Today’s notice: Politicking after an assassination. Honoring Charlie Kirk. Going nuclear in the Senate (and not helping the spending debate). And: The chaos after Trump’s “Gulf of America” announcement.
THE LATEST
Agony of the new normal: “I had to have a talk with my 17-year-old son last night, who asked me not to run again because he’s worried his dad’s going to get killed,” Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, told the NOTUS Hill team yesterday. “And I can’t, I can’t tell him that that is a crazy perspective.”
Fearing political violence is pervasive in Congress and on the campaign trail. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez canceled a rally scheduled for Sunday in North Carolina. Rep. Nancy Mace also declared that she was canceling all outdoor events for the foreseeable future.
One idea under consideration is expanding a pilot program offering funding for member security unveiled by Mike Johnson after the June shootings of two state legislators in Minnesota.
The numbers get huge, fast. To give all lawmakers security details “would cost billions of dollars, and we’d have to hire about 5,000 additional Capitol Police,” Johnson told reporters yesterday.
And lawmakers say it doesn’t guarantee real safety. Rep. Tom Cole said the funding that already exists often goes toward lawmakers’ home security equipment like cameras.
“All the camera would do is help them get the guy who murdered me,” Cole said.
Open tabs: Trump offered to let S. Korean detainees stay, train U.S. workers (WaPo); Rep. Morgan Luttrell will not seek third term in Congress (Texas Tribune); $10 Million in Contraceptives Have Been Destroyed on Orders From Trump Officials (NYT); Bob Menendez’s wife sentenced to more than four years (NorthJersey.com)
From the Hill
A statue of Charlie Kirk? Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is circulating a letter among House Republicans calling on Johnson to “direct” that a statue of the late conservative activist be put in the Capitol.
NOTUS’ Reese Gorman asked Rep. Andrew Clyde about the idea. “We have a statue of MLK in the Capitol, don’t we?” he said.
Senate Republicans went “nuclear” yesterday, changing the rules to speed up confirmations of Donald Trump’s nominees by allowing them to be voted on en masse. John Thune has teed up 48 nominees for a vote as soon as next week.
“I think there are a lot of Democrats who are aware that they created an untenable situation, and it would have been nice to see them acknowledge that and to move to return to longtime Senate precedent,” Thune said on the floor.
Sen. Brian Schatz said Democrats and Republicans were “actually very close” to a deal on nominations. “And I don’t know who it is or what the dynamic was, but … [Republicans] just said, ‘Nah. I don’t care how close we are. We’re just gonna do this,’” he said of his colleagues across the aisle deciding to change the rules instead.
That likely won’t help spending talks. Democrats left town “unified” against a spending bill that doesn’t include some changes on health care, leaders said yesterday. That could include extending the enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.
“If that’s included in the CR that’s proposed next week, all hell will break loose on the House floor,” Rep. Andy Harris, the Freedom Caucus’ chair, told reporters.
From the White House
Trump told reporters last night that he shared a long call with Kirk’s widow, adding that she was “devastated, absolutely devastated.” The president said earlier in the day that he would posthumously award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The administration’s post-shooting crackdown appears to have begun with speech. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau urged people to report immigrants and foreign visitors “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s assassination on social media.
Landau said he has “directed” consular officials to “undertake appropriate action,” and that they would be monitoring the comments on his X post.
After a harrowing 24 hours, Trump spent yesterday evening at yet another sporting event — this time, surprising New York Yankees players before their home tilt against the Detroit Tigers. The president’s motivational speech must have worked: Aaron Judge smacked two home runs to tie Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio’s career total, leading the Bronx Bombers to a 9-3 win.
From the campaign trail
Running scared: “This cycle, concerns about violence have caused some recruiting conversations to pause, and some to end,” a Democratic strategist told NOTUS’ Alex Roarty. “Mostly, candidates are being brave because they feel called by concern for their communities and country. But they shouldn’t have to be brave, and there must be others silently selecting out of running.”
The era where violence was not a concern is not ancient. Former Rep. Mark Sanford recalled when he first ran for office he thought extra law enforcement officials and bodyguards unnecessarily interfered with candidates’ abilities to speak directly with voters. When he was South Carolina’s governor, he pared back his security detail, sometimes to just one officer.
But now? “Are we now at a tipping point, and we’re in the new era, and that which was excessive is appropriate now? I don’t know,” he said.
NEW ON NOTUS
How much gulf is there in the Gulf of America? Senior administration officials scrambled to figure out what Trump’s order changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name actually meant, according to 109 pages of records NOTUS’ Dave Levinthal obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Does this definition constitute the entire Gulf? Or are we going to [be] splitting the feature into two — Gulf of Mexico in the southern portion and Gulf of America in the northern portion?” Michael Tischler, a director at the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote to an unnamed State Department official on Jan. 21.
‘The United States will respond accordingly.’ That was Marco Rubio’s response to news that Brazil’s Supreme Court had convicted and sentenced the country’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, to 27 years and three months in prison for a plot to stay in power following his 2022 election loss.
Rubio did not elaborate on what a potential U.S. response might look like but called out the judge overseeing the case by name: “The political persecutions by sanctioned human rights abuser Alexandre de Moraes continue, as he and others on Brazil’s Supreme Court have unjustly ruled to imprison former President Jair Bolsonaro.”
More: Dustup Over Moment of Silence for Charlie Kirk Mars EU Parliament Meeting, by Amelia Benavides-Colón
NOT US
- Charlie Kirk Was Shot and Killed in a Post-Content-Moderation World, by Lauren Goode for Wired
- Inside NATO’s Scramble to Shoot Down Russia’s All-Night Drone Raid Over Poland, by Daniel Michaels, Karolina Jeznach and Thomas Grove for The Wall Street Journal
- Utah is now the epicenter of the political divide its governor warned about, by Samuel Benson for Politico
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