Central Casting – President Trump has Truth Socialed he will nominate Kevin Warsh to be the next Federal Reserve chairman when Jerome Powell’s term ends mid-May. [Photo: The Hoover Institution] Scroll down this column to read
•Tuesday House Vote on Spending
•Trump Wants 'Nationalized' Voting for 15 'Places'
•Hochul Bill Would De-ICE Local, County Law Enforcement
•Clintons to Testify on Epstein
TUESDAY 2/3/26
Spending Package Vote – Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expected a $1.2 trillion spending package vote Tuesday that would end a partial government shutdown that began at midnight last Saturday. If passed, spending for Defense, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, Financial Services, National Security-State and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development would be extended to the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
Homeland Security would get a two-week stopgap bill to allow negotiations on whether Department of Homeland Security agents should be required to use only judicial warrants for searches, remove masks and wear body cameras and identification as well as other requirements and limitations.
Key to securing Republican support in the House was a meeting between Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and President Trump at the White House Monday in which she was assured her SAVE America Act would pass in the Senate, CQ Roll Call reports. The SAVE Act (for short) would require proof of citizenship and photo identification to vote.
How would the SAVE Act get past a Democratic filibuster in the Senate? The idea according to Roll Call is that Senate Republicans would force Democrats into a “standing filibuster,” which means the party’s senators would have to speak continuously to prevent a vote, and once they stop talking, Rule 19 would require a simple majority vote on Luna’s bill.
Late jobs report … As a result of the partial government shutdown, the Labor Department will be late in releasing its January jobs report, initially scheduled for Friday.
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‘Nationalized’ Voting – President Trump called on the Republican Party to take control of voting procedures in 15 unnamed states, in an extensive interview with his former deputy FBI director on his eponymous The Dan Bongino Show, released Monday.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many – 15 places,” Trump told Bongino. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
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ICE Out of NY Police – New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has introduced a bill to ban county and local police departments from working formally with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“They’re doing ICE’s job instead of focusing on their own jobs,” Hochul said, according to New York Focus.
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Clintons Give In – With a Wednesday House Oversight Committee vote looming on whether to cite Bill and Hilary Clinton with contempt of Congress, the former president and former secretary of state have agreed to testify before the panel on its investigation of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Their concession amounts to a victory for committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) as he shifts Epstein Files attention from President Trump.
Attorneys for the former First Couple said the two would “appear for depositions on “mutually agreeable” dates, The New York Times reports. Their concession to Comer comes after several Democrats on House Oversight indicated they would join Republicans in voting in favor of the contempt charge. –TL
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MONDAY 2/2/26
•Democrats want ICE masks off, ID badges on
•Boy in the bunny hat returns to Minnesota
•Democrat upsets Republican in Texas special election
•Trump to renovate Kennedy Center
•Melania makes $7 million
To Fund Homeland Security – The Senate on Friday approved appropriations for five big spending bills with a sixth bill, for Homeland Security, would get a two-week extension to reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Two weeks may not be enough time to reach bipartisan consensus on Homeland Security. Democrats want to require body cameras and visible identification on ICE officers. And no masks.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says the spending bill already includes $20 million to purchase body cameras for ICE and Border Patrol agents, but ...
“Wearing identification and taking off masks will endanger ICE officers,” Johnson told Fox News Sunday. Quoting Tom Homan, the border czar who now oversees about 3,000 ICE agents cracking down on Minneapolis. Homan, he said, told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), “I have to protect my officers.”
“Body cameras should be mandatory,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told ABC’s This Week. “Masks should come off.”
There's also the question of use by Department of Homeland Security agents signing their own administrative warrants to search a suspect's domicile, which the speaker wants to codify, while Democrats argue only judicial warrants are legal. It seems the issue should have been covered by the Fourth Amendment.
Johnson had hoped to “fast-track” the House vote on the Senate’s passage of a two-week extension for the appropriations bills, but Jeffries had blocked that and so the House will vote Monday evening. This means the portion of the government affected by those six bills remains closed until Tuesday morning at the earliest.
But not ICE. It is flush with cash from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act. Its budget has skyrocketed from about $6 billion per year to $85 billion, according to NPR.
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Boy in the Bunny Hat – Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, is back in Minnesota, according to his school district, after Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas ordered the boy in the blue bunny hat and toting a Spiderman backpack released from an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, The New York Times reports. The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was released from the detention center as well.
Witnesses of their detention by ICE on Friday, January 20 say agents grabbed the boy in an idling car in his father’s driveway as “bait” to apprehend Arias when he emerged from the house.
Biery in his order to release father and son condemned ICE for “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.”
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Texas Flip – More GOP midterm panic as Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points in a special election Saturday for the Texas state senate’s otherwise reliably Republican 9th District, Newsweek reports. President Trump, who won the district by 17 points in November 2024, had endorsed Wambsganss. The Democratic Party claims to have clinched or overperformed Republican candidates in 240 out of 269 elections since Trump’s presidential election win.
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Expect Tons of Gold – President Trump will close the (Trump-)Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington for two years beginning this July 4, for renovations into a “new and spectacular Entertainment Complex,” The Wall Street Journal reports. That means it will be closed on the 250th anniversary of the republic.
Trump Truth Socialed (natch) that financing for the renovation is “completed, fully in place.” He gave no other details on financing – Melania’s $28 million fee for Melania as seed money? Cost-cutting for the East Wing ballroom? Selling the Qatari Boeing 747?
Will President John F. Kennedy’s name be removed from the side of the building?
The project is subject to approval by the Kennedy Center board, NPR reports. It truly is the Trump-Kennedy Center board, filled with Trump appointees and with Trump its chairman.
Would any board member argue with this? “I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday evening.
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MAGA Goes to the Movies – Amazon MGM Studios’ $40-million documentary Melania took in $7 million of boffo box office from 1,778 theaters over the weekend, though it fell short of Saturday’s projected total of $8 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But the Brett Ratner-directed flick, which paid its subject, First Lady Melania Trump $28 million to “document” the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration had been on-track to earn just $5 million going into the weekend. The doc premiered at The Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington last Thursday.
According to the trade publication, a “grassroots campaign engineered by various conservative groups paid off” for the doc, which earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 6%.
Melania cost Bezos’ Amazon – which laid off 16,000 white collar workers last week -- at least $75 million when you throw in US and overseas marketing costs. Its $7-million first weekend is well-short of left-wing provocateur Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which boffo’d $23.9 million from 868 theater box offices after its first week in 2004.
Meanwhile … Boffo-est box office for all movies for the weekend goes to 20th Century’s Sam Rami-directed female revenge flick, Send Help, which earned $20 million in the US plus $8.1 million overseas, The Hollywood Reporter reports. --TL
FRIDAY 1/30/26
About Warsh – President Trump’s pick to be the next Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin
Warsh, served on the central bank’s Board of Governors from 2006-11. Warsh has aligned himself with Trump’s criticism of the Fed and Powell, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump said of Warsh; “I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best. On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”
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Whither First Amendment? – Federal officials arrested independent journalist Don Lemon Thursday evening in Los Angeles and Georgia Fort in Minneapolis Friday morning after they followed demonstrators into Cities Church in St. Paul Sunday, January 18, who protested one of the church’s pastors, who they say also works as a local ICE official, The Washington Post reports. US Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi says two others were arrested over the protest.
Lemon is the eponymous former host of CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight who was sacked by the news channel in April 2023 over his comments about then-former President Trump. He was in L.A. to cover Sunday evening’s Grammy awards.
“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” said Lemon’s attorney, Abbe D. Lowell.
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Deal? – Senate Democrats reached a deal with President Trump and Republican leadership Thursday to hold up the Homeland Security spending bill to allow time to make reforms and move five other spending forward in time to avert a government shutdown. But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) triggered the Senate’s “hotline” process to prevent an agreement on votes and a limited list of amendments, Roll Call reports.
Graham called the agreement a “bad deal” and said, “we’re not voting tonight.”
The hotline process requires all 100 senators to agree not to raise objections. So the Senate adjourned late Thursday night without taking action, with hopes to pass the five of six spending bills Friday.
Graham was “visibly upset” about Homeland Security funding being held up by the Senate over treatment of immigration enforcement officers he said were being “demonized” by the actions of a few.
The bipartisan deal reached Thursday included a House-authored provision to repeal a new law that created a new avenue for Graham and other Republican senators to sue the federal government for “large payouts” over collection of their phone records in 2022 in the “Arctic Front” investigation into their alleged participation in a false-elector scheme after the 2020 presidential election. Graham would be eligible to sue for “at least $500,000” according to The New York Times.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told Punchbowl News after the Senate session ended Thursday “snags on both sides” remained. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declined to say if there were any Democratic objections.
“Republicans need to get their act together,” Schumer said. –Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa