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| First Up |
| Joe Biden Hasn’t Lost Dems on Capitol Hill. Keeping Them Won’t Be So Simple. |
| Congressional Democrats largely stayed in line with Biden on their first day back to Capitol Hill. That may change soon. Read more from NOTUS’ team on the Hill. |
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| ALSO ON NOTUS |
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| Democrats Have an Answer to Questions About Biden: Trump Democrats complained about the press, raised alarms about Project 2025 and ignored the questions altogether. Read more from NOTUS’ team on the Hill. The Republican Party Is Formally Backing Away From Federal Abortion Bans Donald Trump’s proposed party platform passed a key committee on Monday, setting the stage for significant change in the GOP’s professed policy priorities. Read more from NOTUS’ Oriana González and Reese Gorman. House GOP Whip Brings in Over $5 Million in Latest Fundraising Haul House Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s total this cycle is now over $22 million. Read more from NOTUS’ Reese Gorman. Biden Is Digging In President Joe Biden is lashing out at Democrats who have called on him to end his reelection campaign, insisting that he’s the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump and that anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Read more from NOTUS’ Katherine Swartz. |
| From the Notebook |
| The night Donald Trump was convicted, Rep. Jim Banks posted a captionless image of the Appeal to Heaven flag, hearkening back to the Enlightenment idea of the right of revolution. He made it his pinned tweet. In the absence of any other context, some commenters decided that he might view what was happening to Trump as dire enough to warrant some new kind of American revolution. Given multiple opportunities to make his message clear on Monday night, after his office previously didn’t answer questions from NOTUS about it, Banks refused. “I’ll let you make your own conclusions,” he told NOTUS’ Haley Byrd Wilt. But doesn’t he see that a captionless image of that flag, posted right when Trump was convicted, could be misconstrued? “I’m not sure what there is to misconstrue,” he said. “We’re in unprecedented times, and November will be the result of regular people taking our country back. And then we’ll have a reset, and then we’ll take back our government and our country from the elites and those who are trying to destroy it. So, you can infer whatever you’d like from that post.” In that case, is he saying that the right of revolution, as described by John Locke — that people can take up arms against oppression when they have no other option — is now fulfilled more peacefully in elections? “Sure,” he said. “I mean, this is the most important election of our lifetime.” But to be clear, does he condemn any kind of violent insurrection? He condemns “the Democrats for what they’ve done to weaponize the federal government against their political enemies. It’s un-American, and I think the vast majority of the American people have had enough of it. So they’ll speak loudly on Election Day.” But, really, to be clear — does he oppose the concept of a second civil war? “That’s a crazy question,” Banks said, without answering it. Ben T.N. Mause covers Republicans and national politics for NOTUS. Here’s what he is watching:
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