Funding Deal Done

Today’s notice: Guess who convinced skeptical House Republicans to back the Senate appropriations deal? What Trump has planned for the Kennedy Center. Allegations in the Democratic Senate primary in Texas. And: What kind of Republican will replace MTG? If you don’t subscribe yet, you can sign up here — it’s free!

THE LATEST

Showdown averted, per the House speaker: “We’ll have the votes, yeah,” Mike Johnson told NOTUS’ Em Luetkemeyer and Riley Rogerson last night.

The holdouts stopped holding out. Namely, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett. “As of right now, with the current agreement that we have, as well as discussions, we will both be a ‘yes’ on the rule,” Luna said.

What did the trick? In part, a meeting with Donald Trump, who appears eager to move on from the news cycle questioning his administration’s aggressive immigration tactics. (Kristi Noem also announced that federal agents in Minneapolis would receive body cameras, though the Trump administration hasn’t shown any sign of changing its tactics.)

Rep. Tom Cole said he’d heard Trump was calling members “individually” to get them in line on the spending package to end the partial shutdown.

In case you’re wondering how Cole, the top Republican appropriator in the House, is feeling about his own party’s holdouts, this is what he said about the whole ordeal: “I don’t care what your petty little thing is. Time to grow up and be part of a team.”

The deal? Luna and Burchett told reporters they received assurances that the Senate would take up the SAVE Act, the conservative immigration bill that would institute a national photo ID requirement for voting and limits on mail-in voting (a nonstarter among Democrats).

More dubious: Luna said she’s been “speaking with many senators, as well as directly with POTUS,” about filibuster reform. What she has proposed, and talked to Trump about, is a standing filibuster. The problem: Getting rid of the 60-vote threshold has its own Republican holdouts — and historically they’ve been even more dug in.

Open tabs: Bill and Hillary Clinton Agree to Testify as Part of the House’s Epstein Probe (NOTUS); Marjorie Taylor Greene: MAGA ‘was all a lie’ (The Hill); How the Supreme Court Secretly Made Itself Even More Secretive (NYT); Elon Musk merges SpaceX with xAI (and X) (The Verge)

From the White House

“Brand new and really beautiful” is Trump’s vision for renovations to the Kennedy Center, he told reporters yesterday. He also clarified that the storied arts venue would not suffer the same fate as the East Wing — that is to say, he would not be “ripping it down.”

The White House sent NOTUS’ Amelia Benavides-Colón a list of planned repairs to start July 4: replacing exterior elements, bringing the building “into compliance with current life-safety codes and security standards” and fixing parking infrastructure, to name a few.

Ticket sales plummeted after Trump installed allies on the center’s board, and after his self-eponymous rename in December, artist after artist after artist have canceled shows.

From the campaign trail

“This is a mischaracterization of a private conversation,” Democrat James Talarico began his statement after the party’s Senate primary in Texas erupted in drama over allegations, made by a TikTok user, that Talarico had called his former opponent Colin Allred a “mediocre Black man.”

Allred in turn endorsed Jasmine Crockett for Senate and posted a scathing video tearing Talarico down.

What wasn’t mischaracterized? Talarico’s feeling that Allred’s “method of campaigning” was mediocre. “I would never attack him on the basis of race,” Talarico said.

Battle for the soul of Georgia’s 14th: “It’s going to outline if the Republican Party is still leaning more towards candidates who are like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tend to be like the more argumentative, loud, boisterous personalities,” Jenna Turnipseed, one of the 17 Republicans running to replace Greene, told NOTUS’ Torrence Banks. “Or are they looking for a candidate that is more about trying to actually work and make a shift?”

What to watch for: This race takes place in the shadow of Greene’s ascension in MAGA, and her public falling out with Trump. One candidate, Jim Tully, is a former Greene staffer. But he doesn’t mention his connection to her on his campaign page, Torrence reports.

From the intelligence community

Playing it safe? An eight-month-old whistleblower complaint regarding Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t been sent to Congress. Actually, it’s “said to be locked in a safe,” The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. (Her spox posted that the report is “disgusting” and “clickbait.”)

Another thing Congress won’t hear about (for now): What Gabbard is looking for out of that Atlanta election office raid last week. She told both intelligence committees’ top Democrats, Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, that her office “will not irresponsibly share incomplete intelligence assessments concerning foreign or other malign interference in U.S. elections” in a letter sent yesterday, which Warner’s office shared with NOTUS.

“It raises more questions than it answers,” Warner spox Rachel Cohen wrote to NOTUS. He’ll say more at a 12:30 p.m. press conference today, she added.

NEW ON NOTUS

Judge maintains Haitians’ TPS status — for now: “Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote in a scathing opinion released just hours before the temporary deportation protections were set to expire. “Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

Show me the money: Former Sen. Sherrod Brown is trouncing his opponent, Republican Sen. Jon Husted, in terms of fundraising — bringing in as much money in Q4 as Husted did in the entirety of 2025. That’s good news for the Democrat as he faces a costly bid to unseat the incumbent, NOTUS’ Tyler Spence reports.

NOT US

• Nancy Mace Is Not Okay, by Jake Lahut for New York
  
• Inside Elon Musk’s bet to hook users that turned Grok into a porn generator, by Faiz Siddiqui, Nitasha Tiku and Elizabeth Dwoskin for The Washington Post
  
• A crisis emerges across the US as ‘forever chemicals’ quietly contaminate drinking water wells, by Michael Phillis and Helen Wieffering for The Associated Press
  

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