- His Daughter Was America’s First Measles Death in a Decade by Tom Bartlett for The Atlantic
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