Principals

☞ White House: Biden heads to Springfield, Va. today to deliver a speech on his economic agenda at a steamfitters union hall. Biden will “outline the biggest threat to our economic progress: House Republicans’ MAGA Economic Plan,” according to a White House official.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The Senate hasn’t been voting much this week, but there is a vote scheduled for later today on designating January “National Stalking Awareness Month.”

☞ Mitch McConnell: The Senate GOP leader’s remarks took a local turn yesterday as he lambasted local D.C. officials for the high level of crime in the city. “Stay tuned” for more from Senate Republicans on this front, he said.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The House speaker met with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. on Wednesday about the debt ceiling. Afterwards, Manchin told reporters that “it was a very, very, very productive meeting,” and that McCarthy “agreed” that a deal shouldn’t involve cuts to Social Security or Medicare.

☞ Hakeem Jeffries: Democrats are rallying behind Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. as McCarthy prepares a floor vote to remove from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But several Republicans, including Reps. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., sound reluctant to deny her a seat, which could scotch McCarthy’s plans.

Biden is getting bipartisan kudos for his decision to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, a reversal in the administration’s stance that sets the stage for Germany to send its own Leopard tanks. (The Leopards are expected to arrive sooner and are considered more important to Ukraine’s immediate war effort, but German leaders did not want to supply tanks unless the U.S. did as well). In remarks on the Senate floor, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. called the White House’s move “overdue.” But the announcement also served as a reminder of the cleave in the Republican Party over assistance to Ukraine. “We look weaker if burned out shells of these iconic American tanks begin to litter Ukrainian fields,” the increasingly influential Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. said.

The National Archives is considering asking all living former presidents and vice presidents to search their personal records to make sure they didn’t also inadvertently come away with classified information after they left office, according to the Washington Post, following the recent revelations about President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. The offices of former Presidents Obama and Clinton told The Hill they returned all classified documents properly at the end of their terms.

David Brock is convening over 130 Democratic donors in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. today for a donor conference centered on his groups Media Matters, American Bridge, American Independent, and Facts First USA. According to a copy of his opening remarks, he plans to tell attendees that he expects Trump to be indicted, that the House GOP will “discredit themselves” with partisan investigations,  and that Ron DeSantis is a “cheap imitation” of Trump “without any agenda other than fighting fanatical culture wars — let’s call him Ron DeStuntis.”

Elaine Chao, Trump’s former Transportation secretary (and Mitch McConnell’s wife), hit back at Trump’s racist attacks against her in a statement to Politico.

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: Defying expectations, McCarthy and Jeffries have so far managed to put aside their past tensions and get along — even, *gasp* texting each other directly on occasion.

Playbook: Veterans of the 2011 debt ceiling standoff worry that “this time feels different” because of the slim House GOP majority and the lack of agreement among Republicans on what they want out of a negotiation.

The Early 202: The Washington Post has a rundown of the promises that McCarthy made to conservatives to get the speaker’s gavel that are already giving Republicans problems.

What Trump’s return to Facebook actually means for his campaign

THE NEWS

Meta is officially reinstating former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts “in the coming weeks,” just over two years after he was suspended in the wake of the January 6 riot.

The news, first reported by Axios, is a win for Trump, whose campaign recently petitioned Meta to allow him back on the platform and cc’d Republican leaders in Congress. But this time around, Trump and his team will face new guardrails that, if violated, could limit his reach or even see him quickly booted back off.

“We’ve always believed that Americans should be able to hear from the people who want to lead the country,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg told Axios. “We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election.”

Trump praised the decision on his social media platform Truth Social shortly after the news broke, saying that “such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!”

SHELBY AND MORGAN’S VIEW

Unlike Twitter, Trump was never a prolific poster on Facebook and Instagram, where his campaign team took the lead, and it’s not clear he’ll begin using it now for his daily personal communications.

One 2020 Trump campaign official noted that his team did sometimes port over content from his Twitter feed on his behalf. Copying and pasting his Truth Social posts could be more difficult, however, since Meta’s promised restrictions would likely rule out much of his current daily content. Calls to overturn the 2020 election and Qanon material, for example, are forbidden. Trump’s racist taunts against his former cabinet secretary Elaine Chao also could run afoul of hate speech guidelines.

But regaining access to Facebook could still be a game-changer for his campaign. Republican strategists and Trump insiders who spoke to us said that the development could turbocharge Trump’s grassroots fundraising, a historic strength of his that has been thrown into question after a bumpy campaign launch. Until now, only an affiliated super PAC has been able to run ads.

“Between his email lists, Truth, and the MSM, Trump has had no trouble getting his message out without Facebook,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former aide to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. “But re-gaining access to his millions of followers could bolster his lagging online fundraising.”

That could prove especially critical this cycle given that expected rival Ron DeSantis has become a fundraising giant with larger donors.

“His previous campaigns have basically written the book on how to best take advantage of Facebook’s targeted advertising,” said another Republican strategist, who added that the reinstatement would be “tremendous” for Trump’s campaign.

Republican digital strategist Eric Wilson noted that his firm conducted a post-2022 election poll that found at least 46% of GOP donors use Facebook daily. “But the platform has changed a lot since 2020 so it’s not going to be business as usual for the Trump team,” Wilson added.

Ads and posts can also be used to push pro-Trump messaging. A Republican operative familiar with Trump’s campaign said that the reinstatement is likely to help Trump reach “tens of millions of voters” who are active on the platform.

“Trump rejoining Facebook would be major,” the operative said. “He needs to take advantage of this opportunity.”

THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS

Despite the occasional hot take that a more visible Trump boosts Democrats by reminding voters what they don’t like, elected Democrats were mostly dreading his reinstatement. The recent January 6th-like riot by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro and the pre-midterms attack on then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, have only reinforced fears that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to real world violence.

Four House members sent a letter to Clegg in December urging Meta to keep Trump offline, citing his continued promotion of election conspiracies, his increasing engagement with Qanon, and his calls to pardon rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6th, as ongoing threats to democracy.

“He’s shown no remorse. No contrition,” one of the signatories, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. tweeted on Wednesday. “Giving him back access to a social media platform to spread his lies and demagoguery is dangerous.”

Joe Manchin’s very 2011 idea for a debt ceiling deal

With Democrats and Republicans potentially headed for a collision over the debt ceiling, one critical lawmaker has already begun talking about a familiar offramp.

It’s time, says Sen. Joe Manchin, for a blue-ribbon commission on how to fix the federal budget.

Feeling déjà vu? Creating a grand “super committee” on the deficit was a big part of the agreement that helped resolve Congress’s 2011 debt ceiling standoff. The panel notoriously failed to agree on a solution — triggering the unpopular broad spending cuts known as sequestration that were put in the debt ceiling bill to spur them to a deal. That era also saw the much heralded Bowles-Simpson deficit commission end at an impasse.

But Manchin says it’s time to give the idea another spin. After meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday, he said the GOP leader was “receptive” to the idea of calling a bipartisan panel on how to make spending more “effective,” according to Politico. (He told the publication McCarthy himself hadn’t singled out any specific spending cuts he wanted, other than “fraud, waste, and abuse.”)

He’s also been talking up the bipartisan TRUST Act that he co-sponsored with Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, including on a Fox Business interview last week.

The bill would create Congressional committees, with members split evenly between the two parties, tasked with finding ways to bolster the dwindling trust funds that support Medicare and Social Security. Their proposed fixes would get a fast track to a vote in the House, but still need 60 yea’s to pass the Senate. Unlike in 2011, there’d be no automatic budget cuts if the commissions deadlocked.

The White House has so far insisted that it won’t negotiate on the debt ceiling with Republicans, who’ve said they want unspecified spending cuts in return for a hike. Manchin is the most prominent Democrat to break ranks and urge talks.

Some GOP lawmakers are open to his pitch — though it’s unclear how many would be satisfied with trading a debt limit hike for a commission alone.

Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., told Semafor that it was “a wonderfully innovative idea” that should be on the table. Romney told reporters on Monday that the TRUST Act “could certainly” form part of an agreement to end the current standoff. However, he cautioned that only establishing fiscal committees “would be insufficient to get the deal done.”

At least one veteran of fiscal commissions past is on board with the concept too — though he’s keeping his expectations in check.

“That’s obviously something that I personally think would be a good idea to look at,” Sen. Mike Crapo, the Idaho Republican who served on the Bowles-Simpson commission, told Semafor. He acknowledged that commissions might end in failure again, but added: “We have to try difficult things here.”

Expectations may start off low for any commission, but that could be the point. If the choice is between a fig leaf for fiscal conservatives and a catastrophic default, it may end up the easiest option for everyone involved.

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Ukraine’s intense lobbying effort for western weaponry secured another victory with the announcements that both the U.S. and Germany would send tanks to help claw back territory and resist a new Russian offensive.

Now they’re already turning their attention to the next item on their lists: Western fighter jets that would improve upon Ukraine’s fleet of old Soviet-era aircraft.

“Tanks will be enough for limited military operations and not enough for victory,” Dmytro Gurin, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Semafor. “I am sure that the Armed Forces of Ukraine will show miracles of efficiency and this will open up the possibility of continuing the supply of other types of weapons. Next up is the F-16.”

It doesn’t seem likely that the U.S. would be willing to transfer U.S.-made fighter jets to Ukraine, however, given how complicated it might be to get them there. The Biden administration rejected a Polish proposal to transfer Soviet-era MiG fighter jets to Ukraine last year that would have involved them departing from a U.S./NATO air base, in part out of concern of ratcheting up already flaring tensions with Russia.

“We’re in constant discussions with the Ukrainians about their capabilities,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday when asked about the chances of the U.S. supplying fighter jets. “And as I’ve said, we evolve those as the conditions change. Can’t blame the Ukrainians for wanting more and more systems. It’s not the first time that they’ve talked about fighter jets.  But I don’t have any announcements to make on that front.”

Lockheed Martin (the maker of the aircraft) says it stands ready, according to the Financial Times.

— Morgan Chalfant

One Good Text ... with Dan Pfeiffer

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Two people were charged by the Justice Department with vandalizing anti-abortion clinics in Florida.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: An Illinois man was charged with setting fire to a Planned Parenthood facility.

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— Steve Clemons

An item in yesterday’s newsletter misidentified the state Senator Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. represents. Semafor regrets the error.