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You’re reading The Morning Dispatch, our flagship daily newsletter explaining all the news you need to know today in less than 10 minutes.
Happy Friday! If you haven’t had enough Dispatch for the week, Steve will be on Washington Week on Friday night at 8 p.m. ET (airing on PBS throughout the weekend in local markets), and you can catch Jonah on Mike Pesca’s podcast, Not Even Mad.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- Ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting at the White House today, President Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Thursday, announcing on Truth Social that the pair had agreed to meet in Budapest. At a Thursday press conference, Putin said the meeting would occur in the next two weeks. Trump also told reporters on Thursday that Ukraine wants “to go offensive” in the war, and an unnamed Ukrainian official told Politico, “We indeed can go on the offensive—it all depends on the weapons we get and the approved plan.” Trump has said he is considering providing Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles, but stated on Thursday, “We have a lot of them, but we need them.”
- British politics continues to be shaken by questions of Chinese espionage, in the aftermath of early-October reporting that actions by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government led to the collapse of a September case against two Brits accused of spying for the Chinese government. On Wednesday, court documents from the case were released in which the U.K.’s deputy national security adviser stated that Chinese intelligence has carried out “large scale espionage operations” within Britain, and in a rare public appearance on Thursday, MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum told reporters, “Do Chinese state actors present a U.K. national security threat? The answer is, of course, yes they do, every day.” Also on Thursday, the U.K., for the second time, delayed approval for the construction of a new Chinese embassy in London. Former government adviser Dominic Cummings told ITV News on Friday that British intelligence agencies had “explicitly” told him that the embassy would be a “spy center.”
- A Maryland federal grand jury on Thursday night indicted John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first administration, on 18 total charges of retaining and transmitting sensitive national security information. Prosecutors claim that Bolton kept “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities,” including sensitive information that he allegedly shared with two people who were both unauthorized to view the material. In response, Bolton said the indictment was driven by his criticism of Trump since leaving the administration, and was part of the president’s “intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct.”
- Israeli forensic specialists on Thursday publicly identified two bodies received from Hamas the day prior as Israeli hostages. Under the first phase of the ceasefire deal, Hamas has returned nine of the total 28 deceased hostages. Hamas handed over a 10th body, but the Israeli military said it did not match any of the deceased hostages. While Hamas said it needs special equipment to access the remaining bodies, Israel has said the terrorist group is capable of returning at least 10. An unnamed Israeli official told Times of Israel on Thursday that Israel has shared intelligence it has gathered on the locations of the hostages with mediators. Meanwhile, in response to Hamas’ extrajudicial executions of alleged rivals and Israeli “collaborators” in Gaza, Trump issued a warning to the terrorist group: “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” he wrote on Truth Social.
- Ahead of a Friday vote from the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization on whether to pass a “Net-Zero Framework,” which includes a hefty carbon tax on ships that exceed a set threshold of carbon dioxide emissions, Trump urged other nations to vote against the proposal. “We will not tolerate increased prices on American Consumers OR, the creation of a Green New Scam Bureaucracy to spend YOUR money on their Green dreams,” he posted on Truth Social on Thursday. Last week, the State Department said in a statement that it was considering action against countries that vote to support the framework, including visa restrictions, commercial penalties, and sanctions on officials “sponsoring activist-driven climate policies that would burden American consumers.”
Rule Reversal
On the night of January 19, 2022, Democratic senators tried to end debate on an expansive voting rights bill that Republicans in the chamber opposed unanimously. Fortunately for the GOP, Democrats were unable to overcome that bane of legislators trying to pass party-line legislation: the filibuster.
Democrats had only 50 “yes” votes; 10 fewer than the 60 needed to end debate on a bill in the Senate and move it toward final passage. As such, the filibuster effectively allows the minority party to block legislation that has simple majority support.
Their solution was to attempt to carve out an exemption to the filibuster for this particular bill, through a rule change, but that failed too. Not even 50 senators were willing to vote for it. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—two Democrats who would later become independents and leave the Senate—supported the bill but opposed changing the Senate’s rules to push it through.
“In recent years, nearly every party-line response to the problems we face in this body, every partisan action taken to protect a cherished value has led us to more division, not less,” Sinema said in a floor speech at the time detailing her opposition to the rule change.
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Despite their willingness to exempt a bill from the 60-vote threshold in the past, Democrats are now using the filibuster to their advantage. As of today, they have 10 times denied 60 votes to the House of Representatives’ stopgap funding bill that would reopen the government. And they’re saying they’re not done yet.
“I feel only pressure to fight,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told reporters this week. “People want us to fight for this democracy.”
The 2022 measure would not have eliminated the filibuster; instead, it would have allowed for a one-time exemption for the particular legislation Democrats wanted to pass. But more than 20 senators from the party at the time wanted to do away with it wholesale. Now, those who are still in office are using the very procedural tool they wanted to kill for leverage in the shutdown fight to get Republicans to include extraneous health care provisions in a bill to reopen the government. None who spoke to TMD saw any inconsistency.
“You deal with the situation as it is, and, therefore, right now, the Republicans are saying that they want our votes, but they don’t want to give us anything for the votes,” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii told TMD. “So as long as the filibuster is in place, which it is, we’ll deal with it. I don’t see any inconsistency in using the situation as we find it and [doing] the best we can to get our points across.”
“If the Republicans don’t want to make changes, then they won’t, and we have to follow the current rules. That’s just how it is,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told TMD.
The filibuster stems from senators’ privilege to speak as long as they want. From the early republic up until the early 19th century, there was no such thing as a formal rule to end debate on a bill. The threat of senators drawing out debate on an issue in perpetuity incentivized those in the chamber to persuade opponents or make deals with them.
“It kind of created this atmosphere of constant accommodation and, I think, the sense that senators sort of owed each other quite a bit of respect and deference as a matter of course,” Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies Congress, told TMD.
Things changed in 1917 when “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own,” in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, filibustered his proposal to arm American merchant ships to protect them from German U-boats, shortly before the United States entered World War I. Thus spawned the cloture rule, which allowed the Senate to end debate on an issue with a two-thirds majority.
Still, invoking cloture was seen as a last resort until the middle of the 20th century, when senators representing Southern states endlessly debated civil rights bills—Sen. Strom Thurmond famously gave a speech that lasted more than 24 hours—holding up other business that the Senate wanted to consider. That controversy later inspired Senate leaders to change the rules further, lowering the cloture threshold to 60 votes. Meanwhile, the minority party has increasingly used the filibuster to block bills it opposes, often to the chagrin of the party in power.
Republicans are feeling that pain in this spending fight, and a small number of populist GOP members of Congress have suggested circumventing the filibuster to pass the House’s funding bill. “My point of view would be this: We have almost all Republicans on board. Maybe it’s time to think about the filibuster,” Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio said on Fox News last week. “We just say, ‘Look, the Democrats would have done it. Let’s just vote with Republicans.’”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made a similar suggestion.
Some on the left have also suggested that Republicans either end the filibuster or make a carve-out to it for this purpose. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, an opponent of the filibuster, has called for an exception to it for bills that stop government shutdowns (given than such carve-outs already exist for the confirmation of judicial and presidential nominees). Weakening the filibuster would undoubtedly help Democrats the next time they have the trifecta, so should we see that as a part of a strategy to undermine the procedure?
“I’ve been against the filibuster, and I think what we need to be doing is carving out more exceptions to it,” Khanna told TMD in response to that question. “But to start to say that we should not have a filibuster to keep the U.S. government open, it seems pretty reasonable.”
But Majority Leader John Thune quickly put the kibosh on that idea last week when he was asked about it at a presser. “There’s always a lot of swirl out there, as you know, from social media, et cetera, but no, I have not had that conversation,” he said.
One has to wonder whether he would be so averse to circumventing the filibuster if Democrats had been successful in doing so in 2022. Once one side makes a carve-out to the rules, the other side often capitalizes on it. When then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lowered the cloture threshold to 50 votes for presidential appointments and lower court nominees in 2013, Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the minority leader, warned his opponents that they “may regret it a lot sooner than you think.” After Republicans won a governing trifecta in 2016, they lowered the cloture threshold for Supreme Court justices and confirmed three of them.
It is not difficult to imagine a similar scenario playing out with the spending bill or other legislation during this Republican trifecta had Democrats gotten their carve-out three years ago. One could argue that it is fortunate for Democrats that they failed at the time, but Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another proponent of eliminating the filibuster, was not ready to entertain that conclusion.
“I make a point of looking forward,” he told TMD. “And I haven’t been looking in hindsight.”
Today’s Must-Read
As the nation reeled, and then slowly recovered, from the Civil War, new challenges and new tests for the notions of republicanism and sacrifice remained. Two world wars and the ordeals of the Cold War and the global war on terror led Americans to reimagine the role of sacrifice, particularly that of military service, in the nature of republicanism. What some have come to call the “civil-military divide” emerged, as the cultural, social, and political gap between the U.S. military and the civilian population it serves has replaced more universal notions of service and sacrifice. The American military remains among our most respected institutions, and yet it is increasingly separate from the broader public in ways that would have been foreign to Americans of the 18th and even 19th centuries. The national revolutionary heritage that had been won by force of arms, paid for in toil and blood, demanded purposeful dedication and a willing buy-in from each subsequent generation, in military service, in public service, or in selfless dedication to the ideals that inspired, and continue to inspire, the American experiment.
Toeing the Company Line
The Coming Oil Glut
The surplus is on track to surpass even that of the COVID era.
With a Whimper
Americans have given up on stopping Trump.
A Hill of Beans to Die On
Trump’s first trade war with China prompted structural changes that are playing out today.
Much Ado About ‘No Kings’
Why are Republicans up in arms about this weekend’s planned anti-Trump demonstrations?
The Battle to Control Gaza’s ‘Day After’ Begins
Hamas cracks down on Palestinian society.
In Other News
Today in America:
- The Senate failed to advance a bill previously passed in the House to pay military service members amid the ongoing shutdown, as well as a separate bill to temporarily fund the entire federal government.
- Reuters reported that the U.S. military conducted its sixth strike on a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday—the first such operation to leave survivors among the crew.
- The Washington Post reported that U.S. military helicopters—part of a Special Operations elite unit—earlier this week hovered in Caribbean waters fewer than 90 miles from the Venezuelan coastline.
- Republican senators expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s plan to provide a total of $40 billion to Argentina.
- A federal district judge ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting raids, searches, and arrests in Chicago must wear body cameras to record footage of their operations.
- Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent requesting an investigation into potential ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a D.C.-based advocacy group, and Hamas, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.
Around the World:
- Recently re-appointed French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu survived two no-confidence votes on Thursday, brought in the National Assembly, France’s lower house.
- EU and Chinese lawmakers met in Brussels for their first diplomatic discussions in seven years, during which China’s representatives repeated Russian talking points on the war in Ukraine and reiterated China’s claim over Taiwan.
- Kenyan police opened fire and threw tear gas at crowds attending a memorial for the country’s recently deceased Prime Minister Raila Odinga, killing at least three people, after some attendees pushed past gates and entered restricted areas.
- Uruguay passed a law decriminalizing euthanasia for people with permanent conditions that cause “unbearable suffering,” the first such law passed in Latin America.
- The Nepal Mountaineering Association announced that Kanchha Sherpa—the last surviving member of the first mountaineering crew to reach the Mount Everest summit—passed away on Thursday at the age of 92.
On the Money:
- S&P Global published new analysis on Thursday estimating that Trump’s tariffs will cost companies more than $1.2 trillion in 2025, the majority of which is passed on to consumers.
- Uber announced it would introduce a new way for drivers and delivery workers to make money while they’re not driving, such as by “uploading photos to help train AI models.”
- More than 3,000 people in the U.K. have signed onto a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, alleging a baby powder product made by the company causes cancer.
- Food giant Nestlé announced it will lay off 16,000 employees over the next two years.
Worth Your Time:
- The New York Times follows how key leaders in the deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime managed to flee the country and remain largely hidden. (New York Times)
- Suzy Weiss tries on lab-made jewels in New York City’s diamond district. (The Free Press)
- Dr. Andrea Love questions Consumer Reports’ investigation into lead levels in protein powder. (Immunologic)
- T.M. Brown explores the rise of the pro-Taliban travel influencer. (The New Yorker)
- Out today: the docu-series Mr. Scorsese on Apple TV, Good News and Season 3 of The Diplomat on Netflix, Good Fortune and After the Hunt in cinemas, and the new Tame Impala album, Deadbeat, everywhere good music is found.
Presented Without Comment
Politico: Boris Johnson Admits Writing Books Using ChatGPT
Also Presented Without Comment
USA Today: ‘Less Swapping, More Going’: Charmin Unveils Longest Toilet Paper Roll Ever
Also Also Presented Without Comment
CNBC: PayPal’s Crypto Partner Mints a Whopping $300 Trillion Worth of Stablecoins in ‘Technical Error’
Behind the Scenes
Today’s “Behind the Scenes” comes in response to Michael, who emailed to ask:
Has “Behind The Scenes” been canceled? I haven’t seen one in a few issues, but I hope not!
TMD Editor Ross Anderson: We haven’t canceled Behind The Scenes, as this very answer should indicate! But in all seriousness, we created this feature to answer questions from readers about the editorial and operational decisions that go into TMD, and we don’t want to force it to be a daily segment if we don’t receive a question that we think readers would be interested in.
That said, if you’re curious about anything to do with TMD and have a question—about a decision we made on a piece, about our new segments, about why we did or didn’t cover something, or just general TMD editorial choices—please leave a comment or shoot me an email at tmd.questions@thedispatch.com. I love talking about our work, and I will always try to be as transparent as possible!
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