‘My party crossed a line,’ Fetterman says of decision to splinter from Democrats over government shutdown
John Fetterman – the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who voted on several occasions for a continuing resolution to end the shutdown – defended his decision to break from his party and join members of his caucus to pass a new bill to reopen the government.
“My party crossed a line,” the lawmaker told Fox News in an interview. “It’s only wrong to shut our government down, and I’m relieved … the people now that are going to get paid and fed.”
Fetterman added that he “never got any outreach” from the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, about his vote and holding out against Republicans to ensure that they came to the table on extending Affordable Care Act premium tax credits. “People went five weeks without being paid. I mean, that’s a violation of my core values, and I think it’s our party’s as well,” Fetterman said.
Key events
Michael Sainato
The Trump administration has launched its most direct attempt yet to shut down the top US consumer watchdog, arguing the current funding mechanism behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unlawful.
Attorneys for the administration claimed in a court filing that the agency “anticipates exhausting its currently available funds in early 2026”, setting the stage for it to be dismantled.
The CFPB is legally barred from seeking additional funds from the Federal Reserve, its typical source of funding, the attorneys suggested.
Donald Trump’s officials have tried persistently to close the agency, attempting to fire the vast majority of its workforce. These efforts sparked months of legal wrangling.
The CFPB has returned more than $21bn to US consumers since it was set up, in the wake of the financial crisis, to shore up oversight of consumer financial firms.
The justice department’s office of legal counsel issued an opinion claiming the CFPB cannot draw money from the Fed currently, claiming the “combined earnings of the Federal Reserve System” refers to profits of the Fed, which has operated at a loss since 2022.
Pentagon’s largest aircraft carrier arrives in Latin America region, amid ongoing strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats
The USS Gerald R Ford, the defense department’s largest aircraft carrier, entered the Latin America region on Tuesday, according to the Navy’s Fourth fleet. The area, known as the US Southern Command (Southcom), is seeing a sizable increase in military presence amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug cartels.
“The enhanced U.S. force presence in the USSOUTHCOM AOR will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere,” said the department’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell. “These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations.”
The Pentagon has carried out at least 19 strikes against suspected drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coasts of Latin America, killing at least 76 people.
It also comes amid acrimony with Venezuela, and its leader Nicolas Maduro – who claims the military escalation is a move to oust him from power. For his part, Trump told CBS News recently that Maduro’s days are “numbered”, but downplayed the possibility of a war.
‘Only people that hate our country want to see it not open,’ Trump tells ESPN
Donald Trump made a surprise appearance on the Pat McAfee show, broadcast on ESPN, where he expressed confidence in the final passage of the Senate bill to reopen the federal government. “So the House is going to vote, and I think they’re going to vote positively. I think most people want to see it open,” he told the host. “Only people that hate our country want to see it not open, because our country is doing so well.”
Dani Anguiano
The US Department of Justice plans to investigate the University of California, Berkeley following altercations that occurred during a protest on Monday, outside a Turning Point USA campus event.
The influential rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk made the final stop of its American Comeback tour at the San Francisco Bay Area university, which was met with large and sometimes rowdy protests.
Demonstrators gathered outside the hall where the event was being held, chanting and carrying signs with slogans such as “We won the war, why are there still Nazis” and “No safe space for fascist scum”. Dozens of police officers were staged around the campus, blocking entrances and clearing a path for those with tickets to the event.
The protest was marked by tense moments and sometimes violent confrontations, including scuffles between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators and some people who allegedly threw things at police officers. A UC Berkeley spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that four people were arrested, including two people who fought. Photographs from the event showed a Charlie Kirk supporter with a bloodied face.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights division at the justice department, shared video online posted by rightwing influencers who alleged “Antifa” turned the campus into a war zone. Dhillon said she saw “issues of serious concern regarding campus and local security and Antifa’s ability to operate with impunity in CA” and that campus and the city can expect to receive correspondence from the department.
“In America, we do not allow citizens to be attacked by violent thugs and shrug and turn our backs. Been there, done that, not on our watch,” she wrote.
Rules committee to meet ahead of House vote on bill to end government shutdown
The first step – before the Senate-passed bill to reopen the government heads to the House floor – will require the Rules committee to schedule a vote on the legislation. Politico is reporting, citing two people with knowledge of the matter, that this will take place at around 6pm ET today.
The hope is then for an official vote in the lower chamber on Wednesday afternoon.
Republican congressman and chair of House budget committee announces he won’t run for re-election in 2026
Jodey Arrington, the Republican congressman from Texas who also serves as chair of the House budget committee, announced that he will not seek re-election in 2026. He is now the first GOP House member to announce his decision to leave Congress at the end of his current term, ahead of the midterm elections.
Arrington was one of the key architects of the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill in Congress, and called it the most “consequential piece of legislation in modern history” in his video announcement.
“There is a time and season for everything, and this season is coming to a close,” he said. “I will be passing the torch to the next West Texan. Because I believe, as our founding fathers did, in citizen leadership, temporary service, not a career.”
The lawmaker’s district, which mainly covers the Lubbock area, is a GOP safe-seat.
Analysis: With his threat of a $1bn lawsuit against BBC, Trump’s assault on the media goes global
Jeremy Barr
Donald Trump has, for years, used legal threats and lawsuits to pressure news companies who put out coverage he does not like. After his return to power, a string of US broadcasters and tech firms have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle such cases.
The president has now gone global with this campaign, crossing the pond to threaten the BBC with a $1bn lawsuit over an episode of the Panorama documentary program that aired more than a year ago.
The saga is only the latest chapter in a campaign meant to keep media institutions that cover Trump on their toes. Often, legal letters sent to media companies on his behalf have not actually led to lawsuits – though many journalists say they have contributed to a chilling effect on coverage.
But Trump has also followed through on several lawsuits, and since his re-election one year ago, a series of media and tech companies have chosen to take the easy way out by agreeing to significant settlements. Several of those companies have business before his administration.
In July, Paramount, parent company of CBS News, chose to settle a case that Trump had filed in the state of Texas arguing that the company had violated consumer protection laws by misleadingly editing a 60 Minutes interview of then vice-president Kamala Harris. Many legal experts viewed the case as easily winnable for Paramount, considering the unrelated statute he sued under – and that Trump could not credibly claim to have been harmed by the segment since he defeated Harris in the election.
But company leadership viewed the lawsuit as an unnecessary distraction, particularly as it sought the federal government’s approval of a merger with Skydance Media. Paramount ultimately paid $16m.
Trump also won a settlement last year from ABC, owned by Disney, which he had sued over comments made by anchor George Stephanopoulos. ABC agreed to pay $15m.
When combining Trump’s settlements with ABC, CBS and cases against both Facebook parent company Meta and YouTube, which is owned by Google, he has racked up over $80m in agreements.
Now the BBC is in his sights. Unlike CBS, owned by Paramount Skydance, and ABC, owned by Disney, the BBC is not part of a complicated corporate empire: it is independent, although its unique structure as a publicly funded organization invites intense scrutiny.
But if Trump chooses to sue, Mark Stephens, an international media lawyer at the firm Howard Kennedy, said the case would bring renewed attention to Trump’s comments, and any role he might have played in fomenting the violence of January 6. (Trump claims he did no such thing.)
If he sues, he opens a Pandora’s box, and in that Pandora’s box is every damning quote he’s ever uttered about January 6.
So this isn’t the hill to die on, in my view. It’s a legal cliff edge, and if he jumps, there’s a high chance he’ll fall.
Top House Democrats vow to oppose shutdown bill over healthcare funding
Chris Stein
As House Republican leaders move to hold a vote on legislation to reopen the government, top Democrats vowed today to oppose the bill for not addressing their demand for more healthcare funding.
Democrats have for weeks demanded that any measure to fund the government include an extension of tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans, which were created under Joe Biden and due to expire at the end of the year, sending premiums for enrollees higher.
With Donald Trump’s encouragement, Congress’s Republican leaders refused, sparking a spending standoff that resulted in the longest government shutdown in US history. But the Democrats’ resolve cracked earlier this week, when a splinter group in the Senate joined with the GOP to craft a compromise bill that reauthorizes government funding through January, without extending the tax credits.
The Senate passed that legislation yesterday evening, and the House is expected consider it beginning Wednesday afternoon. The chamber’s top Democrats oppose it, with minority leader Hakeem Jeffries yesterday calling it a “partisan Republican spending bill that continues to gut the healthcare of the American people”.
Today, the House’s largest ideological caucus, the centrist New Democrat Coalition, announced their opposition to the measure.
“While New Dems always seek common ground, our coalition remains united in opposition to legislation that sacrifices the wellbeing of the constituents we’re sworn to serve,” chair Brad Schneider said. “Unfortunately, the Senate-passed bill fails to address our constituents’ top priorities, doing nothing to protect their access to healthcare, lower their costs, or curb the administration’s extreme agenda.”
The sentiment appears much the same in the congressional progressive caucus, where chair Greg Casar called the measure “a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them”.
The Democratic opposition threatens to make for a tight vote for speaker Mike Johnson, who has kept the House out of session for more than 50 days in a bid to pressure Senate Democrats into caving to the GOP’s demands.
With a 219-member majority with full attendance, he can only afford to lose two votes on the bill, and Kentucky representative Thomas Massie is likely to vote no.
But Democrats may have their own defectors. Maine’s Jared Golden, who last week announced he would not seek another term representing a district that voted for Trump last year, was the only Democrat in September to vote for a Republican funding bill that did not extend the tax credit. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, whose Washington state district is similarly friendly to the president, also expressed her support for that bill.
Donald Trump sings “God Bless America” during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery earlier today.
US firms were shedding more than 11,000 jobs a week through late October, payroll processor ADP said today in its latest real-time estimate of job market trends.
Though an ADP report last week estimated the country overall added 42,000 jobs in October versus the month before, Reuters notes that the new estimates show how hiring trends are evolving on a week-to-week basis – in this case pointing to further weakening in a labor market being closely monitored by Federal Reserve policymakers.
“The labor market struggled to produce jobs consistently during the second half of the month,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist.
ADP recently began issuing weekly payroll estimates as a way to augment its monthly jobs report. The data could reinforce some Fed policymakers’ arguments that developing job market weakness warrants further reductions in the US central bank’s benchmark interest rate.
The Fed reduced its policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point at each of its last two meetings. Investors expect it to deliver another quarter-percentage-point cut at its December 9-10 meeting.
ADP’s payroll data is among several private-sector sources that policymakers have referred to as an alternative – if not a full substitute – to the official statistics that have been missing during the government shutdown.
If the shutdown ends this week, a possibility after the Senate’s passage of a temporary funding bill, Fed policymakers should see the flow of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics resume in time for their next meeting, even if some reports are still missing.
Trump calls Senate bill a ‘very big victory’ in Arlington cemetery remarks
The president has congratulated House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader John Thune on the upper chamber’s passage of a short-term spending bill to reopen the government.
“Congratulations to you and to John and to everybody on a very big victory,” Trump said during his remarks at Arlington National Cemetery. “We’re opening up our country. Should have never been closed, should have never been closed.”
A reminder that the House is considering the legislation today, and could schedule a vote as early as tomorrow.
Joseph Gedeon
A Utah judge has handed Democrats a win in the continuing national fight over voting districts by ordering a new map that creates a House seat in a Democratic-leaning area, in a state where Republicans currently control all four positions.
The judge, Dianna Gibson, ruled just before a midnight deadline on Monday that a revised map submitted by the Republican-controlled state legislature “unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats”, throwing out lawmakers’ second attempt to draw fair districts.
Instead, Gibson approved an alternative proposal drawn by the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government. It consolidates Salt Lake county – which includes the state’s largest city – largely within a single district, rather than dividing the Democratic-voting population center among all four seats.
The decision is a setback for Republicans in what they had assumed was secure territory, and breathes new life into Democrats’ attempts to reclaim the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections. Democrats need to flip just three seats nationally to gain control of the chamber from the GOP majority.
Republicans have already locked in advantages in nine seats across Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. They have more potential gains looming in Indiana, Kansas, Florida and Louisiana. Democrats have mounted their own counteroffensive, with California voters last week overwhelmingly backing a ballot measure that could hand the party five additional seats. Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature is also moving on a plan that could yield two or three more seats for the party.
We’re getting some of the first pictures from Donald Trump’s visit to the largest military cemetery in the country to commemorate US veterans.
Senate bill to reopen government includes provision to allow senators to sue for seized phone records
Tucked into the in the short-term funding bill which just passed the Senate, is a key provision that offers a legal path for senators to sue if federal law enforcement seeks out a lawmaker’s phone records or device data without proper notification.
“Any Senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency,” the text reads.
Under “limited retroactive applicability” this provision could offer redress to the Republican senators who allege their phone records were seized as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s 2023 investigation into the Capitol insurrection.
The bill’s text says that each “violation” could result in at least $500,000 in damages.
In a short while, we’ll hear from Donald Trump as he attends a wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery and delivers remarks. We’ll bring you the latest as that gets under way.
As government shutdown is poised to end, House prepares for vote on short term funding bill
We’re now waiting for the House to schedule a vote on the Senate-passed spending bill that will reopen the government and keep it funded through January. Republican speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Monday that he thinks he has the votes in the lower chamber to secure the bill’s passage.
A reminder that Johnson told members to start making plans to return to Washington, since the House has been on recess for more than 50 days, at the speaker’s behest.
Trump continues to lambast Chicago, repeating calls to send in national guard
Donald Trump also took to Truth Social in the early hours of Tuesday morning to repeat that Chicago’s murder and crime rate has decimated the city. In this instance, he focused on retail.
“The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28% vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” the president wrote. “CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!”
Notably, according to data compiled by the Council of Criminal Justice, in the first half of 2025 (January-June), Chicago’s homicide rate was 33% lower than it was for the same period in 2024.
Melody Schreiber
As flu season begins in the US, following the deadliest flu outbreak in children outside of a pandemic since record-keeping began in 2004, pediatricians are taking the lead on vaccine messaging.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not plan to resume its “wild to mild” flu vaccination campaign, which was halted in the midst of the record-breaking flu season.
Even as places such as Australia and Japan report severe flu seasons, there has also been a drop in global virus samples shared with the US, which help scientists understand which viruses and variants are circulating and how they are mutating.
In the 2024-25 flu season, 280 children died from influenza – making it the second-deadliest pediatric flu season on record in the US, second only to the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic. The CDC classified it as a “high severity season”.
A total of 109 children were diagnosed with encephalopathy, or brain swelling, related to flu infection, with one-third of those patients suffering acute necrotizing encephalopathy. Three-quarters of the patients with brain swelling needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit, and one in five died from the condition.
Among the children who were eligible for the vaccine, 89% had not been fully vaccinated.
The CDC is launching a new national campaign to “raise awareness and empower Americans with the tools they need to stay healthy during the respiratory virus season”, said Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Hilliard did not mention the role of vaccines or respond to a request for more information about the campaign.
Pediatricians and other trusted figures are stepping into the communications gaps.
“We saw a really bad season last year, and I worry that this season could be even worse,” said Jonathan Miller, associate chief of primary care at Nemours Children’s Health and president of the Delaware chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
