Firings at CAP...AOC hunts down Mitch...Reading at Politics and Prose tonight
Four freshmen House members ventured to the Senate chamber today, looking for Mitch McConnell. First they tried the Senate floor, then McConnell’s Capitol office, then the Russell Senate Office Building, where he also has a desk. No sighting of McConnell. The women -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jahana Hayes, Katie Hill and Lauren Underwood -- were looking to deliver a letter asking McConnell to kindly re-open the government.
The attention is all on Trump for shutting it down, but the freshmen are right that it’s entirely in McConnell’s power to put a bill on the floor and override a Trump veto. The votes are there. Why won’t he do it? He’s up for re-election in 2020. Here’s Dave Dayen and Akela Lacey on how McConnell’s own election is factoring into the shutdown.
If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the Washington, DC area this evening, come to Politics and Prose on the Wharf -- the one by the waterfront, not the one uptown! -- for an event I’m doing with Gregory Jaczko for his new book Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, at 7 pm. It’s sort of a book reading, but I’ll be interviewing him, which hopefully will be more interesting than somebody just reading from their book. I wrote a long story about his battle with the industry as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission back in 2011, a battle that ended with him being pushed out of the agency.
I have a scoop up today with Clio Chang on a very strange turn of events at the Center for American Progress. A little before Christmas, we reached out to them for comment on a story, asking about a particular email chain. That inquiry sparked a leak investigation, which led to two people being fired, neither of whom had leaked anything to us or spoken to us. It’s a wild story, and tragic for the two people caught up in it, one of whom was on paternity leave.
And we just published a piece by Richard Ojeda, the West Virginia state senator who helped spark the teacher strikes there, on the new teacher strikes in LA. It’s a really good read, promise.