Principals

☞ White House: The Biden administration is promoting a handful of private sector investments in electric vehicles from companies like Uber, Walmart, and Zipcar. Uber, for instance, is pledging to log 400 million miles driven in electric vehicles on the platform by the end of this year, according to a White House fact sheet.

☞ Senate: Democrats return to the upper chamber grappling with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s, D-Calif. extended absence due to shingles, which has caused work to grind to a halt on the Judiciary Committee. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to name a Democrat to replace her on the panel but will need Republican votes to do so. “I spoke with Sen Feinstein and she hopes to be back soon,” Schumer said in a statement to late Sunday. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. acknowledged on ABC that Feinstein’s absence would become a problem if it lasts many months longer. “We are going to need her vote on the Senate floor eventually. We have things like the debt ceiling coming up,” Klobuchar said.

☞ House: Kevin McCarthy is set to speak at the New York Stock exchange as he unveils a new debt limit proposal today that will reportedly include reductions to SNAP benefits, popularly known as food stamps. (Senate Republicans are already sounding skeptical the cuts will ever pass). House Judiciary members will also be in New York for a road hearing to examine Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s crime policies.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will amend his financial disclosures to add a reference to a real estate deal with a GOP megadonor involving his mother’s home and other properties in Savannah, according to CNN.

A judge abruptly delayed the trial over Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which was supposed to start today, the Washington Post reports, in order to allow settlement talks to continue. It’s set to begin Tuesday instead if there’s no further news.

A super PAC aligned with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Never Back Down PAC, accused former President Trump of “stealing pages from the Biden-Pelosi playbook” in a new ad, pushing back on attacks over DeSantis’ prior votes for entitlement cuts. A second ad called Trump a “gun grabber” over his support for “red flag” laws. The new spots came after pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc, released a much-discussed TV ad Friday that used an unpleasant claim about the Florida governor eating pudding with his fingers to highlight his past votes for benefit changes to Social Security and Medicare. (You really need to watch that one if you haven’t already.)

A pro-Russian network of social media accounts that operated under the alias “Donbass Devushka” helped spread some of the classified Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by Massachusetts National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, The Wall Street Journal reports. The network is partly run by a Washington-based former U.S. aviation electronics technician named Sarah Bils. The group’s Telegram account reposted a portion of the classified files, some of which were altered to raise Ukraine’s casualty count and lower Russia’s.

GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley overstated her fundraising haul when her campaign announced earlier this month that she had raked in over $11 million in six weeks. Instead, she raised $8.3 million among her fundraising committees, which CNN writes is “still a sizable showing for a first-time presidential candidate.”

— Morgan Chalfant

Punchbowl News: In his speech later today at the New York Stock Exchange, McCarthy will try to blame President Biden for delaying action on addressing the national debt. “This is not how the leader of the free world should act,” he’s set to say. “Your partisan political games are provoking the very crisis you claim you want to avoid: greater dependency on China, increasing inflation, and threatening Medicare and Social Security.”

Playbook: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn’t weighed in on whether Republicans will help Schumer swap out another Democrat for Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, but one McConnell confidant sounded doubtful. “My instinct is he would do everything he could to keep Democrats from stacking the federal judiciary,” the person told Politico.

The Early 202: Republican leadership performed a “soft whip check” about an emerging debt limit proposal during the two-week recess. One source told the Washington Post the response was “overwhelmingly positive.”

Axios: Ron Klain, who departed his role as Biden’s chief of staff earlier this year, is returning to the law firm O’Melveny to lead its Strategic Counseling and Crisis Management Practice. He also says he’s lost 15 pounds and lowered his blood pressure since leaving the administration.

Why Tim Scott thinks he has a lane in 2024

THE NEWS

GOOSE CREEK, SC — Sen. Tim Scott took his first official dip into the 2024 presidential race last week, launching an exploratory committee and hitting up Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. At first glance, his (unofficial) campaign launch hit some speed bumps: Namely, Scott faced tough questions on abortion, and repeatedly struggled to answer them clearly.

Nonetheless, his home state of South Carolina greeted him with open arms on Friday. A small crowd stood outside of Alex’s Restaurant in Goose Creek with homemade signs welcoming him back to town, and he entered the locally-owned establishment to a packed house. Inside, Scott spent over an hour shaking hands and chatting with locals — a glimpse at the retail politics one can expect will be at the forefront of Scott’s soft-launch.

Just as it has in speeches to Republican audiences for years, Scott’s personal story as a successful Black man who credits conservative values — not “woke” paternalism — with powering his rise went over well.

“I’m voting for Tim Scott, even if he runs on another ticket with somebody else,” 54-year-old Hugh Denton said in South Carolina. “He stood up in the face of being neglected, being put down, being tossed out, being called names because of his color and what he supports. And I think that he’s shown real integrity and real value and real worth of what he can do in the face of criticism — and not just bow to it, but stand for what he stands for until the very end.”

Scott’s team believes his inspiring background is just one of the ways he’ll find a lane, however. They also believe he’s the most traditionally conservative Republican in the 2024 race and backed up by the interest groups that matter most. Gun Owners of America gave him an “A” in the 2022 congressional ratings and he’s earned both a 100% by the National Right to Life and an “A” from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group.

Just as importantly, he has resources that others don’t to tell voters about his personal story and record. His $21 million cash on hand beats out all the competition for now, including former President Donald Trump.

SHELBY’S VIEW

I’m not yet convinced that Scott can successfully find a lane against big-name, nationally-established opponents like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump, and even former Vice President Mike Pence.

If the test for what makes a good conservative in 2023 was a flawless voting report card, then Scott would indeed pass with flying colors. But that was true of lots of Republicans in 2016 that Trump shoved aside for the nomination.

And it remains an open question whether there’s a path for any one candidate to stand out as the most conservative of the bunch, especially when they’re elbowing each other for the title. Just last week, DeSantis quietly signed a 6-week abortion ban into law, and he has consistently been on the forefront of “anti-woke” fights that rev up the Republican base. Meanwhile, Pence has sought to separate himself early and often on social issues, and has been vocal on his anti-abortion stances in particular.

And while Scott, due to his background, can certainly speak on various red-meat topics in a way that other candidates can’t, that lane isn’t entirely clear either: Nikki Haley, who grew up in a small town in South Carolina as the daughter of immigrants, has been hitting the ground with a similar message.

Scott also lacks his rivals’ name recognition, which puts him at an early disadvantage. His team argues it’s an opportunity: They point out that he’s viewed positively by those who do know him, which offers a chance for him to grow in a way that other candidates won’t have. Underdog campaigns have won contests like Iowa in the past by building gradual buzz with an appealing message and a charismatic messenger. Scott’s war chest will help him aggressively make his pitch, but money hasn’t been everything in prior races either.

Finally, Scott has to convince voters he isn’t running for vice president — something he and his team have explicitly pushed back on. His early reluctance to criticize rivals who might end up leading a ticket is in keeping with his usual style, but could bolster those suspicions.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board made the case that Scott’s “optimistic conservatism” could help propel him to the presidency. “If he can make it through the GOP primaries, he could be formidable in a general election as the candidate of national revival for a country that sorely needs it,” the board wrote.

The White House refreshes its debt ceiling message

As House Republicans continue to debate their opening bid for a debt ceiling increase, the White House is trying to keep the pressure on Congress to pass a clean debt limit hike.

Their newest argument: However bad the financial fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse may have seemed, it was absolute child’s play compared to what would ensue if the government failed to make good on its debt.

A new White House memo shared with Semafor highlights comments from Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently: “If the prospect that some uninsured depositors in an idiosyncratic California bank would lose money could traumatize the financial world as it just did, try to imagine the market effects of a default on U.S. Treasury debt.” The memo also highlights AEI economist Michael Strain’s argument that “running up to the eleventh hour to raise the debt ceiling would be even worse” than market disruptions caused by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

The memo, which the White House is distributing to Democrats on Capitol Hill, also highlights comments from ex-national security officials, business groups, and even former President Trump to buttress the argument for a swift debt ceiling hike.

“While Congressional Republicans threaten to hold the economy hostage in order to secure unspecified spending cuts, economists, national security experts, and business and fiscal leaders agree: Congress must raise the debt limit immediately and without conditions,” the White House memo says.

The debt limit will be a major topic of conversation as lawmakers return to Washington later today after a two-week recess. House Republicans want to use the debt ceiling talks to force action on some of their priorities, like cutting federal spending, but the White House has insisted talks about the budget need to be kept separate.

Republicans are trying to coalesce behind a plan that would raise the debt limit in exchange for returning discretionary non-defense spending to fiscal year 2022 levels, clawing back unused COVID-19 funds, in addition to other priorities.

— Morgan Chalfant

The House select committee on China plans to focus “heavily” on Taiwan and bolstering its defense this spring, according to a source close to the committee, as lawmakers search for ways to head off a Chinese invasion.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., believes that speeding arm sales to Taiwan is the critical ingredient to deterring a Chinese attack on the self-governing island, which Beijing claims as its own territory. The committee wants to make sure that any Taiwan-related measures are included in the mammoth defense policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, the source said. That could include provisions to expand security assistance and training and accelerate production of key weapons.

Roughly $19 billion in U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan have been delayed, largely due to production hiccups. The backlog was a topic of discussion when members of the China select committee joined McCarthy and other bipartisan lawmakers to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California earlier this month.

— Morgan Chalfant

Jason Patterson is a Black history based artist and the Arts & Exhibition Fellow at Washington College’s Starr Center for The Study of the American Experience.

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: An Economist/YouGov poll found that majorities of Americans oppose allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity and allowing parents to give their transgender kids puberty-blocking drugs.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: The Texas judge who ruled to reverse the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone removed his name from a controversial law review paper criticizing protections for transgender people and abortion during his Senate confirmation process, according to the Washington Post.

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— Steve Clemons