The U.S. Capitol building ©Indy2320 | Dreamstime.com

**We may have a deal: **A group of Democrats broke with their party late last night and voted with the Republicans to advance a bill that would reopen the government, a critical step toward ending a shutdown that has lasted for more than a month.

Materially, Democrats are getting few real policy concessions that will leave them in a better place politically than they started. And yesterday’s 60–40 Senate vote is on a continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of January—which means we may well find ourselves in the same place come February, with two parties deadlocked and unable to fund the government further.

“The compromise measure includes a spending package that would fund the government through January, as well as three separate spending bills to cover programs related to agriculture, military construction and legislative agencies for most of 2026,” reports The New York Times. “The package also includes a provision that would reverse layoffs of federal workers made during the shutdown and ensure retroactive pay.” In essence, this means that the Democrats have negotiated their way back to what they had when this started. Their primary demand at the heart of the original shutdown fight—extending health insurance subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year—has not been won. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R–S.D.) did say that a separate vote could be held on extending the subsidies sometime in December, after the government reopens.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) have both come out against the deal. “This health care crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home that I cannot in good faith support this,” said Schumer from the Senate floor.

“I think it’s a terrible mistake,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) told reporters. “The American people want us to stand and fight for health care, and that’s what I believe we should do.”

***Scenes from New York: ***Inside a gathering of New York’s political class in Puerto Rico, including tons of city council members strategizing about how to position themselves during the Zohran Mamdani years.

QUICK HITS

• Who, specifically, has died from the U.S. strikes on alleged narcotrafficking boats? The Associated Press has a long investigation attempting to piece together whether those who have been killed were, in fact, involved in the drug trade.

• President Donald Trump on Sunday floated the idea of a $2,000 dividend, paid out from the revenue generated by tariffs—possibly out of anger, given that the Supreme Court might strike his aggressive tariff agenda down. Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent turned around and said that, well, maybe “dividend” doesn’t actually mean that: “The $2,000 divided could come in lots of forms. It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing.”

• The *New York Times *reports that Trump is in the process of granting preemptive pardons to Rudy Giuliani and others, including John Eastman and Sidney Powell, who were involved in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

• “Times have changed since Millennials were little and neighborhoods had lots more stay-at-home moms available to pitch in,” writes Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. “For nearly 70 percent of kids under 6 today, both parents work, compared with half in 1985. Your friends with kids might not be able to do school pickup in an emergency, because they, too, might be working. ‘We just don’t have as many people around….There are just fewer people physically available to call.’”

• “China’s official CPI figure—which offers limited item-level detail and is shaped by a complex methodology that isn’t transparent—has hovered around zero since early 2023, occasionally posting modest gains,” reports *Bloomberg, *which “analyzed prices for dozens of products in 36 major cities as well as both official and private data across China to get a sense of how much cheaper things have become on the ground….The analysis showed that prices are unmistakably dropping. Among 67 items tracked by Bloomberg News, prices on 51 dropped over the last two years. Economists say that official inflation measures may only partially capture the reality. Many key data series have quietly disappeared in recent years, and the National Bureau of Statistics has never offered the sort of granularity more common in the US, where inflation trackers go so far as to publish the cost of indoor plants and pet food. An outdated methodology for calculating rent changes in the CPI likely led to its overestimation in the past few years.”

• Pharmacy deserts, according to socialists: when getting your prescription refilled requires more than a 10-minute walk.

• “If there is enough pressure, and there is enough candy in the dish.”

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