Democrats are pouring millions of dollars into two must-win Senate races in Montana and Ohio, aiming to build party infrastructure that can help counteract the two states’ GOP leanings.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is set to invest seven figures in building out a ground game this fall to aid the reelection bids of Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), according to information shared first with POLITICO.

Tester and Brown are running in deep-red states where Republicans are heavily favored in this year’s presidential race. Since President Joe Biden is unlikely to focus on Montana or Ohio, where Tester and Brown are the last statewide Democrats standing, that makes it vital for Democrats to invest there early.

DSCC Chair Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said in a statement that the campaign arm’s “investments in sustained, effective grassroots organizing will lay the groundwork for our campaigns to win tough races.” The new investments will pay for staffers to focus on field training, volunteer recruitment and organizing, as well as analytics, data, voter access and voter outreach.

Though the DSCC did not provide a precise figure for its spending, ultimately the Senate Democratic campaign arm plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on its field programs, according to an aide. The party is expected to announce more states and funding later this year. During the successful 2022 midterm cycle, Democrats spent more on field organizing than TV ads.

The battle for the Senate majority this fall is likely to center around Ohio and Montana. With Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) retiring, Tester and Brown now face the toughest races — and their reelections represent their party’s easiest path to keeping the majority. With that in mind, Republicans are homing in on the duo, hoping to nominate candidates best equipped to beat the two battle-hardened incumbents.

If Democrats win the presidential race this fall, they can maintain a 50-seat majority, provided all their incumbents are reelected. The DSCC has also announced funding for staff in several other battleground states — including Texas and Florida, which are the party’s best opportunities to knock off GOP incumbents in Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, respectively.

As the Senate’s bipartisan border negotiators sound an optimistic note about presenting a potential agreement to their colleagues next week, one of them — Arizona Independent Kyrsten Sinema — separately revealed that she spoke with Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday.

“We’ve been talking about briefing the two [Senate] conferences next week,” Sinema told reporters. “I think we are on track to do that.” She declined to offer any details about her separate conversation with Johnson.

Senators will return to Washington on Monday and will hold full party meetings on Tuesday. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), his party’s leading negotiator, echoed Sinema’s hopes of securing at least the outlines of a deal by early next week, though he was skeptical and made clear there is no agreement yet.

“We’ve already blown through the deadlines we had established for ourselves in 2023 … I don’t know that we’ll get there,” Murphy said. “We still have a couple outstanding issues that we’re working hard at.”

Clinching even a partial agreement on stricter border policy by early next week would be the most notable sign of progress in two months of negotiations among Murphy, Sinema, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and the Biden administration. If it happens, it couldn’t come at a more high-stakes time: The first batch of government funding runs out on Jan. 19, and House conservatives are already beginning to signal interest in trying to force a shutdown if a border deal isn’t reached that’s to their liking.

Johnson’s involvement also signals that talks are progressing to the point of briefing the House, where many lawmakers worry that Republicans could quickly reject any Senate deal. Conservatives are already pushing more border restrictions than Democrats can stomach, and if Johnson embraces a Senate proposal that’s unpopular with the right, he could face a problematic rebellion with a reed-thin majority.

A Johnson spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment about his conversation with Sinema.

Senate negotiators spent the past few weeks facing questions on whether to welcome the speaker’s engagement in their work, or whether the lack of it showed they were pursuing a flawed strategy.

“You’ve got to get a bill through both chambers to get it signed by the president,” Sinema said. “So we’re working very hard to ensure that this is a bill that can pass both the Senate, the House and get signed by the president.”

Both Sinema and Murphy declined to offer specifics on whether they’re hoping to present their colleagues a framework, a bill text, or just a broad update on where negotiations stand. Their efforts are designed to create a border package that can help shake loose President Joe Biden’s $100 billion-plus emergency national security spending request — not to have any role in the domestic funding that’s set to expire soon.

“Normally how these big bipartisan deals work out is that you have a top line compromise first, and then you work to finalize the text. I don’t yet know how, if we reach an agreement, how we present that to our colleagues,” Murphy said.

Negotiators are expected to make some changes to U.S. asylum law, including raising the credible fear standard and an expulsion authority similar to the Trump-era Title 42 policy, according to three people familiar with the talks who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Department of Homeland Security officials are drafting text for these policies, according to one of the people, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss private conversations with Hill aides and administration officials.

The people further cautioned that the impact of the policies depends on how the text is written — a level of detail that hasn’t emerged from the tight-lidded talks. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not attend Friday’s meeting but is a regular presence in the talks; several White House officials were in attendance on Friday.

Negotiators are still working through complicated details of other potential policy changes, such as an expansion of expedited removal of migrants. The biggest sticking point remains striking a compromise over changes to the president’s parole authority, which has so far been a red line for the White House.

Sinema would not address what’s still holding up a final accord, but she told reporters that negotiators will continue to meet remotely this weekend before session resumes on Monday.

“It’s going to be very busy,” she said of the upcoming weekend.

There’s good news about House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s treatments for blood cancer: He has responded well to chemotherapy and is undergoing a stem cell transplantation process, according to his office.

That ongoing course of treatment means the Louisiana Republican will work remotely this month before returning to Washington in February, according to his office.

“He is currently undergoing the transplant process, marking a significant milestone in his battle against cancer,” the office said in an unattributed statement. “Once the procedure is completed, he will be recovering under the supervision of his medical team and will work remotely until returning to Washington next month.”

Scalise revealed his diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, back in August. His ongoing treatment became an issue in his unsuccessful bid to replace former Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker back in the fall.

House Republicans will take a first step next week toward holding Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress, after he skipped a closed-door interview last month.

The House Oversight and Judiciary committees will vote Wednesday on resolutions to hold Hunter Biden in contempt, paving the way for a floor vote in which Republicans will need near unity from their increasingly narrow majority.

“Hunter Biden’s willful refusal to comply with our subpoenas constitutes contempt of Congress and warrants referral to the appropriate United States Attorney’s Office for prosecution. We will not provide him with special treatment because of his last name,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a joint statement.

Both committees are also expected to issue a report, which hasn’t been released yet, making their case for why they believe the president’s son should be held in contempt.

Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell, in a statement, said, “It’s clear the Republican Chairmen aren’t interested in getting the facts or they would allow Hunter to testify publicly. Instead, House Republicans continue to play politics by seeking an unprecedented contempt motion against someone who has from the first request offered to answer all their proper questions. What are they afraid of?”

It’s the latest in the standoff between House Republicans and Hunter Biden, whose legal team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. Republicans will ultimately need the Justice Department to agree to enforce any referral — making it unlikely that Hunter Biden will face new charges.

Republicans subpoenaed the president’s son to appear behind closed doors for an interview on Dec. 13. Instead, Biden skipped the appearance and spoke briefly to reporters outside of the Capitol, defending his father, President Joe Biden, and reiterating that he is willing to take part in a public hearing.

Congressional Democrats, the White House and Hunter Biden allies have criticized Republicans for refusing to accept the offer for public testimony, pointing back to remarks from Comer earlier last year where he seemed open to the idea. But House Republicans have rejected holding a public hearing — unless Hunter Biden meets with them privately first — arguing that the president’s son shouldn’t dictate their subpoenas.

Republicans are months into their investigation aimed at President Joe Biden that has largely focused on the business deals of his family members. They view Hunter Biden as one of their biggest targets. They are also working to get interviews with James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, and Rob Walker, a Hunter Biden business associate.

The contempt step comes as Republicans are nearing a decision about whether or not to pursue articles of impeachment against Joe Biden. It is far from clear they will have the votes to impeach him, even after Republicans voted to formalize their inquiry last month.

Republicans have poked holes in previous statements by Joe Biden and the White House, and they’ve found evidence of Hunter Biden using his last name to try to build his own influence. But they’ve struggled to find a smoking gun that shows actions taken by Joe Biden as president or vice president were meant to benefit his family’s business deals.

As bipartisan talks on a deal linking stricter border security policies with Ukraine aid stretch on with no clear resolution in sight, Speaker Mike Johnson has a new problem: the growing number of House conservatives willing to shut down the government over it.

There are just two weeks remaining before the first tranche of federal funding runs out on Jan. 19, with a more high-profile group of agencies set to run dry on Feb. 2. And without a border agreement that Johnson can sell to the majority of the House GOP, he’s facing a growing rebellion among hardliners who want to pick a shutdown fight over surging migration at the nation’s southern border.

The idea began with Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who floated it on social media, and others followed suit. Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) reiterated the position during a House GOP trip to the border this week, with Biggs claiming: “No more money for his bureaucracy until you’ve brought this border under control.”

The conservative House Freedom Caucus is hardly united behind the push to shut down the government over the border — and without a bigger swath of its members vowing to oppose any funding plan without a border deal, the speaker’s headaches may prove somewhat contained. The Louisiana Republican had demanded any Ukraine aid be tied to border changes, but never truly embraced the Senate’s ongoing bipartisan talks.

So it’s not a good sign that House GOP support for linking the border to domestic funding is only growing. The number of public supporters for a shutdown fight over migration exceeds a dozen. In addition to the five Republicans named above, they are:

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), new chair of the Freedom Caucus
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)
Rep. Eric Burlinson (R-Mo.)
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.)
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.)
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.)
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.)
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.)
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio)

House Republicans have a narrow three-vote majority, which will shrink to two after Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) leaves office on Jan. 21. That makes the burgeoning demands from his right flank more than enough to sink any spending bill that GOP leadership tries to pass along party lines. If Johnson leans too heavily on Democratic votes to pass a funding agreement, though, he could face fresh threats to his gavel.
The speaker, importantly, has so far stopped short of embracing the threat of a government shutdown as soon as this month. Asked about the possibility during the trip to the border this week, Johnson said it was “too early to pre-judge,” but that Republicans were “resolved” behind two main priorities: “to get the border closed and secured” and to “reduce non-defense discretionary spending.”

During a private call with fellow Republicans this week, Johnson floated the idea of direct outreach to the White House on the border, according to a person familiar with the conversation who was granted anonymity to address it.

But any such effort would have a hard time leapfrogging over bipartisan Senate border talks that, after weeks of wrangling, are continuing to make slow headway on a deal that could with enough GOP votes across the Capitol.

When it comes to government funding, Johnson would be able to sidestep frustration from his hardliners if he can strike a deal with Senate Democrats and the White House. That gets harder if he decides to try to link a GOP border bill to the government funding talks, an idea that’s DOA in the Senate.

“We have seen this failed playbook before, and here’s the bottom line: shutting the government down over extreme partisan policies … doesn’t solve a single problem — instead, it forces the personnel at our southern border to work without pay and seriously undermines the very agencies responding to the uptick in new arrivals,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

While House Republicans have also used short-term funding extensions to buy more time since taking over the majority last year, that’s less likely to happen this time — the speaker is wary of turning to another stopgap bill after fierce backlash from his use of one in the fall.

If Johnson agrees to tie border security to a government funding bill, House Republicans would need to agree among themselves on what that proposal would look like. They previously passed a sweeping bill last year that would make it significantly harder to seek asylum in the U.S. and fund the continued building of the border wall, in addition to other GOP migration priorities.

Meanwhile, Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) offered his own idea during the GOP’s trip to the border this week: Insert language into any government funding bill that would suspend the processing and release of new migrants.

“We should put that one sentence into legislation,” Jordan said. “I think it boils down to the will of Republicans in the United States Congress. Are we going to force that sentence, that solution, on a piece of legislation?”

Caitlin Emma contributed.

Shortly after reports emerged that Speaker Mike Johnson floated negotiating directly with the White House on border policy, President Joe Biden’s budget director Shalanda Young panned the idea.

Young argued that if Johnson is serious about addressing the surge of migrants at the southern border, he would reach out to the Senate negotiators who have been working towards a solution for weeks.

“It’s a long trip down to the White House to do something that could be done right next door” in the Senate, she said at a breakfast with reporters Friday morning sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

Johnson raised the idea of reaching out to the White House directly during a call with House Republican freshmen, according to a person familiar with the call. Johnson said he was “weighing it” but acknowledged that the Senate has the pen, that person added. Punchbowl News first reported the details of the call.

Johnson is “a fellow Louisianan, so I’m going to use a charitable thought here, but that is not serious,” Young added.

Several House Republicans have called for shutting down the government if their border demands are not met. Many of them want Democratic leaders to agree to the functional equivalent of the partisan H.R. 2, a bill packed with conservative priorities that Democrats have widely rejected.

That rhetoric on the border has Young increasingly worried about keeping the government funded beyond back-to-back deadlines on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

The trip Johnson and dozens of other House Republicans took to the border this week “left me with more concerns about where they’re headed,” Young said. “Don’t mark me down as optimistic this morning, especially after some of the remarks I’ve seen over the last couple of days.”

In exactly two weeks, Congress will face the first of two government shutdown deadlines. From her decades of experience as a top appropriations aide in the House, Young noted the difficulty of even drafting the first tranche of spending bills by that funding cliff, since congressional leaders still haven’t struck a deal on a framework agreement setting overall funding totals.

Democrats are insisting on a non-defense spending figure of about $773 billion and they’re amenable to Covid aid rescissions and IRS cuts, according to a person familiar with those funding negotiations.

“I’ve seen a few of these rodeos before,” said the budget director. “And it is tight, to say the least, just from a mechanical standpoint, how quickly can appropriators write to finish these first four bills by January 19.”

Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.

Former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn is kicking off a bid for Congress in Maryland to succeed retiring Rep. John Sarbanes, emphasizing the need to protect democracy after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“I like to live by the phrase, ‘Until there’s nothing that can be done, there’s always something that can be done,’“ Dunn said in an interview. “As a Capitol Police officer, I did all that I can do in that role to protect, defend, and preserve democracy. But that is exhausted now.”

Dunn, a 15-year veteran of the Hill’s police force, departed the force last month. He became well-known after testifying before the Jan. 6 select panel with other officers about the horrors law enforcement had faced that day and the lingering trauma. Since then, Dunn has been outspoken about the insurrection and has built a large social media following.

The decision by Sarbanes (D-Md.) not to run for reelection last October has kicked off a scramble to succeed him in Maryland’s 3rd District, a solidly liberal amalgam of suburban Baltimore enclaves. Dunn was unphased by the crowded field, saying they were “career politicians” while he was a “career public servant.”

“I truly believe that is one of the reasons why, because I am no stranger to public service. I spent the last 15 plus years of my life dedicated not only to public service, but to defending democracy,” he said.

Asked about his policy platform, Dunn cited a laundry list of priorities including democracy protection, gun reform, infrastructure and transit, and public safety.

The congressional bid will be his first time running for elected office, outside of a bid to lead the Capitol Police union. But the veteran officer said his immersion on the Hill gave him plenty of exposure to politics.

“I spent the last 15 years of my life being around elected officials every single day, having personal relationships with them, talking to them. And I pay attention to my surroundings, I pay attention to everything, not just only elected officials,” he said.

Although he hadn’t discussed the bid with Sarbanes prior to making his decision, Dunn said he looked forward to seeking guidance from him and other elected leaders.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer does not plan to seek reelection this year, a spokesperson said.

The Missouri Republican is one of the most senior and influential members of the House Financial Services Committee, where he chairs the national security subcommittee.

Luetkemeyer said his decision to retire came “after a lot of thoughtful discussion with my family.”

“Over the coming months, as I finish up my last term, I look forward to continuing to work with all my constituents on their myriad of issues as well as work on the many difficult and serious problems confronting our great country,” he said in a statement.

The lawmaker was first elected to the House in 2009, and has served in his current district since 2013. He will step down after his current term ends in January 2025.

Luetkemeyer had been a frontrunner in the race to replace retiring House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) as the top Republican on the committee. His departure now clears the way for other contenders like Reps. French Hill (R-Ark.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.) and Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.).

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is abandoning a top party recruit in a swing Ohio district after he was caught on tape calling Donald Trump “arrogant.”

“I was very disappointed in his inappropriate comments regarding President Trump,” Stefanik wrote of Craig Riedel on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday.

“As we begin 2024, my focus is on ensuring we nominate the strongest candidates on the ballot who are committed to electing President Trump this November and expanding our House GOP Majority,” the New York Republican added.

Riedel, a former state representative, was the party’s preferred pick to take on longtime Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur until audio was leaked in December that showed Riedel calling Trump “arrogant” and vowing not to endorse him. Stefanik’s pulled endorsement, which she initially announced back in July, further signals that his path to the nomination will get tougher.

“I think he is arrogant. I don’t like the way he calls people names. I just don’t think that’s very becoming of a president,” Riedel said of Trump in the recording, the date of which is unclear. Riedel quickly endorsed Trump after the audio leaked.

That left scandal-tarred J.R. Majewski, who lost handedly to Kaptur in 2022, with a clearer shot to the nomination again — a problem for Republicans due to reports that he lied about serving in Afghanistan and allegations that he has called Trump “an idiot.” The party worked to get Ohio state Rep. Derek Merrin to jump into the primary at the last minute.

Stefanik did not endorse either of the other candidates in her post on X.