Today’s notice: Is the House coming back soon? Trump’s $200 million request. Bernie stands by his Maine man. Where’s the beef (coming from)? Rural hospital politics. And: The mother who lobbies for her son.
THE LATEST
Time to start booking flights, House Republicans. “If it were up to me, we’d come back right away,” Rep. Tom Cole told the NOTUS Hill team yesterday. He added that he respects Mike Johnson’s choice to keep the House out of session, but the Appropriations Committee chair is one of a growing chorus of Republicans who are nervously looking at the calendar and saying, it’s time for another continuing resolution.
The timeline: The CR passed the House in September (and still can’t pass the Senate), and only funds the government through Nov. 21 — aka, less than a month away. “There’s no way” to get all 12 appropriations bills done by then, Sen. John Barrasso said. Especially with Democrats continuing to press their leverage as a largely unified bloc.
There’s only one way to get a new CR. The House has to come back. Nothing has been decided, sources familiar with the situation told NOTUS, but there have been preliminary talks among House Republicans about returning to pass a new CR. Many are still hoping some Democrats relent and pass the September bill with their GOP colleagues. But no one watching this shutdown would say that’s imminent.
The House GOP is “pretty comfortable” with its position right now, Cole said. “Probably inadvertently — and I think the president’s trying to do the right thing. He’s trying to make sure troops get paid, he’s trying to make sure that people that need WIC get WIC, and those sorts of things — but it’s probably taking some of the pressure off.”
But clock pressure is coming. Cole wants a bill that keeps the government open until January, which would give his committee time to work. A new CR could offer a chance for Senate Democrats to try to negotiate what they want in exchange for their votes, but it’s hard to see Republicans bringing them to the table. However, the optics of the House passing another bill and leaving again are not ideal.
This is a thrilling development for Democrats, who for the past three weeks of the shutdown have been trying to make Johnson’s extended recess a liability for Republicans. They may have held out long enough to make it stick. “It’s very hard to get out of a shutdown if the majority party has an unexpected monthlong break,” Sen. Brian Schatz said.
Open tabs: White House Moves Toward Settlement With First Public University (NYT); Arizona Sues the House Over Johnson’s Failure to Swear In Grijalva (NOTUS); Trump and Putin cancel Budapest summit over Ukraine (FT); White House expands East Wing demolition (WaPo)
From the White House
“If I get money from our country, I will do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House,” Donald Trump told reporters of the more $200 million he is reportedly asking the DOJ to hand him as restitution for its criminal investigations into him. He also acknowledged that it’s “strange to make a decision where I am paying myself” as the head of the government, but insisted that he deserved the money.
Democrats immediately voiced outrage. “It is completely absurd,” Rep. Dan Goldman told CNN. Rep. Jamie Raskin and his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee called it “the ultimate Shutdown Shakedown” and said they’d launch an investigation into the matter.
From the Hill
Mother of the year: “You may have heard of my son,” Donna Gallo Ingrassia told staff in Rep. Raskin’s office when she knocked on his Hill office door in June. Her son, Paul Ingrassia, was Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel until he opted to drop out of consideration last night following a series of ugly controversies.
Donna was not happy with an open letter Raskin and other Democrats signed calling him unqualified for the job. She also went to see another signatory, Rep. Robert Garcia, in his office, NOTUS’ Reese Gorman and Riley Rogerson report. She told staff there she wanted to “give him a piece of my mind.” Both offices said the lawmakers were out of town while the House was on recess.
“Paul is articulate, intelligent, and wise beyond his years. He has strong family support and leads a life of faith, integrity and virtue. Very loyal,” Donna texted NOTUS when asked about the visits.
As for whether he would make it through the Senate confirmation process: “Outcome : God’s will 🙏.”
Beefin’: A rare (as opposed to well done with ketchup) moment of broad, public opposition to Trump from Republican lawmakers has emerged over the administration’s scheme to import beef from Argentina as part of larger efforts to prop up President Javier Milei’s economic agenda.
“That’s undercutting our ‘Made in America’ cattle,” Sen. Steve Daines told NOTUS’ Haley Byrd Wilt and Hamed Ahmadi. “There’s nothing more America than the cowboys and cow-calf operations they support.”
From the campaign trail
Dealing with Graham Platner’s tattoo: “He went through a dark period,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told reporters yesterday as the candidate he endorsed in the Maine Senate race faced down a controversy over his apparent Nazi-affiliated chest tattoo. “He has apologized for the stupid remarks, the hurtful remarks that he made, and I’m confident that he’s going to run a great campaign and that he’s going to win.”
This is Platner’s story too, and he’s sticking to it. The oyster farmer denied that he was a “secret Nazi” and said he got the ink while on a drunken trip to Croatia during his time in the Marines. “At no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’ It never came up,” he told the “Pod Save America” crew Monday.
THE BIG ONE
The rural hospital crunch: NOTUS’ Torrence Banks reports on the last days in a labor and delivery unit at the St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia, Georgia. The hospital’s management announced that “recent Congressional cuts to Medicaid solidified” its decision to shutter the unit.
Patients are anxious about finding new doctors, and medical professionals expect they’ll shift their birthing needs to the ER. “It is not the general thing that people in emergency rooms are fixed to deal with,” a high-ranking official at the hospital told Torrence.
In the South — much of which is considered a maternity-care desert — and across the country, the cuts made by Republicans’ budget law are expected to threaten access to care.
“A lot of these women are either going to have babies on the road because they can’t make it in time, or they’re gonna just go into labor and go into the ER here, and hope that the ER can deliver their baby,” a former nurse in the unit told Torrence. “Because a lot of people think that that’ll be the same, and it’s not.”
NEW ON NOTUS
Leavitt campaign debt: NOTUS’ Taylor Giorno reports that Karoline Leavitt’s failed 2022 congressional campaign still hasn’t repaid thousands in contributions it accepted over the legal limit, according to its latest filing with the FEC. Neither Leavitt nor her campaign committee responded to a request for comment.
Trump’s NYC: The president has promised to take federal funds away from New York if Zohran Mamdani wins the city’s mayoral race, and the polls show he’s likely going to. NOTUS’ Shifra Dayak reports that experts are preparing for the economic fallout. Two things are true here: a loss of federal funds would affect the city’s budget, and budgeting would be affected as the inevitable court challenges work their way through the system.
More: Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Arrested After Threatening to Kill Hakeem Jeffries, Authorities Say, by Amelia Benavides-Colón
NOTUS PERSPECTIVES
“What is one surprising, under-covered way that AI will influence American society?”
A NOTUS forum featuring Greg Allen, Janet Egan, Kay Firth-Butterfield, Ryan Heath, Reid Hoffman, Anne Neuberger, Rep. Jay Obernolte, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Miriam Vogel and Andrew Yang.
NOT US
- How Tulsa’s Mayor Pushed Through Racial Justice Compensation, by Brentin Mock for Bloomberg
- How a Bizarre Healing-TV-Screen Tycoon Is Funding MAGA Media, by Will Sommer for The Bulwark
- ICE’s ‘Athletically Allergic’ Recruits, By Nick Miroff for The Atlantic
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