Principals

☞ White House: Biden is turning back to domestic issues, holding a meeting on the economy with Treasury Secretary Yellen and business and labor leaders this afternoon including representatives from Ford, Kaiser Permanente, the Service Employees International Union, and United Food and Commercial Workers, per CNN.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The New York Democrat said the Senate is poised to pass the marriage equality bill after they return from Thanksgiving break.

☞ Mitch McConnell: McConnell congratulated Pelosi after she stepped down from her two-decade stretch as the House Democratic leader. “The Speaker and I have disagreed frequently and forcefully over the years, but I have seen firsthand the depth and intensity of her commitment to public service,” he said in a statement.

☞ Nancy Pelosi: The Speaker will end her nearly 20-year tenure as the Democratic leader next month. One of the most consequential Congressional leaders in history, Pelosi led her caucus through the Iraq War, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, two impeachment votes, and then shepherded Biden’s top agenda items into law with few votes to spare. Her longtime deputies, Reps. Steny Hoyer, D-Md. and James Clyburn, D-S.C., are also stepping down from their positions.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: McCarthy did not attend Pelosi’s farewell speech (he said there was a scheduling conflict). Meanwhile, ranking Members Jim Jordan, R-Ohio and James Comer, R-Ky. wasted no time laying out their plan to investigate the Biden family in the majority next Congress. The White House called the investigations “politically-motivated attacks chock full of long-debunked conspiracy theories.”

The Biden administration plans to ask the Supreme Court to take up its student loan debt relief plan. Will the conservative justices bite? “It seems very unclear right now,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told Semafor. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has twice rejected emergency requests to block the student debt relief plan. A Trump-appointed Texas judge blocked the plan last week, ruling it unlawful. “The Justices may be waiting for more than preliminary rulings and district opinions before it grants cert and maybe before it seriously considers any of the appeals,” Tobias said.

The battle for Georgia rages on. McConnell and several other lawmakers attended a fundraiser Thursday evening for Herschel Walker (who zoomed in) hosted by Rob Chamberlain, William Crozer and several others, according to an invite obtained by Semafor. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who is the incoming NRSC chair, addressed the group and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla did not attend.

Twitter’s future is uncertain as hundreds of employees reportedly planned to leave the company after Elon Musk demanded they pledge to work “hardcore” hours or depart. Employees who spoke to The Verge said that “given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon.” The social media platform was still online as of early Friday morning, but users were still speculating about its possible demise. “Hard to predict where we go from here but I will genuinely miss this website and a lot of the great people I met on here,” the White House’s digital director Rob Flaherty tweeted.

The narrow Republican victory in the House will have ripple effects for U.S. foreign policy. House Republican leaders are signaling they will tighten oversight of money that is flowing to Ukraine. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is gearing up for a sprawling investigation of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that one staffer said would “hit the ground running” once the new Congress takes hold. And House Republicans have already sketched out plans for a hawkish China policy, some of which may overlap with Democratic plans.

— Morgan Chalfant and Kadia Goba

Punchbowl News: There was a bit of drama behind the scenes leading up to the smooth Democratic leadership transition announced Thursday. Some Democrats “privately urged” Steny Hoyer to remain in House leadership and Katherine Clark’s team was left in the dark until Thursday’s announcement that he would step aside.

Playbook: Lee Zeldin is eyeing a potential run for chair of the RNC.

Axios: Efforts to prevent misinformation from disrupting the midterm elections were “at least partially effective.”

Meet the new Democratic leadership

After being run by a trio of elderly party stalwarts for much of the last two decades, House Democrats are about to welcome a new generation of leaders in their forties and fifties. Here’s what you need to know about the new class expected to take over for Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn.

Hakeem Jeffries

Jeffries is poised to be the first Black member of Congress to lead either party in the House. The 52-year-old Brooklynite worked at the powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss and served in the New York State Assembly before winning his current seat in 2012. Legislatively, he has focused on criminal justice reform, helping to pass the bipartisan First Step Act that was signed by Donald Trump.

Long considered Pelosi’s heir apparent, he’s been a close ally of the speaker’s during his time as Democratic Caucus Chair; he’s also been known to peruse biographies of previous House leaders, paying particular attention to the words they’ve used to address their caucuses. Perhaps relatedly, Jeffries likes to quote rap lyrics, and dropped a line from the Notorious B.I.G. into his closing speech during Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, in which he served as one of the House managers. The line: “And if you don’t know, now you know.”

Where does he fit in the party?

Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but at the same time has very publicly clashed with the party’s left flank.

Notable quotable

“I’m a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now…There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” (source: The Atlantic)

Katherine Clark

Clark, the 59-year old Massachusetts Congresswoman set to become minority whip, is the quiet one in the band. First elected in a 2013 special election, she previously served in a pair of lower-profile leadership roles working closely with freshmen members, and was once rumored to be a potential challenger to Jeffries.

Where does she fit in the party?

A member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Clark isn’t known as a firebrand but has been quietly positioning herself for leadership by building close ties with powerful women across Washington. In 2015, she stopped dying her hair —now a signature gray— and has since championed women redefining so-called traditional standards of beauty and professionalism.

Notable quotable

“I think there is something about women’s leadership styles that are built on listening, building consensus and listening not just to people — our constituents — but also to my colleagues that come from different districts, have different concerns, different pressures than I do.” (source: Axios).

Pete Aguilar

“A Latino working class kid makes good” is how one aide described 43-year old Rep. Peter Aguilar. The incoming Minority Caucus Chair has been pegged for years as a rising star well-liked across party factions. He was mayor of Redlands, California prior to winning his congressional bid in 2014 when he flipped a Republican-held seat.

Under Trump, Aguilar led a failed bipartisan effort to craft an immigration bill combining new border security measures with protections for DACA recipients. He recently achieved some national prominence as a member of the Jan.6 panel investigating the Capitol riot.

Where does he fit in the party?

Aguilar is a member of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of Congressional lawmakers with a reputation as pro-business moderates.

Notable quotable

“I think that there’s benefit to being a relatively junior House member from California. From where I’m from, in the shadows of Los Angeles…nobody from my neck of the woods runs for statewide office, so that door has been closed.” (Source: Politico)

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants to clean up social media’s toxic runoff

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. spoke with Semafor Editor at Large Steve Clemons about the future of social media regulations ahead of our event today, “Media, Government, and Healthy Democracy,” which features top government and business leaders from across the political spectrum. Klobuchar is one of the leading voices calling for lawmakers to revisit the rules that have guided Internet platforms since their earliest days.

Steve Clemons: When it comes to platforms where toxic exchanges are being made, how do you draw a line on content moderation that is responsible and not censorship?

Sen. Amy Klobuchar: Two answers. One is on the monopoly standpoint, which is pretty much a separate issue except for one thing: If you didn’t have monopolies dominating then you’ll never know what bells and whistles Instagram or WhatsApp could have developed when it comes to both privacy and misinformation and hate speech, because they never had a chance because Facebook bought them. And in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, in an email, “I’d rather buy than compete.” Those were his words, not mine. That’s one aspect of it. But a lot of this stuff is more content neutral that we are working on.

The second piece, though, is the Section 230 liability. Right now, a news organization has to have some modicum of checking truth on things. When you have a social media platform, they are protected from the time at which they were little startups in garages and this immunity was put in place. Well they are no longer startups in garages. They are the biggest companies the world has ever known.

So you could have exemptions to that immunity when it comes to misinformation, when it comes to hate speech and the like. You wouldn’t have to completely get rid of it, but you could, I’m open to that…There are now some lawsuits over misinformation and what’s happened and things like that, but it’s very difficult when the immunity is in place. I never thought I’d be talking like that, because I thought they’d be able to figure this out, but we just keep going, and they’re not. To me that comes to be the answer if they are not going to clean up their own shop.

One Good Text With ... Kipp Hebert

• The political world mourned the death of former George W. Bush White House speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson Thursday. Gerson’s Post colleague Karen Tumulty writes that he was a man of deep Christian faith who was an increasingly lonely voice for tolerance and civility on the Republican right. “His grace was a blessing, and we need it more than ever.”
• As if Elon Musk didn’t have enough problems at the moment, a group of seven Democratic senators wrote a letter to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan calling for an investigation of Musk’s brief but tumultuous reign at Twitter. Per The Financial Times, the letter alleges Musk has “undermined the integrity and safety of the platform.”
• The new Republican House majority’s plans to investigate Hunter Biden got the headlines Thursday, but Politico reports a growing group of party insurgents also want to put the squeeze on some traditional GOP allies: big financial firms and trade groups. One major target is firms seen as guilty of climate investment strategies that are harmful to coal, oil, and gas interests or are too cozy with China.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: San Francisco launched a guaranteed income program for low-income transgender residents. The pilot program will give $1,200 a month temporarily to 55 people.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: A former GOP aide was convicted of funneling illegal foreign contributions from a Russian to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

— with our partners at Ground News

Join me in Washington DC or online later today for our third event on the future of news.

Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith will be speaking with the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, author of “Confidence Man,” the definitive new portrait of former President Trump. I will be chatting with former presidential spokesfolk Symone Sanders, Jason Miller, Joe Lockhart and Anthony Scaramucci as well as Senator Amy Klobuchar. Semafor Executive Editor Gina Chua will be sitting down with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

RSVP here to join us virtually — or to join us in person for the event and the happy hour that follows.

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— Steve Clemons