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👋🏾 HI, HEY, HELLO! Welcome back to Congress Nerd Daily. I hope today was everything for you. The midterms are in 47 days.
It’s out! I joined Punchbowl News’ Fly Out Day this week after Maryland Gov. Wes Moore sat down with Anna Palmer to talk redistricting, the possibility of a Democratic congressional majority, AI and data centers in Maryland and more. Then CNN’s Alayna Treene and I yapped about it all. Watch the episode and let me know what you think.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) has learned nearly four years into the job that keeping her sprawling caucus together is often less about bringing down the hammer than understanding why a member might be prepared to break ranks in the first place.
“Sometimes that’s what I have to do,” Clark told me this morning of coming at members hard. “But most of the time it’s finding the best way. What is the underlying problem? What is going on in someone’s district? What are the pressures that they are feeling from a collapse of an industry that may be very different than my district?”
Clark said effective whipping also requires knowing when she isn’t the right person to persuade a member.
“It’s also knowing when you’re not the best person to actually talk to a member, but maybe a different member, someone who is from their region or in one of their ideological caucuses, is the better person,” she said.
Clark offered the unusually candid description of her leadership style after I asked what she had learned about herself and her colleagues during their nearly four years leading House Democrats together—all of them spent in the minority.
The question carries new weight as the trio closes out its final stretch before the midterms. If Democrats win control of the House, Clark would move from whip to majority leader, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) would be positioned to become the first Black speaker and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) the first Latino majority whip.
Jeffries also made clear Thursday that whatever differences exist in the three leaders’ styles, he sees them as aligned in confronting one of the caucus’s most immediate challenges.
“There is no daylight between the three of us,” Jeffries said when asked about chatter of a push to remove Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) from the exclusive Appropriations Committee following her repeated votes for Republican procedural rules. “And we’ll address the situation when we address the situation.”…
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IN THE KNOW
Data-center cost fight hits the Senate: An effort to quickly pass a bipartisan House bill aimed at preventing AI data centers from driving up consumers’ electricity bills stalled in the Senate this afternoon as lawmakers clashed over how far the federal government should go to regulate the facilities…
READ ALL ABOUT IT
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— “College is coming apart” by Ian Bogost: “Successive, overlapping crises reveal that American higher education makes no sense.”
— “How much Pat McAfee is too much?” by Adam Elder: “Once-predictable ESPN is wagering its future on a polarizing, overcaffeinated commentator.”