Principals

☞ White House: President Biden hosted a rare meeting of all four top legislative leaders on Tuesday. Their massive to-do list isn’t stopping the holiday season from rolling in. Biden and Vice President Harris will attend the annual National Christmas Tree Lighting tonight. French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit also begins with a trip to NASA headquarters with Harris.

☞ Chuck Schumer: The majority leader turns his attention back to a consistent priority today: confirming more judges. The Senate will vote on Biden nominees to fill vacancies in Puerto Rico and Schumer’s home state of New York.

☞ Mitch McConnell: The Republican leader criticized former President Trump for his dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, saying Trump was “highly unlikely” to be elected again to the White House. Trump responded through Fox News by calling McConnell a “loser” and said he didn’t know what Fuentes’ views were when he met with him.

☞ Nancy Pelosi: Pelosi was designated “Speaker Emerita” last night but will serve as speaker until Jan 2, 2023. Former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert was the last speaker to receive the honorable title. Meanwhile Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. has introduced legislation to designate the caucus room in the Cannon building the Nancy Pelosi Caucus Room.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: The Republican leader denounced the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, but inaccurately claimed Trump had done the same, and stopped short of criticizing the former president after a meeting with Biden.

Democratic leaders seem cautiously optimistic that they’ll be able to stop an economically crippling railroad strike by a Dec. 9 deadline, even if it means ticking off organized labor. Joe Biden has asked Congress to pass legislation ratifying the deal he brokered in September between rail operators and their unions, whose rank-and-file members later rejected the agreement because they wanted more paid sick leave. Nancy Pelosi says she’s confident the bill will pass the House later today, and that the chamber will also consider a separate kicker measure providing rail workers with seven sick days. But some Democrats and Republicans sounded wary of overriding workers to approve  the deal, especially without more paid leave. “The choice is not between a stoppage and a bad contract,” an undecided Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a former union organizer, told Semafor. “I want to try for a good contract.”

A deal to fund the government next year remains elusive, but congressional leaders emerged from a one-hour meeting with Biden hopeful that they might pass an omnibus spending package rather than a temporary stopgap. McConnell said there’s “widespread agreement” about the need for a full package that would boost spending next year but that “significant hurdles” remain. Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, expressed support for including additional Ukraine funding in a deal, but did not provide an exact number (the White House has asked for $38 billion). “I think that people fighting for freedom like that, you should never turn your back on them,” Shelby said.

No. 2 GOP Senate leader John Thune, R-S.D. told Bloomberg that Republicans want to use the next debt ceiling hike to force spending cuts and make changes to entitlement programs like Social Security. Coincidentally, Semafor got an early look at new polling from the Democratic firm Navigator suggesting such a move might backfire politically: It found that two-thirds of Americans find the idea that Republicans might try to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare at least somewhat concerning.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy by a federal jury in Washington for a plot that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It’s the most serious charge to date brought by the Justice Department in the investigation into Jan. 6.

— Morgan Chalfant and David Weigel

Punchbowl News: White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will brief senators today on the need for additional U.S. assistance for Ukraine.

Playbook: Conservative radio host Mark Levin mocked lawmakers on the right for opposing McCarthy’s bid for speaker: “How can they be so stupid?”

Axios: McCarthy met with “several right-wing detractors” among other members of the House GOP conference Tuesday in his quest for the votes needed to become speaker.

A peace treaty in the marriage wars

The Senate passed the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act with 61 votes on Tuesday, putting America on the verge of codifying new protections for same-sex and interracial couples.

It was an emotional day — Majority Leader Chuck Schumer choked up discussing his daughter’s wedding to her wife — and a breakthrough in a country where gay marriage was politically taboo less than two decades ago and majorities of Americans did not approve of interracial marriage until the 1990s.

“As someone who has been long a part of the LGBTQ community, I think about how progress is made, and so much of it has to do with visibility, and people knowing us and knowing our families, which replaces myth and stereotype,”  Senator Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., who led bipartisan talks on the bill, said after the vote.

Negotiators sold the legislation as essentially a peace treaty between religious leaders and LGBTQ Americans on marriage equality, allowing each side to move on to other civil rights debates where they’re still in conflict.

“Christians, including myself, believe that God defined marriage as between a man and a woman and the argument is, who are we to second guess God’s definition?” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who voted for the bill, told Semafor. “And the way I resolved that was by separating the Biblical definition from the new secular definition of marriage that was recognized in the Obergefell decision.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine thanked the ”broad array of faith-based groups” who worked with her colleagues on an amendment clarifying its religious liberty protections, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Orthodox Union.

For religious leaders, the bill was a way to lock in the current status quo in the courts for the long haul — the text clarifies that faith institutions and non-profits can’t be compelled to participate in “the solemnization or celebration of a marriage.”

But the bill also doesn’t wade into other territory that’s led to court fights in recent years, like, say, a private bakery refusing to sell a wedding cake for a service.

Not all Republicans, only 12 of whom voted for the bill, agreed with those terms of surrender in the marriage wars. The Senate rejected three Republican amendments to expand its religious liberty clauses, including one by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah that would have barred the federal government from taking “discriminatory action” against persons or organizations based on their belief in traditional marriage, including revoking tax-exempt status or denying grant money.

“Why wouldn’t anyone want to deny the federal government the ability to retaliate against individuals, nonprofits and other entities based on their sincerely held religious beliefs?” Lee said in a floor speech.

While the current Supreme Court takes a relatively expansive view of religious liberty, many conflicts over marriage are still live issues and Democrats and civil libertarians worried the amendment was so broadly worded that any number of forms of discrimination could be justified on religious grounds.

Instead, future disputes will have to be resolved the way same-sex marriage was — in the courts, in legislation, and in public opinion.

“Today is important, but not the end of the fight,” Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson told Semafor. “We have to keep working toward full lived equality for LGBTQ+ people – in politics and policy, in schools and workplaces, in every place we are.”

— Kadia Goba and Steve Clemons contributed to this story

After Trump’s dinner debacle, Mar-a-Lago is changing how it vets guests

Mar-a-Lago is ramping up its screening after white supremacist Nick Fuentes was allowed into the venue to dine with former President Donald Trump.

“My understanding is they’re making big changes over who can come in and the vetting process, which I think is smart,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. told reporters on Tuesday night.

A source familiar with the discussions confirmed that “additional processes are being considered to ensure individuals who are scheduled to meet the president are fully vetted.”

The AP also reported that Trump’s campaign is planning to put in place a new system “in which a senior campaign official will be present with him at all times.”

Trump hosted Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Fuentes at his estate last week. Both men have promoted antisemitism and Fuentes is a prominent white nationalist. He has said he did not know who Fuentes was, but has not denounced either figure, telling Fox News Digital on Tuesday that “it wouldn’t have been accepted” if Fuentes had said something offensive at their dinner.

Jewish activists condemned the meeting as did members of Trump’s party, some of whom questioned how he and his staff had failed to recognize Fuentes beforehand. Security and access to the estate had previously come under scrutiny after the FBI recovered classified documents the president had taken from the White House.

— Shelby Talcott and Kadia Goba

Hakeem Jeffries prepares to lead the Democrats: ‘I’d much rather be a coalition than a cult.’

Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, who is poised to become the next House Democratic leader now that Nancy Pelosi is stepping back, sat down with a group of reporters on Tuesday night to explain how he intends to lead his caucus from the minority once the new Congress gavels in next year. Here’s what he had to say on bipartisanship, intraparty tensions, Nancy Pelosi’s “speaker emerita” role, and more.

ON TENSIONS WITH THE LEFT

Jeffries has clashed with his party’s left-flank, telling The Atlantic for instance that he would never “bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” Tuesday, he was more conciliatory:

“The House Democratic Caucus is a big family, a diverse family and enthusiastic family and sometimes noisy family. It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “In my view, it’s a good thing because I’d much rather be a coalition than a cult.”

ON WORKING WITH REPUBLICANS

Jeffries has a notoriously frosty relationship with GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who is likely to be the next speaker. Tuesday, he was only slightly warmer about this counterpart than usual.

“Certainly, I’ve had more interaction with the incoming Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise, but have an open mind about being able to engage with Kevin McCarthy for the good of the country.”

ON THE DEBT CEILING

After a top Senate Republican said earlier in the day that his party planned to demand cuts to spending, including entitlements, in return for hiking the debt ceiling, Jeffries told reporters Democrats were ready to push back.

“The fact that extreme MAGA Republicans in the House and the Senate remain determined to detonate the American economy in order to blow up Social Security and Medicare is shocking, particularly given their historic underperformance in the midterm election,” he said.

“It’s an incredible thing that they’re even contemplating going down this road,” he added. “But if that’s a fight they want to have with respect to holding the American economy hostage to the debt ceiling, that is a fight that we are prepared to lean into aggressively and we will win.”

ON PELOSI’S ROLE

Nancy Pelosi may be sticking around Capitol Hill, but seriously, he’s going to be the leader, not her.

“Speaker Pelosi has repeatedly — both privately and publicly — indicated that she will conduct herself as a member of Congress representing San Francisco,” he said. “She’s not going to be the type of individual that’s looking over the shoulders of those leaders that she just helped to elevate into positions of consequence for the caucus moving forward. And she means it.”

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig

One Good Text With ... Ian Jefferies

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: An Energy Department official is on leave from the Biden administration after being charged with stealing a traveler’s luggage in Minneapolis.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: A court ruled that Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows must testify to a grand jury investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

— with our partners at Ground News

Your regular reminder that building infrastructure is hard (in America, anyway). Washington is getting ready to spend billions to expand America’s network of electric vehicle charging stations. But according to the Wall Street Journal, the effort is facing an underappreciated hurdle: Gas stations and other potential operators “aren’t sure how they will make money,” especially in remote, rural areas.

What, exactly, is at stake in the U.S. Senate runoff between Rafael Warnock and Herschel Walker in Georgia? The race won’t determine who controls the chamber. But Politico has a useful rundown of all the ways a win giving Democrats 51 seats in the chamber would make their lives vastly easier. A big, but underrated one: The party would get an extra seat on committees, which would allow them to brush aside GOP delay tactics and speed through more of Biden’s nominees. Time to appoint some judges.

“Scientists Revive 48,500-Year-Old ‘Zombie Virus’ Buried in Ice.” No, that is not the plot line of a John Carpenter movie. Rather, it is the headline of a Bloomberg article, about a group of scientists studying how permafrost that melts due to  global warming is likely to let loose previously frozen pathogens. The team apparently brought 13 different viruses back to life, finding they were still infectious “despite spending many millennia” under the frosty earth.

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— Steve Clemons