Threats and Realities

Today’s notice: Rhetoric and reality in Minneapolis. Earmarks cause fussin’ and fightin’ in the House. How Trump finally got his Nobel Prize. And: Guess the letter grade that seven independent Latino voters gave Trump 2.0 so far?

THE LATEST

What are we supposed to think about this? “I think he’s threatened that in other places, other states too. So, we’ll see what happens there,” John Thune told reporters yesterday in the hours after Donald Trump said he was ready to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to Minneapolis.

Shrug is the common response. Maybe Trump will do what he threatens, maybe he won’t. Probably won’t.

“I can’t imagine that we’re gonna have tanks in the middle of Minneapolis,” Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican who said he’s broadly supportive of deploying the National Guard to cities, told Emily. “I don’t think we’re gonna have the Air Force flying over the city and all that. I just don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

This rings hollow in Minnesota. “For decades, my Republican colleagues have warned against tyrannical federal overreach. Well, it is now at their doorstep,” state Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat and a former member of Congress, told us. He’s acting like the threat is real.

Ellison said he’s “prepared to challenge that action in court” if it actually happens.

If it doesn’t, does that prove the shruggers right? Whether words matter is the political question of our age, posed once again this time by a presidential post to social media. Everyone has a different answer.

The threat has impact, even if it’s just online bluster, Minnesotans say. “At a time when we should be trying to keep people safe, finding a path forward, he continues to throw gasoline on the fire in ways that are really dangerous to people,” Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota who’s retiring after this term, told Emily.

Open tabs: ICE error meant some recruits were sent into field offices without proper training (NBC); Senators vow to revive crypto bill (Politico); Native Americans are being swept up by ICE in Minneapolis (WaPo); The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid (404 Media)

From the Hill

Pork is back, and it could cause problems for the GOP: With both a Jan. 30 deadline and the midterms on the horizon, “earmarks,” which some fiscal hawks have spent years railing against, are still haunting Congress. Rep. Chip Roy, a Freedom Caucus member, has called them “the currency of corruption.”

But for leadership, bringing home the bacon is a survival tactic. “When the seats are close, we seem to think they’re helpful,” the House’s top appropriator, Rep. Tom Cole, said. “I’m very comfortable with them.”

Still, spending-weary lawmakers broadly oppose them, they told NOTUS’ Em Luetkemeyer. Rep. Ralph Norman reintroduced a bill to ban earmarks. Rep. Victoria Spartz said they lead to “a lot of wasted money.” And Rep. Josh Brecheen said he even campaigned against them.

Yet, some hawks want to have their cake and eat it too. “I don’t think we should have any,” Rep. Andy Harris, the chair of the Freedom Caucus, said. “But as I’ve said, if we’re gonna have them, then I’ll request them.”

Speaking of funding fights, after ICE killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Democrats are stepping up calls to scale back funding for DHS, or require that it institute reforms. Cole said “what’s going on in Minnesota right now” is holding up bipartisan budget negotiations. His Democratic counterpart, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, agreed.

“Homeland was on track,” DeLauro said. “You got a tragedy of a gigantic proportion, and that has to have a very serious impact on what we do.”

It looks even bleaker in the Senate. “We don’t have a bill,” Sen. Chris Murphy, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said. “Every single minute, we’re learning new ways that the department is acting lawlessly and ways that they are wasting taxpayer money.”

Body cameras might be part of the deal. House Appropriations member Mark Amodei predicted there would be language in the funding bill that’d provide the funds, but said it’s not finalized.

From the White House

We’re moving on from the ACA subsidies debate: Yesterday, Republican Sen. Rick Scott told NOTUS shortly after the White House rolled out its “Great Healthcare Plan” (which is more of a policy framework) that the move could effectively stall the bipartisan talks to extend expired Affordable Care Act subsidies, Manuela Silva and Avani Kalra report.

It’s an outcome he’d relish, as Scott envisions his own health care plan closely matching the president’s. A White House official said the subsidies focus is “looking at a narrow sliver of the individual market.”

Machado Madness: In other news, Trump is now the owner of a Nobel Peace Prize medal, after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado said she “presented” him with it. A senior White House official confirmed to Jasmine that the president received it and will keep it.

THE BIG ONE

Trump’s focused problems: A group of seven politically independent Latino voters epitomized the president’s growing midterms problem, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports. Yes, they are upset with the economy, as they explained in a focus group hosted by the liberal Navigator Research, which Alex witnessed. And yes, that includes deep concerns about the cost of living.

But all seven also revealed a growing fury at the issues dominating headlines: Trump’s foreign interventions and his administration’s aggressive deportation tactics.

“It just seems like the mask is off,” said one of the focus group participants, a woman in her 30s. “That’s who he is. And it’s kind of crazy.”

Less than 11 months away from Election Day, the collective assessment from the group is an early warning sign for Republicans fighting to keep their majorities in both chambers. An October survey from Pew found that 65% of Latinos disapproved of the president’s immigration policies specifically.

“He’s created his own Gestapo,” said another man in the focus group. “He’s going after Hispanics now, but when he gets done with Hispanics, you know who’s next.”

Asked to rate Trump’s second term so far, each of the participants assigned him a letter grade of “D” or “F.”

To be clear: Though they may have some regrets about their votes, it has not pushed them into the arms of the Democratic Party — and at least one woman said she still would not have voted for Kamala Harris if she had a chance at a 2024 do-over. She said she would not have voted at all.

NEW ON NOTUS

Latest STOCK Act violator: Rep. Julia Letlow, a Republican from Louisiana, failed to disclose more than 210 stock and bond trades, NOTUS’ Dave Levinthal reports. Some of the disclosures were more than a year late. The total value of the trades is somewhere between $225,000 and $3.3 million.

Letlow’s staff said they proactively alerted the House Ethics Committee to the STOCK Act violations and said they were due to an error by her financial planners.

More: Pentagon to Overhaul Independent Military Newspaper Stars and Stripes, by Adora Brown

War Powers Resolutions Keep Failing. Democrats Are Going to Try Again Anyway. By Hamed Ahmadi

NOTUS PERSPECTIVES

Name an under-the-radar idea that could pass Congress this year and have a big impact on the country.

A NOTUS forum featuring: Sen. Bill Cassidy, Rep. Maxine Waters, Vivek Chilukuri, Daniel Cochrane, Lee Drutman, Joseph Dunne, Nicol Turner Lee, Maya MacGuineas and Loren DeJonge Schulman.

NOT US

• Inside the Conservative Campus Revolution, by Simon van Zuylen-Wood for New York
  
• Burned books, children’s questions: The aftermath of an attack on Mississippi’s largest synagogue, by Bracey Harris for NBC News
  
• The Provocation That Helped Create America, by Jake Lundberg for The Atlantic
  
• How a G.O.P. Senator Quietly Became a Best-Selling Author, by Catie Edmondson for The New York Times

Thank you for reading! If you liked this edition of the NOTUS newsletter, please forward it to a friend. If this newsletter was shared with you, please subscribe — it’s free! Have a tip? Email us at tips@notus.org. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our newsletter at newsletters@notus.org.