Democrats won in November in no small part because of their opposition to the war in Iran. Now they have an opportunity to stop that war even before new members of Congress take office. The catch? It could hurt federal workers and the people who depend on them—and burn a lot of political capital.
“I understand the impulse,” Representative Becca Balint said about the plan to use the CR as leverage. But, she added, “we want to make sure that we are not continuing to—I want to use the right word here—terrorize our federal workforce. They have been through hell and back again.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries likewise declined to endorse a particular strategy and instead deferred to DeLauro. “I don’t want to get out ahead of Congresswoman DeLauro, but House Democrats have uniformly opposed providing any additional money to Donald Trump’s war machine, to Pete Hegseth’s war machine, over in the Middle East,” he said in a press conference on Thursday.
Congress has used a continuing resolution this way before. In 1973, legislators successfully used a funding package to force President Richard Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia. Last week, a group of 40 civil society organizations sent a letter to Congress pushing lawmakers to adopt this CR strategy. “We don’t think we should spend one more minute, spend one more penny, to fund this illegal war,” said Cavan Kharrazian, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, which was a signatory of the letter.
On Thursday, several lawmakers remained tight-lipped on whether they want to use the CR to restrict war funding. “We’re going to do everything we can to bring this war to an end. It’s illegal, a war of choice, and we’re going to do everything we can to keep the government funded,” said Senator Tammy Baldwin. When I asked if she’d prefer not to attach war funding to the CR, she just repeated the same sentence.
Progressives in the Senate insist that the plan is to keep the government running and say that they need to take the risk regardless. “When we vote on appropriations, we intend to fund the government and stop funds for this war. It is what the American people demand, and what they deserve,” wrote Senators Chris Van Hollen, Michael Bennet, Tammy Duckworth, and Bernie Sanders in a statement.
Even if Democrats could theoretically pass a stopgap CR and return to the funding issue again in January, some think that would be an early capitulation for the party, fresh off their November wins. “We should have that fight now,” Kharrazian said. “We shouldn’t allow the money spigot to continue, for even a month.”
Outside Washington
A story to watch, semi-buried in a Washington Post piece about Dems’ new power in state legislatures and governorships: Texas state Representative Brian Harrison, the outlet notes, “has called for a special session to limit the governor’s executive powers while Republicans still control the legislature.” He tells the Post: “If we don’t limit those, [Hinojosa] may well be able to advance her priorities without passing almost any legislation.”
Elsewhere:
NBC reporter Sahil Kapur noted on Thursday, following the news of Democrat Scott Colom’s stunning victory in Mississippi, that Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s official website continues to feature “a 2023 article about how she single-handedly blocked Colom’s nomination to be a federal judge.” For more on this remarkable race, check out The New York Times’s story from last week about Angela Lewis, whose father, James Chaney, was murdered by Klansmen in Mississippi days after her birth. The article describes how Lewis, a nurse, drove straight after an overnight shift to her polling place in Meridian to vote for the candidate who will now become the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.The Guardian’s Sam Wolfson explores the phenomenon of the manosphere turning on Donald Trump. The “gay jokes, casual racism, and rape apologia” remain the same, and many of the key players still want immigrants deported. But now they’ve decided that “MAGA is gay.”Paparo about “deterrence in the Pacific,” exploring the complexities of U.S. competition with China in the region. Bruce Jones will offer opening remarks, and Lynn Kuok and Michael E. O’Hanlon will moderate.In case you missed it: The World Resources Institute published a useful analysis this week, as Democrats pivoted to thinking about how to deliver on affordability promises, and global policymakers convened in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31 (the United Nations’ annual climate conference). Can electrification help with the affordability crisis? Yes, it can, WRI’s Clem Perry and Nick Wayth write in their explainer. But in order to harness the potential affordability benefits, governments need to make the switch “affordable up front” for households and businesses, “reduce the financing costs for clean power,” and ensure—among other things—that the cheaper price of producing renewable energy is actually reflected in the price passed on to consumers. While that may sound complicated, consider this striking scenario they outline to show the potential benefits:Take home heating. Electricity can deliver cheaper warmth even when it costs more per unit than gas. A heat pump moves heat rather than generating it by burning fuel, delivering three to four units of heat for every unit of electricity purchased — an effective efficiency of 300-400%. Even at the lower end of that range, a heat pump uses 70% less purchased energy than a modern gas boiler operating at 90% efficiency. That efficiency advantage means that even if electricity costs three times as much per unit as gas, the energy cost of heating is still 10% lower.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
While the Democrats have been celebrating their midterm wave for more than a week, the party’s nominee for Senate in Mississippi had to wait until Wednesday for his victory to be declared. And it’s the most historic of all of them this election season: Colom will be the state’s first Democratic senator since segregationist John C. Stennis left office in 1989, and the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.
The drip-drip of bad news finally swamped the co-founder and CEO of AI chipmaker Nvidia, who resigned on Thursday after The New York Times reported on a second affair—this one with a subordinate, as opposed to a suspected Chinese spy. That proved too much to withstand, even for the head of the $4 trillion company at the heart of the AI investment boom.
Political Trivia Question of the Day
—Michael Tomasky
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