Principals

1. Alarm over Biden’s age
2. Senate’s packed agenda
3. Remembering Bill Richardson
4. The combative auto union chief
5. Andrew Cuomo stirs
6. Tax audits pay off

PDB: Biden on Obama, Vietnam heroism, Texas impeachment

Jill Biden has COVID, but POTUS is negative ... All eyes on Mitch as the Senate returns ... NBC News: Kim Jong Un to Russia?

Fear of an old president

Democratic fears about President Biden’s age are peaking. A buzzy WSJ survey over the holiday finds 73% of voters (and two-thirds of Democrats) think Biden is “too old” to run again. Nate Silver argues the age issue is underplayed in the press based on the actuarial data: “The late 70s and early 80s are a period when medical problems often get much worse for the typical American man.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s own health episode is also drawing attention to broader issues surrounding older politicians. Rebutting these concerns, Biden said in his Labor Day speech that “the only thing that comes with age is a little bit of wisdom.”

While the age issue is obviously real, there’s only one relevant political decision for Democrats tied to it: Whether to pressure Biden not to run, or encourage someone else to challenge him. For a variety of reasons — satisfaction with his policy record, concerns about Kamala Harris, the lack of an Obama-like star on the bench — the party has shown little inclination to do so. Had the midterms been a disaster, there might have been more talk about giving Biden the gold watch treatment, but Democrats’ strong cycle ended that conversation before it started. As long as the party is settled on another Biden run, the age talk is mostly empty handwringing about hypothetical future health episodes. Democrats should take a nice walk instead.

— Benjy Sarlin

The Senate returns

The Senate is back with a stacked agenda this week, while the House is off until next Tuesday. With Mitch McConnell’s health on many minds, there’s also a lot of work to get done:

• Emergency Cash. The White House wants to tie disaster relief to Ukraine aid, but some Republicans want the issues kept separate.
• Budget fight. The Senate and House are clashing over how to fund the government ahead of a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. House Republicans want steeper budget cuts. Conservatives are demanding concessions on immigration, defense policy, and a Biden impeachment probe. “Honestly, it’s a pretty big mess,” McConnell said last week.
• Reauthorizations. The Farm Bill is unlikely to be done by a Sept. 30 deadline, senators are holding up FAA reauthorization on issues including pilot training, and the surveillance programs under Section 702 all require new votes every five years — something new to many newer members.
• Defense: Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., so far hasn’t shown any signs of letting up in his blockade of military promotions over Pentagon policy on abortion, which has elicited criticism from military leaders and even some Republicans, like 2024 candidate Nikki Haley.
• Legislative reaches. Chuck Schumer’s priorities this year: Capping insulin costs outside of Medicare, rail safety, artificial intelligence, cannabis banking, and more. None of these items are must-pass but they all have bipartisan interest, which makes them potentially worth the effort. Also keep an eye on (for now) stalled-out TikTok talks.

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Bill Richardson’s secret

Bill Richardson was a very public politician who became an incredibly effective global backroom dealer, Steve Clemons writes in his remembrance of the late statesman. The late politician was obsessive about detail and strategy, and about understanding all sides when there was a foreign policy standoff — or, of course, if an American had been wrongfully detained by a foreign government. Richardson’s rolodex rivaled former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s or any US president’s. He said the most important first step was to get away from accusations of wrongdoing and try to listen to both sides and to neutralize the toxicity. He tried to see where a leader’s own vanity and aspirations of greatness could be turned toward getting that human chess piece, whom someone had snatched, released.

Richardson got many detained people freed, including most recently the basketball player Brittney Griner. He evolved into a powerful force for good. He took the storm of activity that used to swirl so publicly and flamboyantly around him and directed it behind closed doors, out of the media and out of the limelight.

Read Steve’s remembrance here.

Strike talk

President Biden says he’s “not worried” about a possible auto strike ahead of a Sept. 14 deadline. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said Monday. He might be more concerned if he read the Wall Street Journal’s epic profile of United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain over the weekend. After Fain was elected in an upset over more traditional leaders, the UAW has grown more combative under his watch and is currently demanding a 32-hour work week and a 46% hourly wage boost. Fain, who has a Ted Lasso-style “Believe” sign in his office and kicks off his rallies with Eminem, abandoned a traditional handshake ceremony between labor and CEOs dating back to the 1960s and has filed NLRB complaints alleging General Motors and Stellantis are negotiating in bad faith.

He has a red-hot labor market on his side, but industry counterparts say he’s boxing himself in with moonshot demands. The “Big Three” face intense competition from non-union companies and one Wells Fargo analysis pegged the cost of UAW’s demands at $6 to $8 billion per year. Meanwhile, Donald Trump hopes he can use UAW’s skepticism towards electric vehicles as a wedge to pry support from Biden, whose reelection the union has notably not endorsed.

Don’t call it a Cuomo comeback

It’s long been rumored that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would make his way back into politics. Last week a bit of that manifested in a celebrity push on X after Erik Wemple of the Washington Post dropped an opinion piece calling into question the media’s interpretation of a key witness in the case to dethrone Cuomo.

Members of Cuomo’s eclectic circle, including the designer Kenneth Cole, the financier Anthony Scaramucci, and the actor Billy Baldwin posted the article, all calling in various ways for him to “get back in the game,” as the Mooch put it. Then Brooklyn political boss Frank Seddio announced Cuomo will make his first “public political appearance” at the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club later this month. Over Labor Day weekend, Cuomo mingled with the wealthy political class at an event at the Capri Hotel in the Hamptons hosted by the billionaire John Catsimatidis, a person familiar with the event told Semafor. Are these signs of a Cuomo comeback? “As of right now, all I can say is that the future is the future,” former spokesman Rich Azzopardi said.

— Kadia Goba

The IRS’ ROI

IRS officials have said they’re hoping to increase tax audits on the richest Americans tenfold, using the billions in new funding Congress provided through the Inflation Reduction Act. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, the Treasury Department, and the University of Sydney shows just how profitable that could be for the feds: It finds that for every $1 the IRS spends auditing members of the top 0.1%, it brings back more than $6. Auditing less-wealthy taxpayers, by contrast, is basically a break-even proposition.

The findings suggest that putting more money toward IRS funding may be one of the most efficient ways to clip Washington’s blooming deficit, which, despite the growing economy, is expected to double this year thanks in part to unexpectedly weak tax revenues. They’re also sure to be a talking point for Democrats looking to defend the IRS from attacks by Republicans in Congress, who have rallied around clawing back the agency’s funding. This year’s debt ceiling deal would already reduce the pot by $21 billion.

— Jordan Weissmann

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Still no update on whether Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. or Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz. will run for reelection. Manchin “may be the most endangered Senate Democrat this cycle.”

Playbook: Biden once “told a friend that Obama didn’t know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants,” Franklin Foer writes in his new Biden book “The Last Politician,” which is out today.

Axios: You’ve heard about the rising political tensions in New York over an influx of migrants into the city, but the issue is hitting Chicago and Boston as well — and putting local Democratic leaders at odds with the Biden administration.

The Early 202: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t spoken with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy since late July, but put the onus for averting a government shutdown on the GOP leader: “It’s his responsibility as leader if he wants to get this done and avoid a shutdown,” Schumer said in an interview.

White House

• President Biden will award the U.S. military’s highest decoration to Army Capt. Larry Taylor, who pulled off a heroic 1968 mission to rescue a reconnaissance team in Vietnam.
• Vice President Harris is on her way to Jakarta for the ASEAN and East Asia summits.
• First lady Jill Biden is resting at the Biden home in Rehoboth with mild COVID-19 symptoms. Joe Biden tested negative for the virus last night, per the White House — but a positive test later in the week would likely disrupt his G20 travel.

Congress

• The Senate returns this afternoon and will hold a procedural vote on Federal Reserve Governor Philip Jefferson’s nomination to succeed Lael Brainard as the central bank’s vice chair.
• A state judge ruled over the weekend that Florida’s congressional map — championed by Ron DeSantis — is unconstitutional after it eliminated former Rep. Al Lawson’s majority-black district. — NPR
• Primaries today in Rhode Island’s 1st District, a progressive free-for-all featuring a 33-year-old backed by Bernie Sanders, and Utah’s 2nd District, where a Republican heavily critical of Trump could win. Sign up for David Weigel’s Americana for a full preview later today.

Outside the Beltway

• The impeachment trial for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton begins today on 16 articles, including abuse of public trust and bribery. — Texas Tribune

Polls

• Another lowlight for Biden in the latest WSJ poll: “58% of voters say the economy has gotten worse over the past two years, whereas only 28% say it has gotten better, and nearly three in four say inflation is headed in the wrong direction.”

Big Read

• While much of the globe has been occupied with the war in Ukraine, the government of Azerbaijan has been carrying out what some are now describing as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against a community of 120,000 Armenians, Nicholas Kristof writes at The New York Times. The country has blockaded the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing its residents to starve or flee — a situation the former chief prosecutor of the ICC has compared to atrocities in Darfur. The big picture point: “For dictators, tragically, this isn’t a bad time to commit war crimes.”

Blindspot

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: Chinese nationals have gained access to sensitive locations like military bases in the U.S. up to 100 times over recent years, in some cases posing as tourists, The Wall Street Journal reported.

What the Right isn’t reading: The future of former President Trump’s social media app Truth Social is in question as the blank check company seeking to take it public faces a deadline to close the merger.

Neal Katyal is a lawyer, professor at Georgetown Law School, and the former acting solicitor general of the United States. He was at Burning Man when it was hit with heavy rain.