The Playbook Podcast

Welcome back to a four-day workweek in Washington. Today, Senate Democrats resume their doomed push on voting rights and election reform, taking up legislation that already passed the House. Expect more of the fiery speeches we’ve heard from both sides recently as Democrats open the debate. And, what's next for the BBB? Front-line House Democrats, eager to boost their prospects in November, are ur...

With the Democratic Party on course for a devastating midterm election and party elder statesmen stepping in to help, Playbook's Tara Palmeri reports that people close to Bill and Hillary Clinton said the former first couple sees it as an opportunity to insert themselves back into political life. The intra-party divisions have given them a chance to flex their centrist, dealmaking brand of politic...

At 1 p.m., the president will appear at a Democratic Caucus meeting to try to rally senators behind the party’s voting reform proposal. In keeping with his Georgia speech this week, he’s expected to call on them to do whatever it takes — including making an end run around the filibuster — to “save” democracy.  But Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) aren’t budging on the filib...

We have fresh numbers, via the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, on how the public views the major voting rights and electoral reform proposals being considered in Congress. Crosstabs … Toplines Let’s start with the most interesting takeaway: the first data we’ve seen about reforming the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century law that Donald Trump tried to use to subvert the Electoral College o...

Democratic leaders hoped to spend the week before Martin Luther King Jr. Day presenting a united front for voting rights legislation and blasting Republicans as undemocratic.  So much for that. Multiple high-profile voting rights leaders are planning to skip President Joe Biden's speech on the matter in Atlanta today, dismissing the address as too little too late. “We’re beyond speeches. We’re bey...

President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats are entering the second week of their push to pass a pair of voting rights bills. Ryan Lizza is a co-author of POLITICO Playbook Jenny Ament is senior producer of POLITICO Audio.

The White House is looking to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to help thaw out its frosty relationship with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in hopes of resurrecting President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan. Subscribe to POLITICO Playbook. Raghu Manavalan is the host of POLITICO's Playbook. Jenny Ament is the executive producer of POLITICO Audio.

For those who always despised him, feel betrayed by him, or fear his return to power, today is about remembering — never forgetting — Donald Trump's lowest point as president: the day he incited a mob to attack Congress while it affirmed Joe Biden's clear victory, the final desperate move in a plot to overthrow an American presidential election. For those who love him, merely tolerate him, or crav...

Today's Big Event: Senate Democrats will hold a virtual meeting at 12:45 p.m. It will be the first opportunity of the new year for all 50 caucus members to talk about where Build Back Better 2.0 stands and what they think of Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER’s new voting rights push. On both issues — as usual — every utterance of JOE MANCHIN (W.Va.) and KYRSTEN SINEMA (Ariz.) will be examined like a h...

It’s a fitting end to a year dominated by two Senate Democrats at the center of pretty much everything in 2021: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have all but put the kibosh on two major proposals their own party was hoping to pass before the holiday break. First: Manchin’s talks with President Joe Biden over Build Back Better hit a brick wall. Earlier this week, Senate Democrats were looking to the...

The Senate passed a debt limit increase of $2.5 trillion Tuesday afternoon, and the House followed suit just after midnight. Congress should be freed from addressing the issue again until 2023. A final vote on the long-stalled NDAA is likely in the Senate today. Congress has funded the government through mid-February. It shouldn’t exactly get a big pat on the back for doing the basics, but the thr...

President Joe Biden is set to speak with Sen. Joe Manchin as early as today in what Hill sources tell us will be a make-or-break moment for passing the Build Back Better Act (BBB) before Christmas.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been adamant that his chamber will clear the party’s $1.7 trillion social spending package before senators leave for the holidays. Yet everyone knows that won’t...

Thursday was a double-whammy for former President Donald Trump. First, New York state A.G. Tish James announced that she was suspending her campaign for governor and would instead run for reelection. That all but assures the law enforcement officer who has been perhaps the most aggressive in investigating Trump will continue to focus her attention on the ex-president.  Then, a federal appeals cour...

Former Rep. Renee Ellmers announced on Twitter Wednesday that she’s running for Congress again in North Carolina’s 4th district — and sent the House GOP gossip mill into overdrive. Ellmers, you’ll recall, lost her primary in 2016 following allegations that she was having an extramarital affair with Kevin McCarthy, who also lost his bid for speaker around that time in part due to the controversy. (...

The idea started out promising, at least from the GOP’s perspective. Over the summer, Mitch McConnell surprised much of Washington when he drew a bright line on the debt ceiling, demanding Democrats use reconciliation to raise the borrowing cap on their own. The idea was to force President Joe Biden's party to vote to increase the $29 trillion debt by a specific number — then hammer them for out-o...

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Omicron variant: It could be like Delta and current vaccines will offer robust protection. But there’s also a chance that Omicron could be vaccine resistant, so vaccine makers are readying a booster to protect against the new variant, just in case. That could be the future: a new variant, followed by a new vaccine booster to defend against it, followed b...

Congress’ holiday season theme of governing by crisis continues this week, as lawmakers return to Washington to address what could be the trickiest issue of the month: the debt ceiling. House Democratic leaders have discussed adding a provision addressing the debt ceiling to the final National Defense Authorization Act and voting on it as soon as this week, according to a senior Democratic aide. T...

Congress avoided a government shutdown after Senate conservatives dropped their demands to nix President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates in the funding bill — and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave them a way out.  Conservatives will argue they got something out of this drama: a vote on their issue. In reality, it was a face-saving measure. The far-right started out demanding that Congress eff...

Symone Sanders, a senior adviser and chief spokesperson for VP Kamala Harris, “is expected to leave the White House at the end of the year,” Eugene Daniels, Chris Cadelago and Daniel Lippman reported Wednesday night. “It was not immediately clear where Sanders is heading next or when she will be leaving the vice president’s office.  Sanders, a 31-year-old African-American strategist and one of the...

Most people on Capitol Hill are kissing Christmas — or at least most of December — goodbye this year. “We could be in every weekend between now and Christmas, so … sorry,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow told reporters Monday night. Sen. Patrick Leahy is so worried about being here on Christmas that he and his wife bought a holiday tree for their home in D.C. Here are some reasons for the growing pessimism....

The drama surrounding Rep. Lauren Boebert's Islamophobic comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar is about to heat up as lawmakers return from Thanksgiving recess this week. Sources tell us a faction of Democrats is expected to push leadership to strip Boebert of her committee assignments or censure her after she joked about Omar, who is Muslim, being safe to ride with in an elevator because she wasn’t wear...

Because we’re POLITICO, Marc Caputo has a story up this morning on Donald Trump's potential 2024 map. Granted, it’s not terribly surprising, centering on the five states that Joe Biden flipped in 2020. But the level of engagement within Trumpworld this far out — that we didn’t necessarily expect.  “Trump’s shadow campaign … recently polled Trump-Biden matchups in the five states, all of which were...

If a “New York minute” is a few passing seconds, then the opposite is a “McCarthy minute” — something that drags on and on for hours. On Thursday night, at 8:38 p.m., House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor with a speech designed to delay Democrats’ passage of the Build Back Better package.  This morning, at 5:10 a.m., some 8 hours and 32 minutes later, he finally stopped talk...

If you want to know more about the state of the House GOP conference, today should provide a pretty telling snapshot. Ten months after rioters stormed the Capitol hunting for lawmakers, most House Republicans are expected to vote against rebuking one of their colleagues, Paul Gosar, who posted an anime video of himself stabbing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And, voters have increasing doubts abou...

It was all smiles and selfies at the White House on Monday as Democrats celebrated passage of the bipartisan infrastructure deal. But rising voter concern about inflation has cast a pall over President Joe Biden's victory lap.  The White House has tried to frame the president’s agenda as a long-term answer to inflation. A pair of stories this morning in POLITICO, however, underscores why those cla...