Lawmakers Get Airline Perks?

Today’s notice: Selling the DHS shutdown deal. A scoop about AIPAC. Strategery in Iowa and Georgia. Republicans back Trump’s troop deployments. Citizens whose families have been swept up in deportation sweeps go to the Hill. And: Flying while elected.

THE LATEST

DHS shutdown sales pitch: Senate Republicans are trying to convince Donald Trump they are giving him everything it is actually possible to give in their fight with Democrats over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

But some conservatives are not buying the plan pitched by Senate negotiators: First, fund the entire department except for ICE; then, Republicans would attempt a reconciliation bill after the upcoming spring recess that would give ICE its money and include some provisions in the SAVE America Act. “I think it’s hard to do that,” Sen. Rick Scott said.

Still, Republicans are hoping to stay on Trump’s good side until the end of this week, NOTUS’ Al Weaver reports, with the hopes of keeping their recess intact. Part of lawmakers’ Monday afternoon pitch to the president, according to a source familiar with the meeting: “Let’s solve the immediate issue of long TSA lines at a time where there’s a significant threat assessments [to the] country with the war in Iran,” and then best the Democrats in reconciliation.

That appeared to convince Trump, for a little while at least. But a senior White House official pushed back on the characterization that it was the lawmakers’ prowess that pushed Trump to shift his position, telling Jasmine, “No, that’s not what swayed him,” and per the president’s public comments, “He hasn’t even really been significantly swayed.”

Presidents often do not like the Senate, this one in particular. A deal only gets done if Trump accepts the idea that Senate Republicans cannot be pushed any further on his agenda items.

The senator to watch: “I’d say Katie [Britt], obviously, is one,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS’ Helen Huiskes when asked who in the conference is best at talking to Trump about the art of the possible. “But the president, he’s his own guy.”

What comes next: There’s a whole other chamber to deal with. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said he hasn’t seen the Senate deal. But he has heard about it. “It’s coming together and falling apart,” he said.

Open tabs: Democrats flip Florida state House district that includes Mar-a-Lago (The Hill); Trump and R.N.C. Lean Toward Dallas for an Unusual Midterm Convention (NYT); USDA cancels $300 million program to help farmers buy land amid anti-DEI push (Politico); Trader made nearly $1M on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets (CNN)

From K Street

NOTUS scoop: AIPAC shake-up. The powerful lobbying group is quietly looking for a new general counsel and director of political operations, according to recruiting documents marked “CONFIDENTIAL” obtained by NOTUS’ Taylor Giorno.

The current general counsel and director of political operations, Philip Friedman, is retiring after three decades at AIPAC. Executive recruitment firm Major, Lindsey & Africa is running the search for his replacement. A managing director at the firm shared the documents with at least one candidate. “Not a traditional general counsel role,” the job description reads.

From the campaign trail

Republicans’ favorite Democrat in Iowa? “Their preference would be to run against Zach Wahls,” a longtime Iowa Republican operative said of which candidate in the Senate Democratic primary Republicans would pick if they could. NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports on an increasingly unsubtle Republican campaign of elevating Wahls over state Rep. Josh Turek.

Republicans’ least-favorite Republican in Georgia? “Nobody knew who Derek Dooley was before this race, and nobody’s going to after,” a GOP operative said of Gov. Brian Kemp’s chosen candidate in the Republican Senate primary. Trump has not endorsed him and it’s likely the three-way race goes to a runoff, which leaves more time for incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, to make his general election case.

NOTUS’ Reese Gorman reports that national Republicans and the White House blame Kemp. But the governor told Reese: “I’m not going to sit around and do nothing when I have very strong feelings about what kind of candidate that we need to win in our state.”

From the Hill

Republicans are backing the Pentagon’s deployment of at least 1,000 additional troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East — for now. But that support comes with conditions when it comes to boots on the ground inside Iran, NOTUS’ Hamed Ahmadi reports.

“I’m OK with using this as another lever to get Iran to come to the table to cease hostilities,” Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters. “But if we’re going to deploy them in a dangerous setting, clearly members of Congress need to understand what that is.”

From the courts

“The definition of contempt.” That is how The New York Times, in a court filing, described the Defense Department’s new press rules. As evidence, they used an on-the-record quote from Pete Hegseth’s own special adviser, Tim Parlatore, who told the Gray Lady that the new rules are meant to effectively evade a ruling made last week.

“We used more words to say the same thing,” Parlatore told the Times for an article published Monday. “The intent is obvious: The Interim Policy is an attempted end-run around this Court’s ruling,” the Times said in a motion filed Tuesday.

NOTUS EMAIL CHAIN

Lawmakers’ airline perks: D.C. social feeds lit up yesterday after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Delta was (temporarily) closing “specialty services” for members of Congress during the DHS shutdown. Those services reportedly include a special customer service desk for ticket booking/changes and quicker access to supervisors than the average traveler.

In a town where Medallion Status is social status, the story caused a commotion. Outside of Washington, people were not happy to learn something like this exists.

We fired off an email to Gary Leff, a longtime chronicler of lawmaker airline perks on his extremely detailed travel blog, View From the Wing. He’s got posts dating back more than a decade on the special stuff lawmakers get from airlines.

“I’ve written in the past about Delta offering elite status to Georgia politicians, about VIP parking at Washington’s Reagan National airport (which was lost during recent airport renovations), and VIP and ‘protocol’ services offered by airlines,” Leff told us.

“It’s certainly awkward for politicians to receive better and different experiences than the traveling public,” he wrote, “because it can be important for leaders who are enacting policies to ‘eat their own dog food’ and experience the processes they’re mandating.”

Recent perk scandals pop up as far back as 2002, when the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy personally called the then-president of then-U.S. Airways after the carrier ended its VIP services program at DCA. After Kennedy called, the program miraculously reopened. Amid public outcry, Kennedy said he was just trying to get two staff in the private waiting room their jobs back.

More recently, there was a dustup in 2024 after Sen. Ted Cruz tried to codify special airport screenings for some federal officials into law. The plan was blocked after the public found out. And then there’s that whole thing with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace last year.

This time, lawmakers are going a different way. GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson filed the End Special Treatment for Congress at Airports Act yesterday, mirroring a bill sponsored by a fellow Republican, John Cornyn, that passed the Senate unanimously last week.

The bill is focused on TSA lines. If it passes, lawmakers will wait to be screened with the rest of us. We asked Hinson if she thinks all the other special stuff should go away, too. “Ashley thinks lawmakers shouldn’t receive these perks especially while their constituents are waiting in four-plus hours wait times to get through security,” a spox told us.

NEW ON NOTUS

Firsthand accounts: Some U.S. citizens whose families have been swept up in Trump’s mass deportation campaign traveled to Capitol Hill yesterday, where they shared harrowing stories of how the administration’s hard-line immigration agenda upended their lives, NOTUS’ Manuela Silva reports.

“You can say all you want about how these awful immigration policies don’t affect U.S. citizens, but that’s a lie,” one teenager, who spoke under a pseudonym, told lawmakers.

More: Immigrant Kids Face Longer Periods in HHS Custody During Trump’s Second Term, by Jackie Llanos

NOT US

• The Vance Whisperer: How Jacob Reses, an earnest young Republican reformer, became one of the most powerful operatives in Trump’s Washington, by Casey Quackenbush for New York
  
• Gregory Bovino’s Final Days: Harsh Words and Few Regrets, by Katie J.M. Baker and Hamed Aleaziz for The New York Times
  
• The MAGA Rebellion Over an $825 Million Plan for an ‘Arkansas Alcatraz,’ by Cameron McWhirter for The Wall Street Journal

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