The Playbook Podcast

Donald Trump and Sen. Elizabeth Warren actually agree on something: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell backed down Wednesday when he offered Democrats an extension of the debt ceiling until December. (As of early this morning, the two sides hadn’t finalized the deal.) “McConnell caved,” said Warren. “Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats, again,” said Trump. Was it the filibus...

Republicans are set to filibuster Democrats’ latest bid to raise the debt ceiling today, just as Mitch McConnell has been saying they’d do since this summer. What is Chuck Schumer's Plan B? The majority leader, a political animal to his core, never passes up an opportunity to put the GOP on record on issues he thinks make Republicans look hypocritical. But privately, many Democrats acknowledge thi...

Now that the dust has settled from last week’s drama on the Hill, let’s take stock of where things stand with President Joe Biden's core legislative agenda. Oct. 31 is the new Sept. 30: Congress extended the highway bill, which expired Thursday, until Halloween. “Our goal is to get both bills done in the next month,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said at an event in New York on Sunday. Take...

So much for that make-or-break Thursday vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed the roll call just before 11 p.m. after a flurry of late-night meetings trying to strike a deal with Sens. Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin over the still-not-final reconciliation package, Build Back Better, at the heart of progressives’ reluctance to pass the BIF at this moment. Here are...

Tuesday was the day it became clear either: A) President Joe Biden's legislative agenda is about to implode or B) Biden made serious progress toward a deal to salvage his agenda. The public evidence points to option A. By the end of the day, there was no indication Democrats were near a deal that would allow BIF to pass the House on Thursday. But the real action was shrouded in secrecy: the talks...

The Democrats’ “two-track” process is no more. After weeks of linking passage of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package (BIF) to the party’s larger reconciliation bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her members Monday night that she’s forging ahead with a stand-alone vote on BIF as the much larger social spending bill is being hashed out.   It’s a reversal by not only Pelosi but Senate Majority Lead...

Congress is three days out from a critical vote on a key plank of the president’s agenda — a massive $1.2 trillion infrastructure package (BIF) — and President Joe Biden and House Democratic leaders haven’t even started the whipping process, we’re told from sources across the Democratic spectrum. Our colleagues Natasha Korecki and Laura Barrón-López reported Sunday night that the president was mak...

Subscribe to Global Insider Global Insider's Ryan Heath runs all over New York, capturing the madness of UNGA’s kickoff, accompanied by his sidekick, producer Olivia Reingold. Hear from Ryan’s go-to “U.N. whisperer,” Richard Gowan of the Crisis Group, and Penny Abeywardena, New York City's Commissioner for International Affairs. Plus: protestors accusing the U.S. of “vaccine apartheid” stop New Yo...

Buckle up. That was the advice from Capitol Hill late Thursday night as news got out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately told her committee chairs that she does, in fact, intend to bring the reconciliation bill to the floor next week, reports Heather Caygle. The question now: Is it bravura or bravado? And, The Arizona Republic scooped the results of the Maricopa County “audit” paid for by “Stop th...

Here’s the most important development that came from President Joe Biden's five hours of meetings with 23 legislators in the Oval Office on Wednesday, according to a senior White House official: “Moderates agreed that they need to coalesce around an offer to the liberals.” It might not sound like much. But given how dug in both sides have been, the White House views the commitment from the Manch-e...

Can the House get to 218 on the BIF? That’s the big question on Capitol Hill after Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear Tuesday her team would not delay a Monday vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, aka the BIF. Here’s what we’re watching as Pelosi’s whipping operation gets underway for what promises to be a close vote. Take the POLITICO Podcast Listener Survey Raghu Manavalan is the host of POL...

Internal Democratic discord has wounded President Joe Biden’s massive social spending plan, raising the prospect that the package could stall out, shrink dramatically — or even fail altogether. Myriad problems have arisen. Moderate Senate Democrats Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) continue to be a major headache for party leadership’s $3.5 trillion target. The Senate parliamentarian...

- WaPo’s Arelis Hernández and Nick Miroff report overnight that some 10,000 Haitian migrants have crossed the Rio Grande and congregated under a border bridge in South Texas. - President Joe Biden announced in April that his community college professor wife would lead the administration’s efforts on new education initiatives, including her longtime mission to make two years of community college tu...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a deal with about a dozen skeptical House moderates In late August to win their support on the party’s $3.5 trillion budget. If they backed the fiscal blueprint, Pelosi promised two things. One was to hold a vote on the bipartisan, $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill by Sept. 27, a sweetener for those members eager to campaign on the policy win. The other promise was less s...

Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom crushed the recall attempt by a nearly 2-to 1 margin. The coverage: David Siders and Carla Marinucci with how he did it. … AP’s Nick Riccardi with 5 takeaways … LAT’s Steve Lopez on possibly “ the most frivolous waste of time in California election history” And, Stephanie Grisham writes in her upcoming book that she did not believe that the election was stolen and tried to...

At 1:25 p.m. on Jan. 6, soon after rioters had broken through barricades outside of the Capitol, Melania Trump received a text message from her then-chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham. “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness and violence?” Grisham asked the first lady. A minute later, Melania replied with a one-word answer:...

On Thursday, President Joe Biden was unsparing about the burdens that the unvaccinated have thrust onto the rest of us: thousands more dead, overflowing hospitals, a rebounding economy showing signs of retreat. Pandemic politics, as Biden called it, are not simple. But eight months into the crisis, any new set of rules offered by the president raises an obvious question: Why didn’t he do this alre...

They started off with a $6 trillion price tag, then lowered it to $3.5 trillion. Now, there’s reporting suggesting Sen. Joe Manchin wants the total for Democrats’ reconciliation plan to drop as low as $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion (though for what its worth some people close to him say his comfort zone is probably closer to $2 trillion). So what exactly will Democrats’ topline number be? And, Senat...

A scoop on the Trump revenge front: Marc Caputo and Alex Isenstadt report that Donald Trump is set to endorse Wyoming attorney Harriet Hageman in her expected primary against GOP Rep. Liz Cheney. the former president’s top target in his attempt to purge the Republican party of his fiercest critics. Caputo and Isenstadt call it “the most important political endorsement yet in Trump’s post-presidenc...

One challenge in covering the Dems’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is conveying the sheer enormity of it. Nobody really even knows what to call it. Is it a jobs package? A human infrastructure bill? A climate bill? Social welfare legislation? Yes. Because Dems aim to pass into law every major domestic priority on which they can find agreement, it is all of those things and more. The NYT’s Jonat...

A few reactions and realities the day after the Supreme Court abortion decision... States are already weighing copycat laws on abortions, Covid-19 precautions, and gun restrictions... Democrats feel the limits of their power in trying to protect Roe v. Wade... Even some anti-abortion conservatives think the Texas law is bad for their cause. MEDICARE EXPANSION VS. ACA: Democratic leaders have been...

BREAKING OVERNIGHT: The Supreme Court, by 5 to 4, declined to block Texas’s law banning abortions after six weeks — a strong but not final indication that the court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade … Conservative majority cites “complex,” “novel” legal technicalities and insists constitutionality can still be reviewed later on … Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals write outrage...

President Joe Biden ended August on Tuesday with a combative speech in which he defended his decision-making on Afghanistan, which has become by far the most controversial turn of his short presidency. He criticized Afghan national security forces for melting away in the face of the Taliban. He insisted that Americans in Afghanistan had “multiple warnings and offers to help them leave.” “Biden is...

It’s been a month from hell for President Joe Biden. From the Afghanistan pullout mission that led to American casualties, to the spike in Covid-19 hospitalizations — and an accompanying hit to his poll numbers — September can’t come soon enough for the president. After the last soldier boarded a C-17 to depart Afghanistan on Monday, the White House and Democrats are looking for a reset, our colle...

Lara Seligman has a breathtaking account from inside the Pentagon that is based on detailed notes of three classified calls in the hours leading up to Thursday’s terrorist attack outside Abbey Gate at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport that killed almost 200 people. Lara documents the Pentagon’s deepening frustration with reliance on the Taliban to provide security in Kabul (and even drive...