Principals

1. Republicans battle over spending
2. Zelenskyy makes his pitch on Fox
3. Schumer in Ukraine
4. More border sparring
5. Alabama IVF fallout
6. Trump’s abortion mystery
7. New ‘Buy America’ waiver

PDB: Countering conventional wisdom about Biden’s age

Biden, Harris meet with governors … WSJ: ‘How Trump Turned Conservatives Against Helping Ukraine’ … Private spacecraft visits moon, first U.S. landing in 51 years

— edited by Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann and Morgan Chalfant

Republicans in disarray as shutdown looms

With a government shutdown creeping closer, Republicans are still very much at war with each other over the budget. Earlier this week, members of the House Freedom Caucus floated a funding plan for the rest of the fiscal year that would lead to a 1% across-the-board spending cut. Defense hawks are already batting that idea down. “A 1% cut to defense won’t fly. The current proposal didn’t keep up with inflation as it is, and the military is decreasing the number of F-35s and attack submarines they’re buying,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb. told Semafor. In an interview with CBS, retiring Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C. put the odds of a shutdown at “50-50,” calling it a “preventable disaster” that hinged on how badly Johnson fears being ousted from his job by conservatives if he strikes a deal with Democrats. (“You can either die as speaker and worry about them taking you out, or live every day as your last,” McHenry, a close lieutenant to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, added.) Amid the Republican sparring, there was at least one hint of bipartisan progress on Thursday, when a source told reporters that talks between the House and Senate were continuing, and added that negotiators hoped to “announce something Sunday night.” However, a House leadership source told Semafor there was no agreement on appropriations, let alone a time for any announcement.

— Kadia Goba and Jordan Weissmann

Zelenskyy’s appeal and more U.S. sanctions on war anniversary

“This price is less than it will be in the future if we’ve fallen down and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will go to NATO countries.” That was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s message on Fox News to members of Congress weighing foreign aid, an interview carried a day before Kyiv would mark the solemn two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The U.S. is preparing to announce sanctions Friday on more than 500 targets as well as export restrictions on 100 entities fueling Russia’s war machine, President Biden said in a statement this morning that pushes Congress for action on Ukraine aid. “History is watching. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will not be forgotten,” he said. What’s next for the conflict? Officials and analysts believe that Ukraine’s standing on the battlefield hinges on U.S. military support. But even if U.S. aid flows, there are growing doubts about Ukraine’s ability to retake territory. “The likely scenario is that this remains a slog in both directions and that neither side makes a breakthrough,” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Semafor. While success is a relative term at this point, U.S. aid could help Ukraine regain “a sense of momentum” that “facilitates a favorable peace process.”

— Morgan Chalfant

Schumer meets with Zelenskyy in Ukraine

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is in Ukraine for meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, leading a Democratic congressional delegation to the war-torn country timed to mark two years after Russia’s invasion. It’s a big moment for the Senate leader, who wants to reassure Ukraine of American support at a time when billions in future U.S. aid is in doubt in the Republican-controlled House. “We will not stop fighting until we gain the aid,” Schumer said in a statement this morning. He also said the senators would reassure NATO allies that the U.S. is “not deserting Europe” or the alliance — perhaps a vague shot at Donald Trump’s recent comments about not defending allies that don’t meet defense spending targets. “If we fail to stand by our allies there will be severe political, diplomatic, economic, and military consequences that will significantly hurt the American people over the next decades,” Schumer said. He is joined by Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.

Johnson dismisses Biden’s ‘election year gimmicks’ on the border

House Speaker Mike Johnson assailed President Biden on Thursday in response to reports that the White House was eyeing new executive actions to curb the flow of migrants crossing the southern border. “Americans have lost faith in this President and won’t be fooled by election year gimmicks that don’t actually secure the border,” The Republican leader said in a statement. “Nor will they forget that the President created this catastrophe and, until now, has refused to use his executive power to fix it.” To some, the speaker’s statement looked suspiciously like a case of moving the goalposts. After all, Johnson and the GOP previously demanded that Biden use executive actions to deal with the migrant crisis before they would pass any kind of a border deal. “Johnson asked Biden to do this. Now he is considering it and Johnson says it’s an ‘election year gimmick,’” observed Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman. Still, Johnson did make one set of demands clear, stating that Biden could “show he’s serious” by reinstating Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, among other moves. What Biden would earn in return from the GOP? Well, that was left unclear.

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Jordan Weissmann

Tommy Tuberville: Alabama’s embryo decision was right

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. defended his state’s court ruling that embryos are children on Thursday, saying it was “one hundred percent” correct. “We’re talking about life, and when it comes to anything to do with life, we’ve got to protect it,” he told Semafor’s David Weigel in an interview. Tuberville sounded a little more circumspect about the implications for women receiving IVF treatments, which were paused around the state in response to the ruling. “I don’t know enough about how that works,” Tuberville said. “I just know the reasoning for a lot of it, and it’s just unfortunate.” As Weigel writes, national Republicans have mostly kept their distance from the decision so far. Within Alabama, the chair of the state Senate’s health committee is introducing legislation to clarify that embryos outside the uterus do not have legal rights. In Congress, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C. told Axios she was looking at ways to put the House on record in favor of IVF, while Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill. pushed to bring up her existing proposal to codify a right to fertility treatment.

Donald Trump’s mysterious abortion stance

Everybody knows the general election is going to feature big debates over abortion. Nobody is quite sure where Donald Trump stands on them. Trump’s silence on the Alabama ruling that effectively blocked IVF access in the state is par for the course, Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin writes. While the former president has regularly taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, he’s kept remarkably quiet on just about every policy fight the decision opened up since then. Among the unanswered questions: Whether he favors a national abortion ban, whether he supports a lawsuit to revoke FDA approval for mifepristone, whether he’d revive the Comstock Act to block sending abortion medication by mail, whether women should be forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, and what his litmus tests for judges and appointees would be on these and other issues. The resulting vacuum has left voters reliant on reported private conversations and speculation from his anti-abortion allies to try to glean his position. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request to clarify his position on the above topics.

Biden waives some ‘Buy America’ requirements for broadband program

Call it Buy mostly America. The Biden administration is waiving “Buy America” requirements for a limited set of materials and electronics that will be used in its $40 billion broadband expansion program, Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant reports. The Commerce Department is announcing its final waiver today, saying it “takes the strongest approach possible to protecting American jobs while also ensuring that we can quickly build the Internet networks.” The final product will likely assuage concerns about delays caused by too strict “Buy America” rules, given that certain products are not made stateside. At the same time, the Biden administration says it’s still on track to spend about 90% of the funding for the program — which comes from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law — stateside.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that his goal in visiting Ukraine is to assure Ukrainians that “America has not given up on them” and to push Speaker Mike Johnson and other lawmakers to move the foreign aid package. “We want to get in detail about how the lack of armaments and the inability to pass this supplemental hurts Ukraine, and what the consequences will be if we don’t do it,” he said.

The Early 202: Schumer said that after Alexei Navalny’s death, “the best way we can punish [Russian President Vladimir Putin] for what he did is give Ukraine the aid and push Putin back.”

Playbook: One of the “under-told” stories about Nikki Haley’s weakness compared to Donald Trump in her home state is the fact that she’s not plugged in with the state’s activist base. The former head of a local Tea Party group said that Haley “abandoned us.”

Axios: President Biden has been using notecards for his speeches at fundraisers, calling on pre-selected donors during Q&As and looking to the notecards to give detailed answers — a practice not unheard of for presidents, but less common at private events like fundraisers.

White House

• President Biden met with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya, the widow and daughter of slain Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, while in San Francisco. Navalny’s mother has said Russian authorities were “blackmailing” her to allow a secret burial.

• Biden and Vice President Harris will meet with governors at the White House during the National Governors Association Winter Meeting.
• Biden’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk traveled back to the region and met with Israeli leaders on Thursday. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said he also met with hostage families and is focused on securing a deal to release hostages and implement a temporary ceasefire. “These discussions are going well, they are constructive,” Kirby said.
• Biden called the Alabama court’s IVF ruling “outrageous and unacceptable” as his campaign tried to tie the issue directly to Donald Trump.

Congress

• Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. quietly filed a resolution last week that could serve as a vehicle for a Ukraine aid bill, starting the clock on a potential discharge petition. — WSJ
• A group of House Republicans led by House China committee chair Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. and House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn. credited the Biden administration for its recent actions to address security threats posed by Chinese-made cranes. “This announcement does not end the threat, but it is a meaningful step to counter it,” they said in a statement.

Outside the Beltway

Standardized testing will no longer be optional for applicants to Yale University, which followed Dartmouth to become the second Ivy League school to drop the pandemic-era change.

Economy

Traders and analysts pared back expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts this year after policymakers indicated any reductions would likely come later than expected.

Courts

• Attorneys for Donald Trump moved to dismiss his classified documents case in Florida, including by arguing he is immune from prosecution.
• The FBI informant charged with lying about President Biden’s connections to Burisma was re-arrested, likely due to concerns he is a flight risk.

Polls

• President Biden’s approval rating is at 38% in the latest Gallup poll, only one point above his all-time low. His ratings on handling various issues are largely unchanged since November, though his approval rating on economic issues is up slightly.
• The most active 25% of American adults who use TikTok produce the vast majority of content on the video platform, and 52% of U.S. adults have never posted a video on it, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.

On the Trail

• Donald Trump praised the “tremendous spirit” of the Jan. 6 “hostages” in his speech to the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville.
• Trump is not expected to go after Larry Hogan as the former Maryland governor vies for the state’s open Senate seat, despite their long-running feud. That doesn’t mean the former president won’t change his mind if Hogan publicly criticizes him during the campaign. — Axios
• A “dream team”? That’s what some allies of President Biden are calling the campaign officials they credit with building a $140 million war chest. They include Jeffrey Katzenberg, Rufus Gifford, Michael Pratt, Jen O’Malley Dillon, and Julie Chávez Rodriguez. — CNBC
• A New Orleans magician was apparently paid to make a fake Biden robocall using artificial intelligence that is now the center of a law enforcement probe. — NBC
• Nikki Haley called Biden “more dangerous” than Trump. — NPR
• Wisconsin Democrats recruited cast members of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” to troll GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde.

National Security

• The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are investigating the AT&T outage that occurred on Thursday.
• The U.S. privately warned Russia against deploying a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon, after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio hinted at the existence of the threat last week. — WSJ

Foreign Policy

• U.S. law enforcement officials examined allegations that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took millions of dollars from drug cartels after he assumed the presidency, but ultimately shelved the inquiry and did not open a formal investigation. — NYT
• Accidentally released audio of a G20 foreign ministers’ meeting pointed to growing U.S. isolation over its support for Israel in its war against Hamas.
• Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is quickly locking up support to be the next NATO secretary general, but he faces a challenge from Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.

Big Read

The conventional wisdom in Washington these days seems to be that President Biden’s age is his biggest vulnerability and Republicans are getting ready to exploit it with the upcoming public testimony of special counsel Robert Hur. But Republican strategist Alex Conant, who worked on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign, writes in Politico that Republicans “are making a big mistake if they think voters will not reelect a geriatric politician.” His reasoning? There’s not a case in history of a politician losing reelection because voters thought them too old. “The 2024 election will offer voters clear choices on issues that directly impact every American, including tax rates, foreign policy, immigration and abortion,” Conant argues. “Voters will choose the candidate who best shares their values on those issues — regardless of age.”

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: A New York state appeals court rejected a law that would allow noncitizens to vote in local elections in New York City, ruling that it is unconstitutional.

What the Right isn’t reading: The World Health Organization said that Gaza has become a “death zone.”

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann, Morgan Chalfant

Editor-at-Large: Steve Clemons

Reporters: Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

David Weigel is a politics reporter at Semafor. Read his coverage in Americana later today.

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