General
Congress seeks to avoid an approps nightmare before Christmas
Jennifer Shutt, Roll Call
Congress returns to Washington this week with a challenging to-do list for December that not only includes drafting articles of impeachment and finalizing a massive trade deal, but also funding the government. Appropriators and congressional leadership have just three weeks to resolve dozens of policy disputes between House and Senate spending bills — a daunting but routine exercise that will determine whether there’s a partial government shutdown right as lawmakers are set to leave for their winter break.
U.S. Drone Killed Afghan Civilians, Officials Say
Farooq Jan Mangal and Fahim Abed, The New York Times
An American drone strike on a car carrying a woman who had just given birth in southeastern Afghanistan left five people dead, including the mother, three of her relatives and the driver, Afghan officials and family members said on Sunday. The strike in the Alisher District of Khost Province occurred either late Friday night or early Saturday, they said.
China suspends U.S. military visits to Hong Kong, sanctions U.S.-based NGOs
Cate Cadell, Reuters
China said on Monday U.S. military ships and aircraft won’t be allowed to visit Hong Kong, and also announced sanctions against several U.S. non-government organizations for encouraging protesters to “engage in extremist, violent and criminal acts.” The measures were announced by China’s Foreign Ministry in response to U.S. legislation passed last week supporting anti-government protesters.
1st Supreme Court Gun-Rights Battle In 10 Years May Transform Legal Landscape
Nina Totenberg, NPR News
Guns: when and how to regulate them. It’s one of the biggest issues across the country.
Lisa Page Speaks: ‘There’s No Fathomable Way I Have Committed Any Crime at All’
Molly Jong-Fast, The Daily Beast
It’s not often that you interview a subject who has no interest in being famous. But recently, I did just that when I sat down with Lisa Page the week before Thanksgiving in my hotel room in Washington, D.C.
Ukraine’s Zelensky is making headway against corruption. But the fight risks angering Trump.
Michael Birnbaum and David L. Stern, The Washington Post
By the end of this month, more than 500 Ukrainian prosecutors will be out of their jobs as part of sweeping professional reviews under Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Among the prosecutors heading for the exit: a key Kyiv contact for Rudolph W. Giuliani.
How a Divided Left Is Losing the Battle on Abortion
Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, The New York Times
The pin was small, and rusted on the back. Sharon Wood had packed it away in 1973 as a relic of a battle fought and won: the image of a black coat hanger, slashed out by a red line.
White House & Administration
U.S. May Retaliate on French Digital Tax Monday After Probe
Brendan Murray, Bloomberg
The U.S. will announce on Monday what retaliatory action, if any, it will take in response to a digital tax France instituted this year that will hit large American tech companies. President Donald Trump and France’s Emmanuel Macron had agreed in August to try to negotiate a compromise, but a 90-day deadline for talks expired this week without a resolution.
President Trump Shifts Tone Ahead of NATO Summit
Catherine Lucey, The Wall Street Journal
President Trump heads to a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this week, seeking to showcase his work on the world stage as the impeachment inquiry continues at home. Mr. Trump, who as a candidate labeled the alliance obsolete, has upended past gatherings with his complaints that members must spend more on defense.
Justice’s election-year conundrum: How to probe team Trump
Darren Samuelsohn, Politico
The Justice Department is in another election-season jam — faced with politically loaded decisions over how aggressively to investigate President Donald Trump and his allies in the heat of the 2020 campaign. Legal experts see signs that DOJ is laying the groundwork for a potential criminal probe into whether the president and his top advisers broke federal laws by withholding a White House meeting and nearly $400 million dollars in foreign aid from Ukraine unless the country’s new leaders agreed to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
Top human rights post goes vacant as Trump nominee confronts links to post-9/11 torture program
Mike DeBonis, The Washington Post
President Trump’s decision to nominate an official involved in the Pentagon’s post-9/11 use of harsh interrogation techniques to the State Department’s top human rights post has sparked a standoff in the Senate that has extended a nearly three-year vacancy in a key diplomatic position. Trump’s nomination in January of Marshall Billingslea as undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights raised immediate alarms among the activists and former government officials who believe his confirmation would send a dismal message about the United States’ commitment to human rights abroad.
Senate
Sen. John Kennedy doubles down on claims of Ukrainian interference
Ursula Perano, Axios
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) argued in a testy exchange on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he believes “both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” claiming without evidence that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “actively worked” for Hillary Clinton. Last Sunday, Kennedy told Fox News’ Chris Wallace he believed a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine tried to hack the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 election.
Why Republicans Will Sidestep Their Garland Rule for the Court in 2020
Carl Hulse, The New York Times
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was released from the hospital last weekend after another in a string of health scares, blue America breathed a sigh of relief. Only one more month, many whispered, until the start of a presidential election year when filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court would be off limits in the Senate.
House
Maxine Waters’ new challenge: AOC and freshman upstarts
Zachary Warmbrodt, Politico
California Democrat Katie Porter fought with her over committee procedures. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad of progressive female lawmakers withheld their support from her over the Export-Import Bank.
House Democrats won’t wait on possibly insider testimony, Florida Dem says
Rishika Dugyala, Politico
A court ruling could push current and former White House aides to testify in the impeachment inquiry — but Rep. Val Demings said Sunday that Democrats won’t be waiting on the final decision. “We’re not going to play games with them. The American people are not going to, I think, tolerate any games,” the Florida Democrat, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week.”
2020
Joe Biden kicks off ‘No Malarkey’ bus tour across Iowa, with focus on rural communities, their values
Stephen Gruber-Miller, Des Moines Register
Former Vice President Joe Biden kicked off an eight-day, 18-county bus tour Saturday as he ramps up his campaigning in rural Iowa. In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Biden said his “No Malarkey” bus tour is the best way to meet Iowans face to face and to show up in the parts of the state that, he said, “tend to be ignored.”
Buttigieg turns to black pastor to discuss racism, poverty
Elana Schor, The Associated Press
As he labors to win over black voters whose support is vital to his Democratic presidential bid, Pete Buttigieg found a receptive host on Sunday in a civil rights activist who has sought to continue the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s push for a racially diverse national campaign against poverty. After attending services at the Rev. William Barber’s Greenleaf Christian Church, Buttigieg stayed for a discussion with the Poor People’s Campaign — begun by King shortly before he was assassinated in 1968.
Democrats aim to catch up to Trump’s 2020 cash advantage
Brian Slodysko, The Associated Press
Democrats are narrowing President Donald Trump’s early spending advantage, with two billionaire White House hopefuls joining established party groups to target the president in key battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of next year’s election. Priorities USA and American Bridge, two of the leading Democratic outside groups, are ramping up operations.
Trump builds a bad cop, good cop routine for his 2020 race
Gabby Orr, Politico
When Donald Trump’s reelection team shamelessly acknowledged during a World Series campaign commercial that America’s 45th president is “no Mr. Nice Guy,” it was doing more than shock-and-awe advertising. Noticeably absent from the 30-second spot was the president’s genteel sidekick: Mike Pence.
2020 Democratic Candidates Wage Escalating Fight (on the Merits of Fighting)
Mark Leibovich, The New York Times
Pete Buttigieg has a nifty politician’s knack for coming off as a soothing, healing figure who projects high-mindedness — even while he’s plainly kicking his opponents in the teeth. “There is a lot to be angry about,” he was saying, cheerfully. Mr. Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., was seated aboard his campaign bus outside a New Hampshire middle school before a recent Sunday afternoon rally.
How Bloomberg Could Win. Again.
David Freedlander, Politico
Michael Bloomberg has begun his improbable bid for the presidency with a rollout you could call unconventional, to be charitable. The big splash was news of his $37 million television ad buy; then there was an overstuffed campaign bio-spot in which the candidate’s voice wasn’t heard and campaign trips to two states that don’t hold primaries for months.
300+ Trump ads taken down by Google, YouTube
CBS News
How to handle political ads on social media has become a growing concern as the 2020 U.S. presidential election approaches. Facebook has taken most of the heat, after refusing to remove an ad for President Trump’s reelection featuring false information about his opponent Joe Biden.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill ends U.S. Senate campaign
Brian Lyman, Montgomery Advertiser
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill Sunday said he would suspend his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, citing the entry of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions in the race last month. “We are grateful for the old friends we reconnected with and for the new friends we have made along the way,” Merrill said in a statement on Sunday.
States
Georgia governor set to buck Trump on Senate appointment
Alex Isenstadt and Melanie Zanona, Politico
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has begun informing Republican officials he plans to appoint financial services executive Kelly Loeffler to the state’s soon-to-be vacant Senate seat, according to three people familiar with the conversations. Members of the state’s Republican congressional delegation were among those to receive a heads-up from Kemp on his decision, according to an aide to a House Republican from Georgia who received a call from the governor over the weekend.
Ron DeSantis isn’t on Donald Trump’s TV anymore. That’s on purpose.
Steve Contorno, Tampa Bay Times
There was a time when President Donald Trump could turn on Fox News at any given hour and there was a good chance Ron DeSantis would be on it, defending the White House or casting doubt on special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation. Case in point: Trump once tuned into his favorite network while on Air Force One and caught a segment featuring DeSantis, then a congressman.
Virginia targets historic push on equal rights amendment for women
Rachel Frazin, The Hill
The election of a Democratic legislature in Virginia is breathing new life into a decades-long push for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would enshrine equality for women into the U.S. constitution. Ratifying the ERA, a longstanding goal for women’s rights advocates, needs approval from just one more state to cross the three-fourths threshold of support needed to become a constitutional amendment.
Advocacy
Goldman Sachs seeks to rebrand as wealth takes center stage in the Democratic presidential race
Tony Newmyer, The Washington Post
An unlikely corporate name kept popping up when Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) visited a community college campus here for a recent forum dedicated to small-business issues. The candidate, who has staked hopes of reviving her candidacy on Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, was 1,100 miles and a world away from Goldman Sachs’s Wall Street headquarters.
John Kerry Launches Star-Studded Climate Coalition
Lisa Friedman, The New York Times
John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state, has formed a new bipartisan coalition of world leaders, military brass and Hollywood celebrities to push for public action to combat climate change. The name, World War Zero, is supposed to evoke both the national security threat posed by the earth’s warming and the type of wartime mobilization that Mr. Kerry argued would be needed to stop the rise in carbon emissions before 2050.
Uncle Sam Wants to Shop Online, Too, and Amazon Is Gunning for His Business
Ryan Tracy, The Wall Street Journal
The Trump administration is testing a new method for federal agencies to buy office supplies and other goods online, a move that could give Amazon.com Inc. and its competitors a foothold in a market worth as much as $50 billion a year. Next year, the General Services Administration is set to contract with privately run “e-marketplace platforms,” as it calls them, making them available to other federal agencies as an alternative to existing government-run purchasing websites.
Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives
Will John Roberts Constrain Trump?
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
The final weeks of November may be remembered as the moment when Donald Trump crushed the last vestiges of resistance to him in the Republican Party. The sole remaining question is whether that conquest extends to the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court—especially the chief justice, John Roberts.
Mark Penn, What the $&#! Were You Doing in Donald Trump’s White House?
Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast
He’s never been a fan of impeachment, but he’s an expert on the process and the politics, having helped President Clinton navigate his way through a highly partisan impeachment in 1999. Now pollster Mark Penn is sharing his strategy—and his polling data—with President Trump, assuring him, in an account of their meeting first reported by The Washington Post, that the Republican-controlled Senate will not remove him from office.
Research Reports and Polling
Public Opinion, the Role of Government, and the Candidates
Frank Newport, Gallup
Government is the most important problem facing the United States today, according to the American people. This makes government a critically important issue in the 2020 election.
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