Today’s notice: Mississippi Senate race is over. Thomas Massie is not done. House Democrats are kinda taking the week off. Reconciliation 3.0 looks unlikely. Abundance Democrats may miss their moment. Bad news at Ballard Partners. Plus: the story of the ‘corruption’ election, Vanilla Ice loses a gig, and a close look at D.C.’s new mayor.
THE LATEST
Mississippi: Picked another senator. Democrat Scott Colom was declared winner of the Senate race by the AP last night, more than a week after voting ended. He will be the first member of his party to represent Mississippi in the Senate in almost 40 years and the first Black man since Reconstruction. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded graciously in a video posted to X.
Democrats: Putting the lame in lame duck. The minority party seems to have forgotten how the House works, The Sun’s Hill team reports. First, some Democrats spaced out on the impeachment vote of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Then, yesterday, they fumbled a vote around veterans’ benefits. To be clear, this is not your old fashioned can’t-agree-on-anything Democrats. This is a new thing where they kind of wander into walls and say hey, who put that there? Despite the missteps, our team reports rank-and-file Democrats were not willing to trash the leaders who are in charge of the caucus now and will continue to be in the next Congress.
Trending
Thomas Massie: Still stirrin’ the pot. The outgoing Kentucky Republican is kinda making the lame duck his own. Last night, he successfully used a House discharge petition to force an upcoming vote on what he’s calling the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which would give state attorneys general the power to sue the Justice Department for failing to comply with Epstein Files Transparency Act I, also a Massie bill.
Republicans: One more reconciliation for the road? Don’t count on it, The Sun’s Al Weaver reports. Some Republicans had hoped the lame-duck session could be the time for another party-line bill, but the time is really tight. “There’s a lot of people that are for reconciliation,” retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said. “The problem is, it’s for their version of reconciliation, and there are probably four or five different versions out there, and none of the Venn diagrams work to get to 51, in my judgment, right now.”
Abundance movement: The permitting reform test. The ongoing permitting reform fight could reveal how much appetite Democrats actually have for deregulation — particularly deregulation that benefits corporate interests, The Sun’s Mara Hoplamazian and Jeff Stein report. The progressive pushback on the bipartisan permitting reform bill has focused mainly on how deregulation limits public participation in federal processes. If those concerns kill the current permitting bill in Congress, Abundance Democrats will have to go back to the drawing board.
Lobbying: Changing of the guard(ed client list.) Ballard Partners, the powerhouse firm that capitalized on clients seeking connections with Donald Trump and his orbit, has parted ways with more clients than any of its lobbying firm peers during the past year, The Sun’s Taylor Giorno reports. Recently departed White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was an alumna of the firm, and former HHS adviser and MAHA star Calley Means has been trashing Wiles and Ballard lately. Is Ballard’s time in the extremely lucrative sun coming to an end?
The firm notes it has built a bipartisan team of lobbyists presumably able to work in any political environment. The team includes former Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler, former Republican Rep. Jeff Miller and former Trump administration official Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, daughter-in-law of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Planning for the future: Schumer Plots a ‘Durable Majority’ That Flirts With 60 Seats
PODCAST
One newsletter interviews another: Sun reporters Evan McMorris-Santoro, Igor Bobic and Oriana González discuss how new members of Congress are adjusting to their new digs. Plus, Igor and Oriana tell us about their newsletter, The Stakeout.
NEW ON THE SUN
2026: How Democrats made ‘corruption’ stick. “We’ve all been waiting 20 years to be able to run corruption against the Republicans,” J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, told The Sun recently. Our Alex Roarty has the two-year story of how the Democratic spending group with ties to Chuck Schumer lived the dream: An issue the public once saw as a question of ethics had become a question of money, aligned with voters’ top overall concern about everyday affordability.
D.C.: Governing time for the incoming mayor. Our Michael Brice-Saddler has a detailed profile of Janeese Lewis George. Her political ascent over the past six years has been fueled by an organizer’s conviction, Michael writes: You can govern an unequal, divided city by pulling competing factions to the same table and forging them into a fragile consensus. But stepping into the mayor’s suite means confronting a job defined by hard limits — where not every crisis can be fixed and governing requires telling allies no.
Vanilla Ice: Not getting a taxpayer payday. The Sun’s Mark Alfred reports on federal contracting documents detailing a hastily assembled and then unassembled plan for the State Department to pay the rapper $150,000 to perform as part of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to India last month. “The U.S. Embassy in India considered engaging Vanilla Ice for a Freedom 250 event but ultimately decided not to move forward,” a department spokesperson said.
HELPing himself: Rand Paul Seeks Top Republican Spot on Senate Health Committee
Huge shocker: Democrats Want to End the Iran War But Can’t Agree on How
Ain’t gonna happen: Two Delaware Voters Sue to Add a 436th U.S. House Seat
NOT US
- How a Misquote by a Supreme Court Justice Imperils Gun Restrictions, by Mike McIntire and Eli Murray for The New York Times
- Now What? How the 2026 Midterm Results Will Change America. From the New Yorker
- A Spy Scandal Lays Bare Nvidia’s Governance Vacuum, by Theo Francis and Chip Cutter for The Wall Street Journal
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The newsletter was produced by Thomas Burr and Erik Schutz.
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