Morning Report — Will Biden, lawmakers avert a shutdown? 

Jousting among House Republicans and the rest of Washington is by now a familiar exercise. Lawmakers who are fresh from a recess will join President Biden today to replay a debate about an imminent shutdown and who might be blamed by voters. 

The president will describe Ukraine’s urgent military needs, and he’ll try to deflect criticism about a migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border by pointing to his planned Thursday visit to Brownsville, Texas. His message to Republicans, according to the White House, will be, “Stop playing politics.” 

The odds are slim that Congress and the administration will sit down today and hatch a plan to prevent a lapse in funding by Friday while settling immigration differences, including a divide between House and Senate Republicans, as well as an accord that might loosen Congress’s purse strings to bolster allies in Kyiv and Israel. 

Biden will meet in the Oval Office this morning with four House and Senate leaders in what is expected to be a group restatement of positions and a flurry of finger-pointing. 

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been criticized within his own party for being a shape-shifting leader who can be slow to make decisions. The conservative House Freedom Caucus wants Johnson to press again for deep spending cuts. House Democrats will not back proposed GOP add-ons to spending measures dealing with abortion, LGBTQ and other cultural touchstones. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned yet again Monday that letting federal funding lapse would be “harmful to the country,” and he urged cooperation. 

“As always, the task at hand will require that everyone rows in the same direction: toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills,” McConnell said. 

The Hill: “We’re not going to allow the government to shut down,” the Senate minority leader said. 

Friday’s funding impasse involves appropriations for agriculture; military construction-Veterans Affairs; energy and water and transportation; and housing and urban programs. The balance of this year’s federal funding remains in limbo with a separate March 8 deadline. 

Woven into House GOP demands is an insistence that U.S. border security policies be fortified, although conservatives opposed a bipartisan Senate bill that ground to a screeching halt earlier this month after former President Trump warned his party to reject it. 

The presidential contest moves Thursday to Texas as Biden visits border agents in Brownsville and Trump heads to Eagle Pass, about 325 miles away, to argue that he made the border safe as president while Biden has not. Republicans say this week’s beating death of a Georgia nursing student, allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan, is proof that Biden’s policies have failed. It has been more than a year since Biden visited the border as Americans complain that the surge of migrants and asylum-seekers crossing into the country is among their top concerns. 

Biden told lawmakers he won’t announce executive action Thursday that would impose new immigration restrictions, a non-legislative fallback under administration study. 

The Hill: Congress is unlikely to add health policies to the next government funding measure. 

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LEADING THE DAY 

CONGRESS & POLITICS 

Senate weathervanes: More than two-thirds of senators in the GOP conference are supporting Trump’s bid to return to the White House. McConnell, long at odds with Trump, is on an island among colleagues after Trump’s primary victory Saturday in South Carolina, The Hill’s Al Weaver reports. While Trump and McConnell have not spoken since 2020, people close to both are working behind the scenes in back-channel discussions to pave the way for a critical endorsement of the former president. 

Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, once a Trump critic who called Trump “inexcusable,” announced his support for the former president over the weekend. McConnell is nothing if not a pragmatist and he may get behind Trump as the Republican Party’s likely nominee, despite misgivings that Trump has not evidenced coattails to help Republicans capture the Senate majority in the past and Trump castigated McConnell and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, in harshly personal terms. Following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, McConnell said in a floor speech that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” before voting to acquit him of impeachment charges. 

MICHIGAN’S PRIMARY today is set to provide a window into the critical battleground state, the last key race before dozens of Super Tuesday contests next month. The Hill’s Julia Mueller breaks down what to watch for. 

A Monday Emerson College/The Hill survey of Michigan voters finds 46 percent of voters support Trump, and 44 percent support Biden in a potential 2024 match-up. Biden won the state in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump won it in 2016 by 10,700. 

As The Hill’s Brett Samuels reports, Trump’s GOP nomination is widely assumed — but his likelihood of defeating Biden in a general election is not. Though Trump won the New Hampshire primary, the results underscored his weaknesses with independent voters. His triumph in the South Carolina primary spotlighted the range of moderate Republicans who don’t support him — and indicate they may not vote for him if he’s the Republican on the ballot in November. 

Biden, meanwhile, faces other challenges in the Great Lakes State. The president faces protest votes among Michiganders who oppose the administration’s Israel policy and the situation in Gaza. Today’s margin of victory will be influenced by the success of the “uncommitted” protest vote. The Listen to Michigan campaign was launched less than three weeks ago by Arab American activists in the Wolverine State. It’s a last-minute effort to send a “clear, sharp message” to Biden, his administration and the Democratic Party to address the concerns of the coalition that helped him win in 2020. 

“This is not an anti-Biden campaign,” said organizer Layla Elabed. “It’s a humanitarian vote. It’s a protest vote. It is a vote that tells Biden and his administration that we believe in saving lives.” 

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ZOOM IN 

INTERNATIONAL 

Biden has stirred some controversy with his public remarks Monday describing his optimism that Israel and Hamas will agree to a pause in fighting in Gaza and an exchange of hostages by next week. The president’s comments to reporters and to a late-night host Seth Meyers on Monday were challenged within hours by Israeli officials and by Hamas. 

“My hope is by next Monday we will have a cease-fire,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question while he was in New York City. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, close but not done yet.” 

Biden added Monday in an interview on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” that Israel has agreed to halt its Gaza offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan if a deal is reached to free the remaining hostages being held by Hamas. But Israeli officials said Biden’s comments on the talk show came as a surprise and were not made in coordination with the country’s leadership. A Hamas official downplayed any sense of progress, saying the group wouldn’t soften its demands.  

The White House has participated in negotiations brokered with Arab support in the region amid growing domestic U.S. pressure among progressives and Palestinian allies. Qatar has been mediating talks between Israel and Hamas, and cease-fire negotiations have taken place between U.S., Israeli, Qatari and Egyptian officials in Paris. Hamas has backed off some key demands in the negotiations for a hostage deal and pause in the fighting in Gaza following accusations by Israel that its position was “delusional.” The move brings the negotiating parties closer to an initial agreement that could halt the fighting and see a group of Israeli hostages released, CNN reports. 

“The major obstacles have been resolved in terms of Hamas insisting on a full withdrawal of Israeli forces and end to the war,” according to a senior Biden administration official following a Friday meeting in Paris. “Hamas’s requirements for the numbers of Palestinians [prisoners that] would have to be freed has declined.” 

ISRAEL HAS FAILED TO COMPLY with an order by the United Nations’s top court to provide urgently needed aid to desperate people in Gaza, Human Rights Watch declared Monday (The Hill). 

RUSSIAN OPPOSITION LEADER Alexei Navalny, 47, was close to being freed in a prisoner swap at the time of his death, but Russian President Vladimir Putin had him killed, alleged Navalny ally Maria Pevchikh, who is based outside Russia and did not present documentary evidence for her assertion. Russia says Navalny died of “natural causes” Feb. 16 after taking a walk at an Arctic penal colony where he was imprisoned. Biden in a speech last week said, “Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.” The Kremlin, which casts Navalny and his supporters as U.S.-backed extremists, has denied state involvement in his death (Reuters and Politico). 

Bloomberg News reports that the prisoner exchange talks had begun before Navalny’s death, according to a Western official. Under the proposal, Russia was to have released Navalny, as well as two jailed Americans — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and businessman Paul Whelan — the official said. 

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ELSEWHERE 

COURTS 

THE SUPREME COURT on Monday appeared conflicted over far-reaching social media laws in Texas and Florida aiming to control how platforms moderate content — particularly ones that are political in nature. The justices signaled unease with handing the two states the right to control the speech social media platforms host, sharply questioning the practical application of the laws and the broad reach they could have.  

But the high court, with its conservative majority, also raised concerns about regulating powerful companies and gave indications they may not block the state laws in full. The laws, which seek to bar platforms from banning users because of their political views, were passed in 2021 amid Republican backlash over bans and suspensions of conservative figures who violated the platforms’ policies. If allowed to stand, they could transform free speech in the digital age (The Hill). 

Justices are likely to decide the cases by June, in the critical months ahead of the presidential election. In a sign of the case’s political stakes, Trump submitted a brief defending the Florida law (The Washington Post). 

MANHATTAN PROSECUTORS are looking to impose a gag order on Trump as his hush money criminal trial approaches. The requested restrictions on the former president’s speech mimic those imposed on him in his criminal case in Washington, D.C. They would bar Trump from making statements about court staff, their family members and prosecutors other than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), so long as the statements are made “with the intent to materially interfere with” the case (The Hill). 

“And the need for such protection is compelling,” prosecutors wrote in their motion. “Defendant has a long history of making public and inflammatory remarks about the participants in various judicial proceedings against him, including jurors, witnesses, lawyers, and court staff.” 

Trump’s lawyers in the case, meanwhile, on Monday demanded a New York judge block key witnesses from testifying in the trial. Trump attorney Todd Blanche moved to block testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s ex-fixer, and two women he paid to stay quiet about their alleged affairs with Trump: adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal (The Hill). 

TRUMP HAS APPEALED an order by New York Judge Arthur Engoron to pay more than $450 million in the New York attorney general’s sprawling civil fraud case against the former president’s business empire. The Monday appeal comes after Trump’s attorneys sought to delay enforcement of the $454 million sum by 30 days to “protect” the former president’s appellate rights. Engoron last week declined to do so (The Hill). 

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THE CLOSER 

And finally … 🐷 A British company specializing in breeding livestock with desired traits says it developed a gene editing protocol to make several commercial pig breeds resistant to a virus that devastates the swine industry.  

Why is this a headline? Meat from pigs, cattle and other livestock that possess edited genes are not on grocery store shelves — yet. The firm Genus hopes the Food and Drug Administration will formally approve the modified pigs for widespread human consumption this year, a first for a gene-edited animal. 

Rodolphe Barrangou, a food scientist at North Carolina State University, says the scientific study is the “end of the beginning” of bringing gene-edited livestock to the wide market because so many farmers will likely want pigs resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which costs the pork industry $2.7 billion annually (Science).  

🍽️ On a per capita basis, Americans eat about 52.5 pounds of pork a year. 

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