Congressional Democrats are largely content to wait until after the election for Kamala Harris to drill down on her policy agenda.

As she picks up the mantle from President Joe Biden and heads into an energized convention next week, the Democratic nominee is slowly rolling out some policy proposals and disavowing some of her former positions. But mostly, she’s leaning into a general positive message that has wider appeal, specifically because it’s light on the details.

Democratic lawmakers call it a savvy strategy. They’d rather lay out a specific plan post-November, when a potential President-elect Harris would have to staff up her administration and determine her governing priorities.

“She doesn’t need to negotiate against herself. We’ve got the biggest possible tent right now,” said Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), chair of the centrist New Democrats. “I don’t think there’s a real strong reason for her to try to weed out any points of view right now.”

It’s an advantageous but incredibly rare position for any presidential nominee. Harris skipped the typically policy-heavy competitive primary process, despite not being an incumbent president, due to Biden’s late dropout. Her own party is hesitant to demand any policy goals that could blunt her momentum, but it’s still a risky strategy. Republicans have repeatedly brought up her more liberal positions from the 2020 presidential primary as they try to paint her as an out-of-touch progressive, an approach they’ll almost certainly continue into November.

Harris has renounced some of those ideas, such as a fracking ban, and started to tease parts of her economic policy, including expected efforts to tackle grocery prices, housing and health care costs. She’s also made another major commitment: eliminating taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers, an idea former President Donald Trump mentioned in June.

Still, Democrats feel little urgency for the Harris campaign to put out detailed new policy documents that could easily become further campaign ad fodder for the right, especially as Trump has struggled to hit her effectively over the last month. They’ve seen polls, in the presidential race and down ballot, shift in their favor after Harris’ rise, and believe her lack of fidelity to certain policy positions will continue to be an asset to elections across the country.

“They have very little knowledge about who she is, what her job has actually been,” said one battleground-district House Democrat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, of voters’ attitudes toward Harris. “They know Trump. They know what his policies are. They don’t know Kamala. And so Kamala has a ton of room right now to define herself.”

Some progressives are calling for more clarity on her positions, especially as Democrats prepare to unveil their platform at the convention next week. But even those voices aren’t hitting Harris hard — yet.

“While we’ve seen some steps in the right direction from Kamala Harris, most of that has been messaging,” said Waleed Shahid, a progressive strategist who advises the “Uncommitted” movement. “The main thing that we’re asking for is to stop sending American weapons to the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza and to indicate in some way that as vice president she would have a different view.”

But, illustrating her long runway within the party, immigration advocacy group leaders say they can wait until after Harris becomes president to discuss a more concrete platform on the major issue.

“We’re hoping to work with her on some more detailed plans about how to help folks with [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals],” said Immigration Hub’s Kerri Talbot. “But I think she’s already really well aware and familiar with those issues. So we’re looking forward to implementing those programs.”

Harris’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Most Democrats acknowledge that Harris will need to round out her platform as the campaign continues, even if she doesn’t need to release an issue-by-issue plan. Former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who lost a Senate bid to GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance in 2022 and ran against Harris in the 2020 presidential primary, said that “at some point” Harris will need to lay out more policy priorities but shouldn’t feel pressure to do so yet.

“She’ll probably need to do something on inflation and getting costs down, but she has the re-industrialization already,” he said, referencing Biden administration accomplishments like the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan legislation aimed at boosting the domestic semiconductor industry.

And one top progressive, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has publicly pushed Harris to flesh out her economic policy platform to win over working-class voters. He said in a statement to POLITICO that the vice president should be “proud to run on” the administration’s economic record, adding: “As we have seen in poll after poll, running on policies that benefit working-class voters is also good politics.”

Elected officials are hoping an intentionally fuzzy approach on immigration, particularly, could help shield them from GOP attacks on the hot-button issue. The battleground Democrat predicted that the “broadest possible take” on immigration that focuses on values without “firm commitments” could help Harris recover ground with Hispanic votes.

The buoyancy provided by the top-of-the-ticket change has many other Democrats feeling more optimistic about their chances in November.

“Folks are very excited across the country, whether they’re going to the convention or not. They’ve seen just an incredible turnout of volunteers, as folks go out canvassing, just a lot of enthusiasm and energy in our battleground races across the country,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), chair of House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Other Democrats framed the lack of policy specifics less as a purposeful choice and more about the tenor of the election. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), said that policy was taking a backseat because the “contrast” between Harris and Trump was what was ultimately going to be most decisive in the race.

“It’s really about the excitement of having a ticket that is more youthful, that is more about the future, that we feel good about, and that I think transcends any individual policy that may come out,” he said.

And as some in the party would privately prefer that Harris add some more heft to her policy positions, especially on issues where the GOP is attacking her, there’s a widespread Democratic argument that Trump hasn’t been fully forthcoming on his own platform.

Officials with the controversial Project 2025 have said they were laying the policy groundwork for Trump’s potential second term, but the former president has publicly rejected any connection to the group. Trump also doesn’t generally detail rigorous policy positions but, unlike Harris, Trump can point to his first term as president.

“We will be trying to influence policy, obviously, but … you don’t see the Trump campaign coming out with policy papers,” Kuster said. “We’re up against total chaos on the other side.”

Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.

House Republicans are setting their sights on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democrats’ vice presidential candidate — the latest indication that they are using their slim majority to go after former President Donald Trump’s political opponents.

Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Friday announced that he is opening an investigation into Walz’s work related to China, including coordinating student trips, and sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting a swath of documents and any correspondence with Walz related to China.

“Americans should be deeply concerned that Governor Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, has a longstanding and cozy relationship with China. …The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes,” Comer said in a statement.

Walz in 1989 went to China as part of a teach-abroad program. He also helped coordinate trips for students and has visited China more than 30 times — two details highlighted by Comer as part of the groundwork for his investigation.

Walz’s work related to China has become an early point of GOP criticism as the party recalibrates its November strategy toward Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris. But Walz has also been critical of China, particularly on human rights. During his time in Congress he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focuses on the issue.

“Throughout his career, Governor Walz has stood up to the CCP, fought for human rights … and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first. Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators, and sending American jobs to China,” Teddy Tschann, a spokesperson for Walz, said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Oversight Committee Democrats in a statement called Comer’s investigation “nothing more than a political stunt to aid the former president, while he ignores Trump’s cozy relationships with dictators, including China’s Xi.”

Comer has launched sweeping investigations into Chinese entities as part of his work as chair of the House Oversight Committee, which has a broad jurisdictional lane. But he’s also used the panel to delve into the party’s political opponents. While he told POLITICO that he wouldn’t be calling Harris in, he recently requested documents related to her work on the U.S.-Mexico border.

His most high-profile investigation — co-leading an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden that largely focused on the business deals of his family members — has quietly wrapped after months. Republicans, however, don’t have the votes to impeach Biden, after investigators failed to convince dozens of their colleagues that Biden had committed a crime or an impeachable offense.

Convicted Sen. Bob Menendez on Friday took his independent candidacy off the November ballot, ending for good the question of whether the disgraced senator would complicate an election for the party that spurned him.

It also formally ends a half-century in politics that began on a New Jersey school board and culminated with extraordinary power on the global stage. Hours earlier, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he would appoint former chief of staff George Helmy to the Senate seat Menendez has said he will vacate in days.

“Please be advised that as an Independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in this November’s election I am advising you that I wish to have my name withdrawn from the ballot,” Menendez said in a letter filed with the state division of elections.

Menendez had said he would run for reelection as an “independent Democrat” if exonerated on corruption charges, and in June filed well over the number of petition signatures needed to get on the ballot as an independent.

But Menendez was not exonerated. Instead, a jury in July convicted him of 16 corruption counts. Even though Menendez plans to resign from the Senate on Tuesday, he hadn’t addressed whether he planned to remain on the ballot until Friday — the deadline to withdraw his candidacy with the New Jersey Secretary of State.

Some New Jersey Republicans were hopeful that Menendez could play spoiler in the Senate race to replace him between three-term Democratic Rep. Andy Kim and Republican hotelier Curtis Bashaw. Murphy said that Helmy will fill Menendez’s seat until a winner in that race is certified, then he will appoint that person.

Republicans have not won a U.S. Senate election in New Jersey since 1972. However, the political environment has changed drastically, with Vice President Kamala Harris now at the top of the ticket, and Menendez’s trial led to daily negative headlines about the senator taking bribes to help foreign governments and influence prosecutions.

Menendez has served in the Senate since 2006 and rose to national prominence as the chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He had been a member of the U.S. House, state Senate and Assembly, and mayor of Union City over a 50-year career that began with Union City’s school board.

Menendez’s son, Rob, a first-term House member who owes his political rise to his father’s influence in New Jersey Democratic politics, in June won a primary against Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla and is on a glide path to reelection in his overwhelmingly Democratic district.

Though Bob Menendez was for many years a feared Democratic power broker, state Democrats abandoned him within hours of his September 2023 indictment. It was a stunning contrast to his previous corruption indictment in 2015, when almost every member of the Democratic establishment stuck with him. That indictment led to a 2017 mistrial.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is defending Congress’ ability to permit voting by “proxy” when members are absent, a practice adopted by House Democrats at the height of the Covid pandemic despite intense opposition from Republicans.

In a brief filed Friday in federal court — authored by former Attorney General William Barr — McConnell says that despite his personal opposition to proxy voting, the House and Senate have total constitutional authority to determine the way they conduct business.

“Despite his fierce opposition to proxy voting, Senator McConnell believes it critical that courts nevertheless respect each house of Congress’ power to ‘determine the rules of its proceedings,’” Barr wrote on McConnell’s behalf.

McConnell’s position puts him at odds with the vast majority of House Republicans, who spent years fighting a losing battle in court to overturn the practice, which was initiated in 2020 by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The House GOP leader at the time, Kevin McCarthy, sued to block the practice but was dealt defeats by two federal courts before the Supreme Court declined to take up the issue.

However, in February, a federal district court judge in Texas ruled that the House’s use of proxy voting violated the Constitution, contending that it requires a majority of members to be physically present to conduct business. The ruling, if upheld by appellate courts, threatens to unravel large and complicated legislative packages adopted with decisive votes cast by absent members.

McConnell says the ruling is particularly problematic because it presumes courts have a role in judging Congress’ internal procedures. The district court judge — Trump appointee James Hendrix — never defined what it means to be “physically present” to cast votes, McConnell noted, and said establishing such an “ironclad” restriction would be “debilitating” for Congress.

McConnell argues that the ruling “threatens Congress’s ability to conduct business on a day-to-day basis” and would remove “necessary flexibility,” noting that there may be other national emergencies that could require voting remotely. He said it could particularly devastate common Senate practices like voice votes and seeking unanimous consent.

The matter is pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a conservative court that has at times pushed legal boundaries only to be reined in by the Supreme Court.

McConnell isn’t alone: Homeland security leaders from multiple administrations and advocacy groups who depended on programs funded during the height of the Covid pandemic are also urging the appeals court to overturn the lower court’s ruling.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs fighting in the Iraq War, on Sunday called Republican nominee Donald Trump “despicable” for comments Thursday about soldiers honored for their actions in combat.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” the Illinois Democrat said: “Donald Trump is despicable. He doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief. And certainly those remarks are consistent with where he’s always been. He thinks that we’re suckers and losers.”

On Thursday, when addressing megadonor Miriam Adelson about the Presidential Medal of Freedom he had given her in 2018, Trump said: “It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

The former president, in calling those two awards basically equivalent, added about Adelson: “She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal.”

Addressing ABC host Martha Raddatz, Duckworth said American voters will have to decide: “Do they want a five-time draft dodger who denigrates military men and women and our veterans and calls us suckers and losers, who doesn’t want to have his picture taken with amputee veterans of various conflicts to be the next commander in chief or are you going to have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who care deeply about veterans?”

In discussing Walz’s military record, Duckworth said she had no issues with how the Minnesota governor has characterized his service and blasted Trump and his allies for their criticisms.

“It’s despicable what Republicans are doing,” she told Raddatz, “the same party that thinks that Donald Trump, who dodged a draft five times, who thinks veterans are suckers and losers, that’s who they think is better than someone who served 24 years in uniform.”

Duckworth, the first female double amputee to serve in the Senate, is a retired Army National guard lieutenant colonel whose Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by Iraqi insurgents on Nov. 12, 2004. She wrote in “Every Day is a Gift,” her 2021 memoir: “A rocket-propelled grenade blew through the plexiglass ‘chin bubble’ window at my feet and detonated in a violent fireball right in my lap.”

The senator is not a recipient of the Medal of Honor, but a total of 3,538 have been awarded since the Civil War, including Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), Francis Warren (R-Wyo.) and four others who went on to serve in the Senate.

Trump awarded Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2018, along with football greats Alan Page and Roger Staubach and then-Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). He also presented three posthumous awards that day, to Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.