Who Blinks First?

Today’s notice: Everyone’s pointing their finger at someone else in Congress. Are boots about to be on the ground? Concerns about federal agents at polling places. The question for medical groups: to woo RFK Jr. or sue? Plus: Republicans’ 2028 field takes shape.

THE LATEST

Stalemate. Impasse. Complete breakdown. The Department of Homeland Security’s funding lapse officially became the longest shutdown in U.S. history over the weekend, and lawmakers have left D.C. for their two-week vacation recess without a plan to turn the lights back on. The only movement at the moment is a lot of finger-pointing.

“Obviously, the leadership in the Senate — and that’s on both sides of the aisle — has a real disgust for this president and House leadership because they didn’t even have the guts to call Speaker Mike Johnson and let him know what happened,” Rep. Tim Burchett said on Fox News yesterday. Burchett joined the rest of his House Republicans colleagues in rejecting the bipartisan Senate-passed version of the funding bill, which covered all of DHS except ICE and parts of Border Patrol.

Burchett said the Senate voted in the middle of the night with no effort to inform House members. So, the Republican-led House passed its original continuing resolution. There is currently no plan to reconcile the two bills, and it’s unclear who will cry uncle first.

FWIW: One Senate Republican source refuted claims that the House GOP was blindsided by the eventual plan and noted that the Speaker “knew the play” in the upper chamber on Thursday night.

Left in the lurch, of course, are the hundreds of thousands of people who work for DHS. Checks for TSA agents who have gone unpaid for more than one full cycle will arrive either today or tomorrow, and they will also receive pay moving forward thanks to Trump’s executive action, a senior administration official told Jasmine. And while ICE and CBP frontline agents are getting paid, thanks to money secured in Trump’s domestic policy bill passed last summer, much of their support staff is not, along with other federal workers in the Coast Guard and CISA, among other agencies.

Two complicating factors: reconciliation and the president. The Senate’s bipartisan deal hinged on the prospect that ICE and CBP would be funded later by another Republican-only reconciliation bill. The problem? Neither chamber was ever quite sure a reconciliation bill could pass.

“I’m not going to roll the dice on passing another reconciliation bill,” Rep. Lisa McClain told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo yesterday. “We have a one-seat majority, Maria. I hope we could do a reconciliation, but hope isn’t a strategy.”

Trump appears to be in favor of the House GOP’s rebellion. “I think the Senate is playing it too soft,” Trump said aboard Air Force One last night. “The Republicans are very wonderful people but we’re dealing with very sick individuals. The Democrats are sick. There’s something wrong, they’re like terrorists.”

The president wouldn’t say whether he would sign a bill without funding for ICE and CBP, and called on the Senate to go back to (his) original plan: Getting rid of the filibuster, passing the SAVE America Act and only then addressing DHS funding.

Open Tabs: No Kings protests fill streets at over 3,300 rallies in all 50 states, a record number (WaPo); F.B.I. Said to Dig Up Old Investigative Files on Democratic Lawmaker (NYT); New pro-AI group preps $100M midterm blitz to boost Trump’s agenda (Axios); Investigators Examine Contractor Installed at FEMA Under Kristi Noem (WSJ)

From the White House

It’s the question on everyone’s mind: Could Trump put boots on the ground in Iran?

“I just have lots of alternatives,” the president said to reporters on that AF1 flight on Sunday, when asked if he was still considering it.

Over the weekend he told his 12 million Truth Social followers to watch Fox News host Mark Levin’s interview with Washington Post foreign policy columnist Marc Thiessen. The show focused heavily on the reasons Trump should begin ground operations. “Why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there’s a lot of reasons — and we wouldn’t need 300,000 of them,” Levin said. “It’s this uranium too. We’ve got to get the uranium.”

It’s not the sort of thing the president would endorse if he wanted to tamp down on speculation that he plans to escalate the war. Adding fuel to the fire, The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations.

There’s still disagreement outside the administration. “I don’t think it will go over well,” one Republican strategist, who is close to the White House but against boots on the ground, told Jasmine.

Still, the public line from the White House is that negotiations are ongoing and the president prefers diplomacy. Trump said on AF1 last night that a ceasefire deal could come “soon.”

“I would only say that we’re doing extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them, and then we always have to blow them up.”

From the Hill

Another discharge petition gets its wings: Over the weekend, Rep. Ayanna Pressley got her 218th signature (all Democrats plus support from four Republicans) on a measure to force a House vote on restoring temporary deportation protections for Haitians living in the U.S. The Trump administration has already asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on its push to yank the Temporary Protected Status designation for immigrant communities from Haiti and Syria, and a decision is expected later this year.

From the campaign trail

Republicans’ 2028 star search gets real. In a surprise to few, Vice President JD Vance won the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 2028 straw poll for the second straight year, NOTUS’ Amelia Benavides-Colon reports.

But as a surprise to some, Secretary of State Marco Rubio clinched the runner-up position with 35% of the vote, certifying his rapidly growing popularity among the MAGA(ish) base. That even puts him ahead of his 2016 total, when he also came in at No. 2 with 30%. As a reminder, the winner of that year’s straw poll was Sen. Ted Cruz.

Those numbers haven’t cleared the (theoretical) field. Cruz declined to rule out launching another campaign for president after his CPAC speech, telling Fox News that “there will be plenty of time to make those decisions.”

And for chief Trump foe-but-sometimes-friend Rand Paul? The Kentucky senator told CBS yesterday that he was “thinking about” running for president in 2028 as part of a bid to unite free-market libertarians with the business community.

From your favorite podcast app

In this week’s On NOTUS, Rep. Yassamin Ansari speaks with Daniella Diaz about her experience as the only Iranian-American Democrat in Congress as the war with Iran continues. She believes the war is “wildly, wildly illegal” and the president’s shifting goals make it difficult for Congress to have a clear picture of what’s going on.

“My colleagues and I continue to have massive concerns, and we still don’t even have an off-ramp. The president changes his tune every single day on this.” She also discusses who she’d like to see run for president in 2028 (one of them has the initials A-O-C).

THE BIG ONE

To woo or to sue? The major medical societies have approached Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with a generous dose of skepticism.

But one place where there’s growing engagement? The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines.

Enter Bobby Mukkamala, the president of the American Medical Association, who posed for a photo with Kennedy during a celebration to mark the new guidelines’ rollout, NOTUS’ Margaret Manto reports.

“With Secretary Kennedy, I mentioned to him, actually, the first time we met, ‘You know what? On the vaccine issue, I know we see things differently. I’m totally fine with putting that on the shelf and working on this together,’” Mukkamala said of his decision to support HHS’s nutrition changes.

Other groups are taking a much different tack. Many are escalating their opposition by filing lawsuits. “We had no choice but to engage in a lawsuit to protect our patients, protect the practice of medicine and ensure public health,” American College of Physicians president Jason Goldman told Margaret.

NOTUS Perspectives

A crude ad about a banana and a primary that could predict the GOP’s future: From Oklahoma, anin-depth report on a race that may reveal whether the Republican base is finally tired of the culture wars — or just getting started.

NEW ON NOTUS

Agents to the polls? It’s a possibility that the Trump administration won’t rule out. The operating stance among officials has been a version of “I haven’t had that conversation,” but never a “no.”

“I have had no discussions about that with President Trump or Secretary Markwayne Mullin. It has not come up in any conversation,” White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday.

That status quo has election officials and lawmakers on high alert. “I am very concerned about this,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar told NOTUS. “I think there’s going to be a lot of litigation because to me, that’s where it feels like they’re headed. They’re trying to scare people so they don’t want to vote.”

More: Pope Leo Appears to Rebuke Trump and Hegseth in Palm Sunday Prayer, by Amelia Benavides-Colón

NOT US

• ‘Shameless in a Good Way’: Rahm Emanuel Is Already Shaking up 2028, by Adam Wren for Politico
  
• The Manosphere Turns on Trump, by Elaine Godfrey for The Atlantic
  
• How Iran is making a mint from Donald Trump’s war, by The Economist

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