Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wants Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from considering the case of United States v. Trump, citing the efforts of Thomas’ wife Virginia to challenge the 2020 election.

Blumenthal sent a letter Wednesday urging Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to “take appropriate steps to ensure that Justice Clarence Thomas recuses himself” from the case, which is centered on Trump’s role in the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021. That case is on a fast track for consideration by the highest court and could significantly affect Special Counsel Jack Smith’s handling of the charges his office has filed against former President Donald Trump.

Blumenthal cites Thomas’ previous recusal from the case Eastman v. Thompson back in October, due to Virginia Thomas’ correspondence with John Eastman about overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. Thomas had not recused himself from previous Jan. 6-related cases, but did in the Eastman case.

“The same is true in United States v. Trump. Mrs. Thomas’s close interactions with senior Trump administration officials about overturning the 2020 election results — the very subject of the litigation — certainly creates circumstances where Justice Thomas’s ‘impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’” Blumenthal wrote.

Senators cleared nearly a dozen long-stalled four-star military positions late on Tuesday evening as lawmakers left for the year without action on international aid or border security policy.

In addition, the chamber cleared a short-term extension of the Federal Aviation Administration’s authorization by voice vote after Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) dropped his hold, sending the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk.

“We have no more votes until we return in January,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor late Tuesday. “We are going to be in session [Wednesday] to do housekeeping business, but there are no more votes scheduled” until 2024.

What about those talks? Senators left without legislative text or a detailed framework for a deal that would pair border security policy changes with foreign aid, but Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a rare joint statement touting “encouraging progress” in the talks and vowing action “early in the new year.”

“Challenging issues remain, but we are committed to addressing needs at the southern border and to helping allies and partners confront serious threats in Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific,” the statement read. “The Senate will not let these national security challenges go unanswered.”

One of the lead negotiators, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), told reporters on Tuesday evening he was “going to be here a while” and that lawmakers would keep talking via Zoom and video calls over the holiday period.

“We’ll keep working until we’re done,” he said.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), another lead negotiator on the border-Ukraine deal, indicated the group planned to meet at some point Wednesday and said “I’m talking to Chuck Schumer all the time these days” about the status of the talks.

As for this year’s business: The movement on the military nominations, long-held by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), comes even as the senator from Alabama gained nothing in return.

In addition, the chamber confirmed former federal prosecutor John Russell to serve on the U.S. District Court for Northern Oklahoma by voice vote, Tuesday’s second confirmation to an Oklahoma judicial seat.

Jordain Carney contributed.

Former President Donald Trump endorsed Bernie Moreno in Ohio’s Republican primary, wading into a three-way contest that could help determine the Senate majority next fall.

Trump’s endorsement of Moreno, a businessman, further scrambles a complicated field, which also includes state Sen. Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Frank LaRose. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has remained neutral in the race, with Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) arguing in an interview last week that any of the three candidates could win a general election.

Beating Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) will require “a successful political outsider,” Trump argued in his social media post on Tuesday afternoon. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) endorsed Moreno earlier this year and argues that the party needs to coalesce its disparate wings around Moreno.

“I do think we’re eventually gonna be able to get the party more fully supportive behind Bernie,” Vance said in a recent interview. “We’ll have more Senate folks coming out behind Bernie in the next few weeks.”

Vance knows the power of a Trump endorsement: The former president helped boost the junior senator through a difficult primary last year against a slew of candidates, including Dolan and Moreno, who withdrew. The polls in the 2024 primary are all over the place, with Moreno leading one last week and LaRose handily leading one this week.

“President Trump’s endorsement is the most powerful endorsement in politics, so this will certainly be a huge benefit to Bernie Moreno,” said NRSC spokesperson Mike Berg.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday reiterated his support for a deal that would pair border policy changes with Ukraine aid, stressed Senate negotiators will need more time to reach agreement on a package.

“It’s going to take more time,” Schumer said Tuesday on the floor. “But no matter how long it takes we must succeed.”

His comments echo those made in recent days by New York Democrat, after negotiations among senators prompted a postponement of the chamber’s scheduled holiday recess — while failing, so far, to yield a framework for a deal.

The Senate leader emphasized that his chamber, despite attendance challenges, would clear pending nominations, military promotions and a short-term reauthorization for Federal Aviation Authority before leaving town for the holidays.

“We’ll not leave town until every last one of these delayed nominees is confirmed,” he vowed.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nodded to the ongoing challenges of reaching compromise, despite several weeks of intense negotiations, during his own opening remarks.

“They’re chipping away at years of failure to enact basic, common-sense border security policy,” he said. “Reaching an agreement that can pass Congress and become law is easier said than done.”

The Senate late Monday confirmed former Democratic presidential candidate and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley to lead the Social Security Administration amid extremely weak attendance.

The vote was 50-11, with 39 senators absent for the chamber’s first vote the week before Christmas as lawmakers continue working on an international aid and border security supplemental package.

Longtime Senate reporters and procedural experts called it the worst attendance for a vote that they could recall for at least the last two decades.

“Governor Martin O’Malley is the strong operational leader that the Social Security Administration needs right now,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) on the floor. “I saw his hands-on approach first-hand.”

Republicans objected to President Joe Biden’s decision to remove the last Senate-confirmed leader of the agency, Trump-appointed Andrew Saul, prior to the completion of Saul’s six-year term.

What’s next? Majority Leader Chuck Schumer teed up five votes on nominations on Tuesday afternoon, including Justice Department and judicial nominations.

When one door closes… Schumer teed up votes on two nominees who would be particularly unlikely to clear the chamber with more fulsome attendance.

One — Labor Department nominee José Javier Rodríguez — failed on a procedural floor vote last month, while the other, Joe Goffman, would lead the powerful air office of the Environmental Protection Agency (Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has vowed to oppose all EPA picks.)

Sen. Ben Cardin on Monday evening said he’s “terribly angered” and “disappointed” by reports that a now-former staffer had taken part in sexual activities in a Senate hearing room, which were captured on video.

“I understand the Capitol Police are doing an investigation,” Cardin told reporters, adding that his office is “absolutely” cooperating with the Capitol law enforcement. Cardin says he has not been individually contacted by Capitol Police.

Cardin said the tape was brought to his attention this weekend, adding that he does not know whether the staffer — identified as Aidan Maese Czeropski — had somehow booked the room. Czeropski is no longer with the senator’s office. The tape was first reported by the Daily Caller.

“My knowledge of this was over the weekend. When I learned about it, made sure that he was separated. So he left the Senate employment, and the appropriate steps were taken from the point of view of our office,” Cardin said.

Cardin, who is retiring after this term, would not go into detail about how well he knew the staffer.

“I’m not going to get into my relationship with staff people,” he said, noting that it’s a personnel issue.

Republican senators are distancing themselves from former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric used over the weekend that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a comment President Joe Biden’s campaign has likened to those of Adolf Hitler.

“I obviously don’t agree with that. I mean, we’re all children of immigrants,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a member of Republican leadership, in a brief interview.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) echoed that he “certainly wouldn’t have said that,” and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called it “unhelpful rhetoric.” Others like Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) declined to directly comment on the remarks.

The modest pushback — no senators called for Trump to walk the comments back or apologize — is reminiscent of the tack Republicans took back during the years of Trump’s presidency, when incendiary comments became somewhat of a norm. GOP senators would commonly say they hadn’t seen Trump’s comments on social media or the campaign trail, or say they disagreed with them and leave it at that.

“Looks like I’m looking forward to another year of answering these questions,” Young said, sarcastically.

Meanwhile, House GOP lawmakers heavily criticized some university presidents’ refusal to unequivocally condemn calls for the “genocide of Jews” as a violation of their schools’ code of conduct during a recent hearing. Those comments have led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, criticism from Second gentleman Doug Emhoff and calls for others to step aside. Democrats have largely refrained from coming to the defense of the presidents following the comments.

Democrats, of course, were quick to condemn Trump’s comments during a New Hampshire rally.

“He can speak for himself and he reminds the American people why he not only should be president, but why he’s spending so much time in the court these days,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.).

Katherine Tully-McManus contributed. 

Elise Stefanik relished the role of Ivy League inquisitor in a high-profile hearing on antisemitism in academia. But when it comes to Donald Trump’s recent divisive comments about migrants “poisoning the blood” of America, she’s staying silent.

After she went viral with her questioning of university presidents about hate speech on their campuses, the No. 4 House Republican declared to POLITICO that “a reckoning” is due for those who don’t stand up to antisemitism. Stefanik did not return repeated requests for comment, however, about Trump’s weekend rhetoric — which echoed Adolf Hitler’s use of the term “blood poisoning” in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” where he criticized the mixing of races.

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about migrants at a New Hampshire rally on Saturday.

Stefanik touted her fight against antisemitic speech in the wake of her questioning of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. All three university presidents equivocated when the New York Republican asked if calls for genocide against Jews would violate their campus codes of conduct, sparking a rush of notably bipartisan fury with elite academic institutions over their handling of public tension during the Israel-Hamas war. The moment looked poised to reshape Stefanik’s public image as a onetime moderate turned Trump defender.

Her silence about Trump’s remarks, which the Biden campaign likened to Hitler’s, risks unraveling that shift. And it highlights a bigger problem that congressional Republicans are facing with their presidential frontrunner, who’s famed for his use of offensive rhetoric, including open invocation of antisemitic tropes. The more he pushes the limits of campaign-trail commentary toward invective, the more Trump puts GOP lawmakers like Stefanik on defense — when they’d rather hit liberals as ivory-tower defenders of hateful speech.

Stefanik, a Harvard alum, drew widespread praise for her grilling of the elite university presidents on Dec. 5, drawing support from some Democrats who don’t otherwise agree with the conservative lawmaker. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down from the post several days after the House education committee’s hearing.

During that hearing, Stefanik took on Harvard University President Claudine Gay, comparing students calling for “intifada” on campus with a “Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans.” She also demanded that Gay answer “yes or no” to whether she agreed these remarks were protected speech at Harvard.

Stefanik, who endorsed Trump for another term in office more than year ago, rarely if ever criticizes the former president in public.

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign escalated its anti-Trump pushback to a new level in a statement that likened the former president’s comments about migrants to the Nazi leader and highlighted his recent statement that he would not be a dictator if elected, “except for day one.”

“Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “He is betting he can win this election by scaring and dividing this country. He’s wrong.”

Senate border negotiations are almost certainly going to continue into January, based on comments from several senators involved in those talks.

The lead negotiators — Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — consistently asserted that they’d made steady progress in those talks (we followed those all weekend). But they also routinely tossed around words like complex, arcane and byzantine. Reading between the lines, it’s obvious all sides think they still have a ways to go in drafting border security language.

“I think this will go into next year,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday’s NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The bottom line here is, we feel like we’re being jammed. We’re not anywhere close to a deal.”

Graham’s comments echoed similar sentiments from both Lankford and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

What we’re keeping an eye on today:

Signals from Schumer: Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised a vote on a supplemental package — containing aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as well as border security measures — before the end of the year. But we’ll see if he renews that commitment or scraps it when he offers opening remarks this afternoon.

Attendance: Don’t come in between senators and their holiday breaks. Any significant bloc of absences makes lining up the votes for any agreed-to package all the more complicated. We should get a decent sense of how many lawmakers are back in Washington on Monday night.

Don’t forget the stakes: The Biden administration has made clear it’s out of money it can send to Ukraine as it seeks to defeat Russia. Israel continues to battle Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. And an average of more than 10,000 people are crossing the southern border daily.