Kansas

The political arm of the moderate New Democrat Coalition is adding 12 House challengers to its list of candidates to watch in 2018. 

NewDemPAC’s recognition comes with a $1,000 contribution this quarter and guidance about messaging and strategy. The watch list is a way for the group to get involved in races earlier than it previously has. Last cycle, the PAC contributed about $1 million to federal candidates and it expects to give out at least that much this cycle. 

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, last week for low blood pressure, Fox News reported.

Dole, 94, and his wife, former Sen. Elizabeth Dole, tweeted confirmation of the story.

The Blue Dog Coalition’s PAC backed eight Democratic House challengers Thursday in its first round of endorsements of the 2018 cycle. 

Endorsements come with a $5,000 check — the maximum a PAC is allowed to contribute to a federal candidate per election. The PAC can cut each candidate another $5,000 check if they clear the primary and run in the general election.

Seventeen years, eight Congresses and three presidents after Bill Clinton commissioned planning for a massive memorial honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower, planners finally expect to break ground by the end of fall.

The Eisenhower family is on board. Republicans and Democrats on the House Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee are on board.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker hurried into an elevator. Sen. Marco Rubio quickly ducked into the Capitol Visitor Center television studio. And Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain shut down reporters’ repetitive questions.

No Republican senator could be found Tuesday who was willing to question President Donald Trump’s threat before the United Nations General Assembly to “totally destroy” North Korea unless it gives up its nuclear arms and long-range missile programs, which he views as a direct threat to the sovereignty and security of the United States and its allies.

Bipartisanship is the song of September.

A host of fresh criticism rained down on President Donald Trump’s commission on voter fraud Tuesday as it held its second meeting since the panel’s creation in May.

Most of the harshness was directed at Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who led the meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in his capacity as vice chairman. Vice President Mike Pence, the panel’s chairman, was not present.

If anyone in Washington was wondering just how seriously Democrats were taking a presidential advisory commission tasked with finding voter fraud, the answer came in late August, when Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer compared the commission with the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier in the month.

“If the president wants to truly show that he rejects the discrimination agenda of the white supremacist movement, he will rescind the Executive Order that created this commission,” the New York Democrat wrote in a post on Medium.com. He added that the commission was “a ruse,” whose “only intention is to disenfranchise voters.”

Most House Republicans griped about the fiscal package they were forced to vote on Friday, but ultimately, a relatively small portion of the conference was willing to vote against it.

A little more than one-third of House Republicans voted against a package that would extend government funding and the debt ceiling for three months, while providing $15 billion in disaster relief aid, primarily to Texas and Louisiana to help with the Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts.

Amid all the action in Congress this week, you might have missed a vote honoring former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan.

The House approved on Tuesday a bill, introduced by Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., to present Dole with the Congressional Gold Medal. It had already passed in the Senate, where it was introduced by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. The measure now moves to President Donald Trump’s desk.