"Congress approved a temporary spending bill to prevent a partial government shutdown this weekend, with Speaker Mike Johnson forced once again to turn to a coalition made up mostly of Democrats to clear it in the House, followed by passage in the Senate," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"House lawmakers approved a temporary spending bill to prevent a partial government shutdown this weekend, with Speaker Mike Johnson forced once again to turn to a coalition made up mostly of Democrats to pass it," the Wall Street Journal reports. "The vote was 320 to 99, with slightly more than half of Republicans joining with almost all Democrats to support the measure."
"House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants Democrats to stick to a Senate-passed bipartisan foreign aid bill as centrists mount a long-shot bid to force action on a pared-down package," Politico reports.
Said Jeffries: "The only way forward is the bipartisan, comprehensive Senate-passed national security bill. House Republicans need to put it on the floor for an up-or-down vote. And everybody under the Capitol dome knows it will pass."
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said he will run to succeed Mitch McConnell as Republican leader, becoming the first to officially announce his candidacy for the job, Politico reports.
Punchbowl News: "Cornyn, the first GOP senator to officially jump into the race to succeed Mitch McConnell, has been talking to any Republican with a pulse to try to gin up support for his bid to be Senate Republican leader. In fact, Cornyn's call with Lake came as another potential McConnell successor, GOP Conference Chair John Barrasso, was out in Arizona campaigning for her."
"Cornyn's blitz includes nearly every member of his conference and the most important Republican in the country — former President Donald Trump."
"The 72-year-old Cornyn, who's been in the Senate since 2002, has been very aggressive out of the gate. Cornyn is relying heavily on moves he's previously made on the fundraising front, including raking in money for GOP incumbents and candidates even before they ask for it."
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) responded to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R):
PAXTON: It will be difficult for John Cornyn to be an effective leader since he is anti-Trump, anti-gun, and will be focused on his highly competitive primary campaign in 2026. Republicans deserve better in their next leader and Texans deserve another conservative Senator.
CORNYN: Hard to run from prison, Ken.
"Donald Trump is encouraging Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) to run for GOP leader — a move that would significantly shake up the race to succeed Mitch McConnell later this year," Politico reports.
"Daines currently helms Senate Republicans' campaign arm. Daines indicated to Trump that he appreciates Trump's encouragement but is focused on winning back the Senate majority this fall."
Axios: "Much of the speculation about McConnell's successor has focused on the 'three Johns' — Thune, Cornyn and Barrasso — but Trump's involvement signals there could be a long race for the leadership post ahead."
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told CNN he talked to Donald Trump about his "intention" to run for Senate GOP leader and "told him that I had worked with him when I was the Majority Whip for four years. And worked very successfully with him and his team, and I look forward to doing that again."
"Sen. John Barrasso could throw his cowboy hat in the ring with the other Two Johns — Cornyn and Thune — for the Senate GOP's top job. There's a much easier path to promotion, though, as he wrestles with his decision," Politico reports.
"The current No. 3 Senate Republican could eschew a run to succeed Mitch McConnell and instead pursue the party's whip job this fall, elevating him to the No. 2 role, a leadership suite, security detail and being at the heart of Senate floor action every day."
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is "reaching out to each of his colleagues directly to discuss the future of the Senate Republican Conference and what they would like to see in their next leader," Politico reports.
Donald Trump suggested on Fox News he might back a 15-week national abortion ban: "More and more I'm hearing about 15 weeks. I haven't decided yet."
Linda Greenhouse: "I never thought I'd be grateful to the Alabama Supreme Court for anything, but now I am. With its decision deeming frozen embryos to be children under state law, that all-Republican court has done the impossible. It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling."
Dahlia Lithwick: "What we witnessed in Alabama wasn't simply a continuation of a decadeslong fundamentalist religious project to conscript women into having babies, whether they wish to or not. Our imaginations must expand to see this as of a piece with an older and more pernicious American tradition in which the state decides who gets to raise your children, regardless of your preferences—because your own family is not actually in your control, but subject to the state's seizure and redistribution to those who might raise them better than you will."
"While a pregnancy might have been difficult on a 10-year-old body, a woman's body is designed to carry life."— Cincinnati Right to Life leader Laura Strietmann, commenting on the 10-year-old Ohio girl who was raped and had to travel to Indiana for an abortion.
"A half dozen swing-district House Republicans are signing onto a resolution supporting access to fertility treatments," Axios reports.
"Republicans including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and former President Trump have scrambled to distance themselves from an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that has frozen IVF services in the state."
"President Joe Biden will advocate plans to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations as well as to lower prescription drug prices in his State of the Union address next week, in what aides describe as an effort to lay out second term proposals for protecting and implementing his economic agenda," Bloomberg reports.
"It's also a chance to contrast himself with the other side… I used to say to Obama: Is this a referendum on the incumbent? The incumbent usually loses. If it's a choice, the incumbent usually wins, and you start to set that choice up in this period."— Jim Messina, quoted by Politico, on the opportunity the State of the Union address presents for President BIden.
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) will deliver the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address on March 7, NBC News reports.
"She's seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, and her name has been tossed around as a potential vice presidential pick."
New York Times: "Rarely do the current and former commanders in chief arrive on the same scene on the same day to present such sharply different approaches to an issue as intractable as immigration. Even rarer still was the reality that the two men are most likely hurtling toward a rematch in November."
"But the dueling border events were about something even more fundamental than immigration policy. They spoke to the competing visions of power and presidency that are at stake in 2024 — of autocracy and the value of democracy itself."
"In a stunning moment today, Joe Biden used his second U.S.-Mexico border visit as president to urge Donald Trump to work with him on passing the toughest immigration law in decades," Axios reports.
"Biden campaigned on ending Trump-era border policies. Now he's accusing Republicans of standing in the way of his efforts to halt a historic migrant crisis."
Said Biden: "Instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me."
New York Times: "Republicans have long had an edge politically on the issue, with the G.O.P. advantage swelling even larger of late. In the fall of 2020, Mr. Trump was more trusted on immigration by a sizable 16 percentage points, according to NBC News polling at the time. That margin has more than doubled to 35 percentage points as of this January — the largest advantage either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump had on any of the nine issues tested."
"But Biden allies believe the recent decision by Republican congressional leaders — at Mr. Trump's urging — to abandon a potential bipartisan border deal has provided the party a rare opening to cut into that deficit."
"When Donald Trump speaks at the southern border in Texas on Thursday, you can expect to hear him talk about 'migrant crime,' a category he has coined and defined as a terrifying binge of criminal activity committed by undocumented immigrants spreading across the country," NBC News reports.
"But despite the former president's campaign rhetoric, expert analysis and available data from major-city police departments show that despite several horrifying high-profile incidents, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States."
New York Times: A look at the politics behind Trump and Biden's dueling border stops.
"Mass deportations are going to start, if you don't like that, then don't vote for President Trump."— Steve Bannon, on his podcast. Got it.
Donald Trump said he "will use local police to implement his plan for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants if he's elected," Axios reports. Said Trump: "We have to deport a lot of people, and they have to start immediately."
Trump told Sean Hannity that he would give "immunity" to police "to give the job they have to do" and said the officers understand who the migrants are.
David Frum: "Mexico's president gets to determine whether an immigration crisis dominates headlines in a U.S. election year."
"People who don't speak languages. We have languages coming in to our country, nobody that speaks those languages. They're truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them."— Donald Trump, while making a visit to the southern border.
Dan Pfeiffer: "The Supreme Court stay means that the trial in Manhattan over Trump's use of campaign funds to pay hush money to cover up an affair will begin before too long. That case will almost certainly finish well before the election. Voters might actually determine whether they are willing to send a convicted felon to the White House. Because it is not a federal case, newly elected Trump cannot pardon himself or commute his own sentence."
"There are two downsides to the Manhattan case. One, polls show that of all of Trump's crimes, violating campaign finance laws to cover up an affair is not as concerning to voters as illegally hoarding classified documents or fomenting an insurrection. Two, these sorts of crimes rarely end in jail time for first-time offenders. So, our dreams of watching Trump frogmarched into prison may have to wait for another day."
Rolling Stone: "Various Trump advisers and sources close to the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner were jubilant about the Supreme Court's decision, with all of them now viewing it as highly unlikely that a federal election interference trial will happen before Election Day."
"Though a Trump criminal trial in New York is expected to begin next month, the former president's team had long viewed a Jan. 6-related trial as more politically damaging. For months, Trump's lawyers expected the federal trial to start this summer, and they have actively prepared for that scenario. Now, they likely don't have to worry about that timeline."
Said one lawyer close to Trump on Wednesday night: "Literally popping champagne right now."
Nikki Haley said all of former President Donald Trump's legal cases should be "dealt with" before the presidential election, NBC News reports.
Said Haley: "I think all of the cases should be dealt with before November. We need to know what's going to happen before it, before the presidency happens, because after that, should he become president, I don't think any of it's going to get heard."
"The Biden administration is considering whether to provide Ukraine with badly needed arms and ammunition from Pentagon stockpiles even though the government has run out of money to replace those munitions," the New York Times reports.
"Such a move would be a short-term measure to help tide over Ukraine's armed forces until Congress breaks a monthslong impasse and approves a larger military aid package to the country."
Anne Applebaum: "Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president's foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility."
"For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don't they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize."
David Graham: "Dour, somber Mitch McConnell was gleeful, if such a thing can be imagined. Surveying the aftermath of the January 6 riot, the longtime Kentucky senator concluded that Donald Trump was finished."
Said McConnell, to a reporter: "I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself. He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger."
"That was a little more than three years ago. Today, McConnell surrendered to Trump. The Republican leader announced that he will step down from his leadership post in November, meaning that if Trump wins the presidential election, as he currently seems favored to do, he'll have a Senate Republican leader in place more ready to work with him."
The Hill: McConnell exit surprises GOP: "It's Trump's party now."
Josh Marshall: "Mitch McConnell is one of those perhaps historic figures for whom the greatness of his skill and impact are matched only in inverse by the malignity of his impact on our politics. To put it more brashly, McConnell was great at doing political evil."
"There is now a kind of rearguard effort to remake McConnell as an institutionalist, a last vestige of the pre-Trumpian GOP. And on that last point, being a vestige, there's some truth. On being an institutionalist, not at all."
Politico: "We asked congressional insiders, historians and political analysts to choose the longtime Senate GOP leader's most consequential achievement as he prepares to step down."
"Donald Trump's scramble to cover millions in legal fines could start to come to a head next week, as the ex-president has only until next weekend to pay the $83.3 million verdict in E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit unless a court rules otherwise — and Carroll expressed 'very serious concerns' Thursday about Trump's ability to pay," Forbes reports.
E. Jean Carroll said Donald Trump should not be given more time to post the $83.3 million she was awarded in her defamation trial against the former president, telling the judge that Trump is the "least trustworthy of borrowers," CNN reports.
"On Friday, Trump asked the judge overseeing the defamation case to give him additional time to satisfy the judgment while he appeals the jury verdict or allow him to post a lesser amount ranging from $24 million to $40 million."
"Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant who is charged with lying to the FBI about the Biden family, will remain in jail until his trial," Politico reports.
Philip Bump: "Hunter Biden's appearance in front of investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees unfolded a bit like a Bruce Lee movie."
"Republican legislators and interviewers challenging the president's son on the House majority's behalf would throw out an allegation, often one that's been worn smooth after tumbling around in the right-wing media universe for the past year or two. And Biden would invariably swat it away, stripping off the layers of innuendo that had been applied by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) or Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) or any of myriad Fox News commentators."
"This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). But at no point was a question left unanswered — including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment — or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion."
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) questioned Hunter Biden in a closed door hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees:
GAETZ: Were you on drugs when you were on the Burisma board?
BIDEN: Mr. Gaetz, look me in the eye. You really think that's appropriate to ask me?
GAETZ: Absolutely.
BIDEN: Of all the people sitting around this table, do you think that's appropriate to ask me?
Over 100 Palestinians were reportedly killed and at least 700 wounded in Gaza City yesterday after Israeli forces opened fire on crowds gathering near a convoy of aid trucks. The chaotic scene drew conflicting accounts—witnesses accused Israeli troops of firing as residents received food supplies, while the Israeli military claimed the crowd stampeded toward the trucks and allegedly looted supplies. Israeli officials attributed many casualties to overcrowding, trampling, and being run over by the trucks and said they would look into adapting its aid delivery protocols.
Hamas warned the incident may lead to a breakdown in negotiations over the release of roughly 100 remaining hostages and a potential cease-fire. Officials brokering the deal between Hamas and Israel previously said a six-week pause in fighting in exchange for a hostage release could be agreed upon soon.
The incident could also further complicate access to aid in Gaza due to the collapse of security in the enclave, observers said. At least one-quarter of Gaza's 2.3 million people face starvation, according to the UN.
Gaza's death toll now exceeds 30,000, per the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
"Israel made it clear to Egypt and Qatar that it will not hold another round of talks until Hamas presents a list of the hostages who are alive and provides a serious response to the number of Palestinian prisoners that the mediators proposed to be released as part of the deal," Axios reports.
"Jose Uribe, a former New Jersey insurance broker charged in what prosecutors have described as a broad bribery scheme involving Sen. Robert Menendez, pleaded guilty on Friday in Manhattan," the New York Times reports.
"Mr. Uribe had been accused of providing Nadine Menendez, the senator's wife, with a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for Mr. Menendez's efforts to intercede in an insurance-fraud investigation in New Jersey."
"Walgreens and CVS, two of the largest U.S. pharmacy chains, plan to start offering abortion pills this month," Axios reports.
"The move will increase availability to mifepristone just as the Supreme Court is set to weigh access to the pill in a high-stakes case that marks the top court's first major abortion issue since Roe v. Wade was overturned."
"The Missouri Republican Party on Thursday denounced a GOP candidate for governor with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, saying party officials will go to court if necessary to remove him from the ticket," the AP reports.
"Despite all the uncertainty in Donald Trump's Georgia election-interference case, several legal experts said one thing has become clear: Fani Willis's case has been damaged," the Wall Street Journal reports.
"Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who brought the racketeering case against the former president and 18 others, might still beat the effort to disqualify her. But the ethics scandal that has hung over the case for two months has blunted momentum from notching early plea deals, experts say. It also has likely undermined her ability to obtain guilty pleas from the remaining defendants."
"A federal judge in Florida will hold a hearing on Friday to pick a new date for former President Donald Trump's trial on charges of mishandling classified documents, a move that is likely to have major consequences for his legal and political future," the New York Times reports.
Politico reports Trump is expected to attend the hearing.
A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Texas law that would allow state police to arrest, jail, and prosecute migrants suspected of illegally crossing the U.S. border.
The law, Senate Bill 4, was set to take effect March 5, but U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction after the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the law from being enforced, arguing that it's unconstitutional and could lead to racial profiling.
Ezra wrote in his opinion that the federal government "will suffer grave irreparable harm" if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of immigration regulations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
"A Donald Trump enthusiast who believed the former president's lies about the 2020 election was sentenced Wednesday to more than three years in federal prison for assaulting law enforcement officers with a hockey stick during the brutal battle at the lower west tunnel of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack," NBC News reports.
Miles Adkins, an elected member of a Virginia school board — who allegedly bragged about drinking Fireball and Coors Light in the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and said he was in touch with a member of the far-right Oath Keepers that day — was arrested by federal authorities on Tuesday, NBC News reports.
"Former U.S. diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha said Thursday in federal court that he has agreed to plead guilty to being an illegal agent for the Cuban government while defrauding the United States, in a plea agreement that will be unveiled on April 12, when he will be sentenced," the Miami Herald reports.
"A Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting dozens of secret intelligence reports and other sensitive documents on a gaming chat group is expected to plead guilty in federal court on Monday," the New York Times reports.
"The airman, Jack Teixeira, intends to withdraw his not-guilty plea in a deal that is likely to entail prison time, but less than the 60-year maximum sentence he faced on charges of improperly handling and publicly disclosing national defense secret."
Washington Post: "Teixeira's leaks revealed information about the Russia-Ukraine war, China's development of hypersonic spy drones, North Korea's nuclear weapons development, conflicts in the Middle East and the Ukrainian sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline."
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