The Playbook Podcast

“Biden: Tentative railway labor deal reached, averting strike,” AP: “President Joe Biden said Thursday a tentative railway labor agreement has been reached, averting a potentially devastating strike before the pivotal midterm elections. He said the tentative deal ‘will keep our critical rail system working and avoid disruption of our economy.’” And NYT’s Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glas...

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, most Republicans stuck to a simple message: The decision merely sent the issue back to the states; it was not a prelude to any national ban on abortion. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) tossed all that out the window Tuesday, dropping a bill that would implement a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy while allowing states to pas...

 Back in July, a coalition of civil rights and reproductive rights groups pushed President Joe Biden for “continued leadership” in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, requesting a POTUS meeting.  On Monday evening, they got their meeting — with VP Kamala Harris, who spent about 90 minutes with the groups’ leaders. Her message, attendees said, echoed the rising sentiment...

We’re keeping our eyes on three big things this week when senators return this afternoon: 1. The brewing Manchin-Sanders faceoff. 2. The status of the marriage bill. 3. How will the White House handle the new Taiwan bill? And Playbook's Eugene Daniels chats with New York magazine reporter (and former POLITICO) Gabriel Debenedetti about his new book, “The Long Alliance,” that comes out Tuesday. In...

As expected, the Justice Department said on Thursday that it will likely move forward with an appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon's recent decision largely blocking DOJ’s use of materials seized at Mar-a-Lago and appointing a special master. But in the meantime, the government tried a new approach to convince Cannon to rethink her recent decision, at least when it comes to the key documents seized from...

It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, let alone a decade ago, but senators of both parties are increasingly optimistic they can overcome a filibuster and pass a bill enshrining same-sex and interracial marriage into law as soon as this month. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters a same-sex marriage vote “will happen on the Senate floor in the coming wee...

Legal pundits have had another day to digest Monday’s confounding opinion from Judge Aileen Cannon. Recall that the 41-year-old Trump appointee (who was confirmed in the days after the 2020 election) granted the former president’s request to appoint a special master to review the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago, and enjoined the Department of Justice “from reviewing and using the seized materials...

Labor Day has long served as the unofficial kickoff of election season: More voters start to pay attention, political TV ads become inescapable, volunteers knock on doors and pollsters adjust their samples from “registered voters” to “likely voters.” Now, with Labor Day behind us, here’s the lay of the land just nine short weeks away from Election Day, per POLITICO’s just-updated forecast. The Sen...

There was a lot going on in President Joe Biden's 24-minute primetime speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Thursday night. If you felt some whiplash listening to Biden, you’re not alone.  We are in the midst of a confusing and turbulent political period 10 weeks before the midterms, and it seemed to us that Biden was attempting to weave together and make sense of a lot of contradictory polit...

It's a shocker in Alaska as Democrat Mary Peltola won Alaska’s special election on Wednesday, making her “the first Alaska Native in Congress,” the Anchorage Daily News’ Iris Samuels reports. Peltola is also the first person elected via the state’s new ranked-choice voting system.  “Peltola topped Republican former Gov. Sarah Palin after ballots were tallied and after votes for third-place GOP can...

Just minutes before a midnight deadline, the Justice Department filed a stunning response to former President Donald Trump’s request for an independent review of the documents seized from his Florida home earlier this month. The 36-page document is chock-full of previously unknown information, providing an extensive timeline of how the government worked to recover classified material before the un...

As a policy issue, crime, like inflation and immigration, has consistently been a political vulnerability for Joe Biden and the Democrats. Republicans have seized on the national spike in murders — almost 30% in 2020, when, um, Trump was president —  the “defund the police” movement, and criminal justice reform policies pursued by unpopular progressive prosecutors who have faced a backlash even fr...

Today is launch day for the Space Launch System Rocket, which will push the Orion spacecraft on a trajectory to orbit the moon. It lifts off at 8:33 a.m. Eastern time from the ​​Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA TV’s stream of the enormous 30-story tall rocket is already live with a countdown clock. This is a big day for VP Kamala Harris. There have occasionally been snickers about the fact th...

The deadline for the Justice Department to unseal a redacted version of the affidavit used to secure the FBI warrant for the Mar-a-Lago search is noon today (absent a last-minute appeal).  Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein: Judge Bruce Reinhart “emphasized that prosecutors had shown ‘good cause’ to redact elements of the affidavit that would reveal ‘the identities of witnesses, law enforcement agents,...

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced it was canceling up to $10,000 of student debt for millions of people and up to $20,000 of debt for low- and middle-income borrowers who previously received a Pell Grant. But Biden’s long-awaited plan to cancel some student debt, one of the most contentious issues dividing Democrats, has reignited the intra-party policy wars. Politico's education rep...

It’s time to adjust your expectations for November. For weeks, pundits have homed in on the special election in New York’s 19th Congressional District as a national bellwether. The seat is a true toss-up — one of those rare districts won by Barack Obama in 2012, Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 — and the national parties responded appropriately, sending in huge sums of money and organiza...

Some of the year’s most consequential (and highly anticipated) primary battles will be decided tonight in two of the largest states in the country: New York and Florida. Sunshine State Democrats will settle on a nominee to take on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as his national star ascends. In one corner, there’s Charlie Crist, the current Democratic congressman and former Republican governor. In th...

It’s been a long time (months? years?) since we’ve seen national Democrats in such a good mood about their electoral chances. Over the last few weeks — amid a spate of legislative movement, falling gas prices, stumbling Republican Senate candidates and the sense of a growing backlash to efforts to restrict abortion — the fight for control of Congress seems to have tightened. Gone are the days when...

Our colleagues have a pair of stories up this morning as election attention turns to the Empire State’s Tuesday primary. — “Want to know if a red wave is happening? Watch this special election next week,” by Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris. The race to succeed Democrat Antonio Delgado in New York’s 19th district next week will offer one of two signals about the 2022 election: It will either (1) prev...

Twelve weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans’ hopes of retaking the Senate rest on a slate of Donald Trump's hand-picked nominees. And, across the board, they appear to be struggling. In Pennsylvania, a ferocious Democratic campaign to paint Mehmet Oz as an out-of-touch carpetbagger has left him trailing in multiple polls. Herschel Walker may be a Georgia Bulldogs legend, but key voters...

Rep. Liz Cheney is wasting no time beginning the next phase of her bid to prevent Donald Trump's return to office.  “In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler tells Playbook exclusively. The new g...

President Joe Biden and his entire administration are readying for a roadshow with a simple message: We did what we said we would do. The White House, looking to capitalize on his string of policy and political wins, is launching a travel and media blitz over the next few weeks as it looks to beat the historical midterm odds in less than three months.   The details of the victory lap were outlined...

Donald Trump will not oppose the Justice Department’s motion to unseal the search warrant approved by a federal court in West Palm Beach on August 5 and a partially redacted property receipt listing the items seized during the FBI search. (The redactions, according to the government, “remove the names of law enforcement personnel who executed the search,” which seems to indicate that they do not r...

There are two stories worth your time this morning: one about Donald Trump in the Wall Street Journal and one about Joe Biden in the Washington Post. They intersect with each other in a way that gets to the heart of the most profound question in American politics.  First: There’s a government informant inside Trump’s inner circle. (Awake now?)  That’s the takeaway from WSJ’s Alex Leary, Aruna Visw...

It’s been two days since the FBI searched Trump’s Florida home, spurring loud calls for transparency at Justice. But Trump’s lawyers have the warrant and a detailed manifest of what the FBI took away. Why haven’t they been released? We asked Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, who was at Mar-a-Lago during the search, and will report back what we hear. Both Bobb and a second Trump lawyer, Lindsey Halligan...