Political Guyentist

1uscontested2026 midterms

Senate votes 90-6 to push the shutdown fight past the midterms

The stopgap funds agencies through Dec. 11, then senators left town for five weeks with the House still needing to vote.

Some numbers behind the new deadline: Fiscal 1997 was the last time Congress finished all 12 appropriations bills before a fiscal year began. Every year since has needed a stopgap. Dec. 11 lands 38 days after Election Day, inside the lame-duck session — members who just lost their seats still get a vote on it. All 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot Nov. 3.

ContextThe 90-6 vote gave the stopgap an 84-vote margin, with six senators opposed. It would move the funding deadline from Oct. 1 to Dec. 11, extending funding for 71 days beyond the start of fiscal 2027 and carrying the government past the November midterms. The House must still approve the bill.

AXIOS3 sources

2not newsusImmigration enforcement

DHS says it misread the law behind the $4,000 H-1B surcharge

The department is not changing the price. It is changing who has to pay it.

What the notice leaves open: Which employers and which filings move into scope, and which move out. Whether this is a final rule, an interim rule, or a proposal open for comment. The effective date. Whether it reaches petitions already pending at USCIS.

ContextCongress created the surcharge in August 2010 under Public Law 111-230, signed by Barack Obama (Pres-D Illinois). The first rates were $2,000 per H-1B petition and $2,250 per L-1, a bit more than half today's levels. Receipts split between the biometric entry-exit system DHS has owed Congress since the 1996 immigration act and the World Trade Center Health Program, which serves more than 120,000 responders and survivors. No annual collection total, no split ratio, and no revenue estimate for the corrected reading appears in the notice. So the fiscal size of the change cannot be judged from what DHS has released. The 50-worker, 50-percent test shows which employers are exposed to the fee. It does not show who has actually paid it. The chart tracks the surcharge itself: $2,000 and $2,250 when Congress set it in 2010, $4,000 and $4,500 since the 2016 appropriations act. That price is the one part of the fee this notice leaves alone.

FEDERAL REGISTER1 source

3not newsworld2026 midterms

Vance says the Iran talks are moving, then calls the war only half over

The progress claim landed the same Saturday Iranian officials said a Hormuz arrangement was close, with their demands unchanged.

What the Strait of Hormuz actually carries: About 20 million barrels of oil a day moved through the strait in 2023 — roughly 20 percent of global petroleum liquids consumption, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The shipping lanes are about two miles wide in each direction, inside a strait roughly 21 miles across at its narrowest point. Qatar sends nearly all of its liquefied natural gas through Hormuz, close to a fifth of world LNG trade.

ContextVance gave no measure of the reported progress and named no concession Iran had accepted. He also set no deadline for ending the war. His phrase "in the middle of the game" described the conflict's status but did not establish that the war was half over.

THE HILL1 source