 | By Charlie Mahtesian | Presented by The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing | | 
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) speaks to reporters outside of a House Oversight Committee hearing on May 16, 2023. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images | STAYING THE COURSE — In a few weeks’ time, Democrats will be facing the hard reality of the 2024 election results. They will be shut out of power in every branch in Washington and confronted with a swaggering Republican president who won the popular vote in November, captured every swing state and splintered the Democratic base. It’s a dire situation, yet you might not know it from the party’s recent appraisals. Top officials have been circulating always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life statements recounting catastrophes averted and minor victories. Harris staffers have spoken of their campaign as “flawless.” House Democrats did their part this week, sidestepping an opportunity to chart a different course for Trump’s second term by returning a roster of top committee members marked by almost no significant generational change. The election was shaped by the ouster of 82-year-old President Joe Biden as the party nominee over concerns about his age. And then the November results were marked by a huge dropoff in the Democratic vote among those under 30 years old. And yet given the chance to inject some youth and shake up the leadership in the House committees that will take on the Trump bulldozer, Democrats politely declined. It’s true that several Democrats leapfrogged more senior members to claim posts as ranking members on key committees like Natural Resources and Agriculture. But those changes were low-hanging fruit — a matter of pushing out enfeebled or ailing members. The argument for installing Rep. Jamin Raskin (D-Md.) as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee was likewise hard to deny. Raskin is a former constitutional law professor and one of the most dynamic voices in the Democratic Caucus. Installing the 62-year-old over 77-year-old Rep. Jerrold Nadler in the arena where some of the highest stakes battles of the next four years will take place — on issues like executive powers, immigration, abortion rights, and the independence of the Justice Department — was a no-brainer, especially since he will be going head-to-head with combative GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee chairman. Yet it’s revealing that even after the ouster of three 70-somethings from ranking spots on committees — Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), David Scott (D-Ga.) and Nadler — top Democrats on 10 different committees in the next Congress will be over 70 years old. Two of them are octogenarians, including 86-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who will be ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee. The GOP House chairmen these Democrats will be up against aren’t exactly spring chickens. But Republicans will have half the number of 70-plus-year-olds serving in the top spot. Two GOP chairmen will be more than 25 years younger than their Democratic counterpart on the committee. In part, it’s a function of the term limits imposed on committee leaders by the House GOP conference. Democrats, by contrast, are wedded to seniority as the basis of power. The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday was the scene of one of the clearest and most publicized Democratic rejections of a generational shift. In that case, 74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) defeated 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to become the high-profile committee’s ranking member. In isolation, it was a decision that made some sense — Connolly is a respected veteran and a productive member. Ocasio-Cortez is an outspoken, progressive lightning rod whom Republicans might have leveraged against party centrists. But the decision wasn’t made in isolation. Tapping Connolly — who has been diagnosed with cancer — was part of a pattern that places seniority, institutional experience and intra-party relationships above all else at a time when new ideas, new leadership and a break with past party practice might be more important than ever. Together, these choices are the mark of a complacent party that still seems unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to reorient itself, and where too many aging Democratic officials won’t willingly give up power. It’s a phenomenon that played out to devastating effect for the party just last month. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie .
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| | A message from The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing: Big Pharma’s patent abuse drives up drug prices and blocks competition – costing patients and the U.S. health care system billions. Patent thickets protect profits, not innovation, and extend monopolies on blockbuster drugs while millions of Americans struggle to afford their medications. This year, the Senate unanimously passed Cornyn-Blumenthal, a bipartisan solution to curb these anti-competitive tactics. Time is running out – Congress must pass Cornyn-Blumenthal and deliver relief to patients before it’s too late. Learn more. | | | | | GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN? — Johnson’s spending nightmare grows: GOP leaders are now considering a plan B to avert a shutdown deadline on Friday as conservatives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance have excoriated the original spending plan, which included several add-ons like $100 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension. Trump and Vance, while objecting to the current bill in a long statement, also surprised lawmakers by demanding that Congress address the debt ceiling now and explicitly opening the door to a shutdown. — Supreme Court will take up TikTok’s bid to avoid U.S. ban: The Supreme Court said today it will decide whether a looming ban on TikTok in the U.S. violates the First Amendment . The high court put the case on an unusually accelerated timeline, agreeing to hear arguments on Jan. 10 — nine days before a law is slated to take effect that would ban the popular app or force its Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell it. TikTok had asked the justices to grant an emergency injunction that would have temporarily put the law on hold and lifted its Jan. 19 deadline while the high court considered whether to take up the case. — Ethics Committee secretly voted to release Gaetz report: The House Ethics Committee has taken the rare and controversial step of voting to release its investigative report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, according to a person familiar with the matter. The private vote earlier this month means at least one Republican on the panel, which has membership that is evenly split between both parties, sided with Democrats to release the report. Its release is expected after lawmakers wrap up their votes this week, the person said.
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Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Labor, walks to a meeting in the Hart Senate Office Building today. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images | HEADED TO THE HILL — Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer has begun making the rounds on Capitol Hill to secure support for her bid to become Labor secretary in the Trump administration. The Oregon Republican will meet today with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who serves on the Senate HELP Committee, a staffer in his office confirmed to POLITICO. Unions have expressed cautious optimism about President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to tap DeRemer to head up DOL, while some businesses are wary of the pick, which could signal a move away from the GOP’s pro-employer labor tilt. However, she remains one of Trump’s least controversial nominees and will likely gain support from Democrats looking to preserve remnants of President Joe Biden’s labor agenda. JOHNSON’S NEWEST HEADACHE — Speaker Mike Johnson has a massive new headache as he races to stop a holiday government shutdown — and his name is Elon Musk . The tech scion and mega-ally of President-elect Donald Trump took to his social platform X today to slam a short-term funding bill Johnson backed, criticizing the 1,547-page continuing resolution for its numerous unrelated spending measures — including a raise for lawmakers — and calling it “criminal,” “unconscionable” and a “crime against the American people.” It started at 4:15 a.m. ET, when Musk posted on X “this bill should not pass.” And he hasn’t let up since, repeatedly urging his nearly 208 million followers to call their representatives to “Stop the steal of your tax dollars!” and threatening that “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” That’s a problem for Johnson — a Republican and Trump ally himself who could face a gavel fight in January — who must clear the bill by Friday night to avoid a government shutdown at the peak of the holiday season.
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| | | | | TILTING RIGHT — Ireland’s new parliament has picked an ex-trucking boss and its first woman to be its speaker in a move that suggests the country’s next government is taking a turn to the right. The election by secret ballot of independent lawmaker Verona Murphy — a tough communicator who once infamously branded immigrants as Islamic State terrorists — sets the stage for a new government reliant on support from rural mavericks like herself. Murphy, a 53-year-old school dropout who became a trucker and ultimately president of the Irish Road Haulage Association, lost her first parliamentary by-election in 2019 after claiming that Islamic State supporters were “a big part of the migrant population” who represented a security risk and would need to be “deprogrammed” to fit into Irish society. Murphy quickly apologized. But she was sidelined and quit the government party Fine Gael as both it and the rival centrist party Fianna Fáil dismissed her views as ignorant and racist. Undeterred, she since has built a poll-topping base in her native southeast county of Wexford as a blunt-spoken independent — the very kind of politician that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil now are courting to form a parliamentary majority. NIGHTMARE START — New French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s first few days at Matignon, the residence of the French prime minister, have been marred by controversy over his insistence on keeping a side job as mayor of Pau — a small city in southwestern France — and his handling of the crisis that followed the devastating cyclone in the French overseas region of Mayotte. Even more crucially, Bayrou has so far been unable to extend his narrow base of support in France’s fragmented legislature — something he will need to accomplish to avoid the fate of his predecessor Michel Barnier whose minority government was toppled by a no-confidence backed by nearly all opposition parties. LET’S WORK TOGETHER — Canada’s government says it wants to create a joint “strike force” at the Canada-U.S. border to target transnational organized crime — a shared initiative with the added goal of convincing President-elect Donald Trump to drop his tariff threat. Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly discussed details of the plan with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan during a phone call Monday — the same day Canada announced a C$1.3 billion border security package. The proposed force would be made up of U.S. and Canadian law enforcement, LeBlanc’s office said.
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| | | FYODOR FEVER — Amidst romances and books that have been turned into blockbuster movies, a surprising book is shooting back up to the top of bestseller lists: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” a novella that runs about 80 pages. And the thinness of the volume is part of its success — unlike some of his other, more famous works like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Crime & Punishment,” “White Nights” has gained much of its recent popularity from “BookTok,” the side of TikTok concerned with reviewing and discussing books. Many popular “BookTok” creators are concerned especially with how many books they’re reading in a year to meet their own defined goals. Hence, “White Nights.” Read all about how Dostoevsky shot up the list with a surprising volume, and what modern “BookTok” is prioritizing from Imogen West-Knights in The Guardian.
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On this date in 1987: South Korean riot police drag a bleeding demonstrator away after students clashed with police in Seoul. The students were protesting against alleged election violations by the ruling party. | AP | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here .
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| | A message from The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing: Big Pharma’s patent abuse drives up drug prices and blocks competition – costing patients and the U.S. health care system billions. Patent thickets protect profits, not innovation, and extend monopolies on blockbuster drugs while millions of Americans struggle to afford their medications. This year, the Senate unanimously passed Cornyn-Blumenthal, a bipartisan solution to curb these anti-competitive tactics. Time is running out – Congress must pass Cornyn-Blumenthal and deliver relief to patients before it’s too late. Learn more. | | | | |
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