Congress could determine NFL Washington Commanders’ home stadium
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(WASHINGTON) — Congress’s December to-do list includes an unusual item this year: a bill that could determine the home of the NFL’s Washington Commanders.
Since 1997, the team has played home games in nearby Maryland, and the former home of the team, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadum, has fallen into disrepair.
But there is new momentum behind a bipartisan bill to grant the District of Columbia a 99-year lease on the federal land that could allow the city to make a deal with the team to return to Washington after 28 years.
The House approved the bill in February. A key Senate committee did the same last month — after the team and league promised Republican Sen. Steve Daines it would honor the team’s old Redskins logo that depicts a chief of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe.
“We’ve had good discussions with the NFL and with the Commanders,” Daines told Fox News last month. “There’s good faith negotiations going forward that’s gonna allow this logo to be used again,” he added, citing this as the reason why he changed his mind to favor the bill.
Now, advocates are blitzing the halls of Congress, trying to get Senate leaders to add the measure to a year-end spending bill.
On Monday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Commanders Managing Partner Josh Harris met with Hill leaders on the stadium proposal and among other matters, a league source and Commanders team source confirmed to ABC News.
If the Senate doesn’t approve the deal by the end of the month, the bill dies, and both chambers would need to start from scratch in 2025.
That could also leave the fate of the project in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump.
Trump has feuded with the NFL and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and has slammed D.C. as “filthy”, and crime ridden. But the developer-turned-president has also promised to redevelop the city – and once aspired to own an NFL franchise.
Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., a prominent ally of Donald Trump, said voters don’t care who conducts background checks into the president-elect’s Cabinet picks and that Trump would fire members of his administration who don’t follow the policy he sets out.
In an interview with “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, Hagerty lambasted the records of some of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet members and insisted that Trump will command compliance from top members of his upcoming administration.
Name-checking Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for the bloody withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Hagerty said, “They’ve not been held to account.”
“President Trump will fire people that don’t do their job well. I fully expect everybody coming into the Cabinet will listen to President Trump. They’ll let him set the policy, and they’ll execute according to that plan.”
Trump has moved at a rapid pace to flesh out his Cabinet, including picking Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii to be director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump also tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to head the Justice Department after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., withdrew from consideration amid a tumultuous sexual misconduct investigation in the House Ethics Committee.
Hagerty said Trump hopes to have his Cabinet nominees swiftly confirmed, telling Karl that Trump “clearly expects to hit the ground running” and “wants us to have these hearings done quickly and expeditiously.”
However, others besides Gaetz have been hit with scandal.
Kennedy has been a prominent vaccine skeptic and supported abortion access, riling anti-abortion groups allied with Trump. Gabbard has blamed the U.S. and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. And Hegseth is mired in a sexual misconduct controversy over payments to a woman who alleges he assaulted her at a conference.
With Gaetz out of the running, the spotlight has mostly shifted to Hegseth, who has also ruffled feathers by saying that he doesn’t agree that women should serve in combat roles in the military.
Hagerty praised Hegseth and insisted that the Trump transition team has thoroughly vetted all of its candidates — but that he isn’t concerned with who does a formal background check on them before the confirmation process formally begins.
“Don’t let these allegations distract us. What we need is real significant change. The Pentagon has been more focused on pronouns than they have lethality the past four years. We need to get back to business, and I think Pete is just the person to do it,” Hagerty said.
“The transition team has been working for months to prepare for this. I’m certain that there was significant vetting that has taken place, it has for every candidate,” Hagerty added.
FBI background checks have been standard practice for nominees requiring Senate confirmation, but the Trump transition team has yet to sign the necessary agreements to allow such screenings to occur.
However, while some Republican senators have said they’d like to see an FBI background check done on Hegseth, Hagerty said, “I don’t think the American public cares who does the background checks. What the American public cares about is to see the mandate that they voted in delivered upon.”
Hagerty also said that he supports the use of recess appointments — allowing Trump to temporarily put Cabinet picks in office while Congress is out of session — though he did demur when pressed by Karl over whether Trump would do so if the person lacked sufficient Republican support to be confirmed in the Senate.
“I haven’t spoken with President Trump about the specific plans. What he wants to do is see these appointments made quickly. He wants to see us get through the confirmation process. And again, I think everything should be on the table,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — For the first time in four years, Democrats are leaderless. But chaos is a ladder, as the saying goes, and the party is packed with climbers.
Democrats are still sifting through the rubble of last week’s election results, and many said that a period of grieving and soul-searching is due after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss. But over a dozen operatives said that the leadership vacuum fueled by her defeat will attract members of the party’s deep bench who likely won’t wait long to cast themselves as the messenger Democrats need to bounce back ahead of the 2028 election.
“I have not seen any outreach from the national party to folks for 2028. I think they’re too busy playing the blame game, they’re too busy knifing each other,” said one person who has spoken to multiple potential 2028 candidates. “In terms of donors reaching out to their candidate of choice, that has been never ending over the course of the last four or five days. And then there’s a lot of local outreach to people.”
Democrats boast several governors, senators, House members and more rumored to have national ambitions.
Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom; Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker; Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear; Maryland Gov. Wes Moore; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper; Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro; Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman; California Rep. Ro Khanna; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, could also play some role in guiding the party, though it’s unclear how much of an appetite there is in the party to allow the bench to take on a supporting role to members of the losing ticket.
Already, the jockeying is underway, albeit not yet in full force.
Shapiro has received calls from Democrats in his state, a source familiar with the matter confirmed, as has Beshear, who also wrote a New York Times op-ed examining his party’s woes. Newsom held a call with his grassroots donor network and is set to be a top Trump antagonist, and Khanna is mulling a media blitz and listening tour to areas that have borne the brunt of deindustrialization, sources familiar with their thinking said.
Buttigieg has traversed the country touting the administration’s infrastructure achievements, often goes behind enemy lines to appear on Fox News and moved his residency to Michigan, which has an open gubernatorial race in two years. Fetterman has been vocal about what he calls his party’s disconnect from working-class voters.
All have some kind of argument, whether it’s a blue-collar appeal the party has been missing, proven electoral experience in red or purple areas, or something else, and most hit the campaign trail for Harris this year. More maneuvering is expected to come, especially once Trump takes office and his policies go into effect, likely galvanizing Democrats’ base.
“I think that what you’ll probably see beginning in January, is people who are at least considering being candidates come out with really detailed, expansive programs. Some may be about jobs, some may be about education, some may be about who knows what else. But it will probably be policy-based,” said Dan Fee, a Democratic strategist and donor adviser based in Pennsylvania.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of a lot of governors and a lot of other folks do the speaking circuit thing, be going to events, certainly heading into ’26, you’re going to see a lot of people endorsing folks,” added one senior Democratic strategist, referencing the 2026 midterms.
There is no clear frontrunner in the beefy field, but some did see their personal stock rise during the Biden administration or as the result of the election.
Newsom, in particular, could benefit, given that his California roots and political base overlapped significantly with Harris’. But Buttigieg also boasts a beefier resume after four years in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, Shapiro and Beshear were vetted as part of Harris’ veepstakes, and many hit the trail — especially to the early primary state of New Hampshire — throughout the year, helping them building relationships with local groups and voters.
Still, anything can happen in four years.
Republicans, not too long ago, were walking in the political wilderness themselves after President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, sparking a famed autopsy. Four years later, now-President-elect Donald Trump won his first term, ushering in two years of unified Republican control but a series of fits ever since over the identity of the party and how much it should hew to his brand.
Democrats too were on a high after Biden’s win in 2020, a euphoria reinforced after the party defied the odds in the 2022 midterms to expand its Senate majority and limit its House losses. Now, they’re conducting a postmortem of their own.
What’s more, positioning oneself for higher office is more art than science. Appearing too eager risks turning off voters, while not stepping on the gas hard enough risks ceding ground to other aspirants.
But promoting oneself isn’t the only way to improve one’s standing amid the jockeying, and operatives predicted that the knives will be out.
“I think the [opposition research] books are probably already being built,” said the operative who has spoken to multiple potential 2028 candidates.
For all the preparation, though, would-be party leaders can’t make themselves so just by themselves. And party donors may not quite be ready to indulge a 2028 free-for-all as it analyzes its 2024 loss, especially after Harris’ team boasted of smashing several fundraising records only to get swept in all seven swing states.
“People were being told this is a toss-up, and so, their biggest problem is going to be getting fundraising,” said John Morgan, a prominent donor to Democratic candidates and causes. Donors “do not trust people with the money. Nobody does.”
That’s not expected to make a bench full of ambitious politicos collectively pump the brakes, though.
Several of the operatives who spoke to ABC News predicted a gargantuan 2028 primary field, even eclipsing that of 2020, which boasted over two dozen candidates.
“It’s gonna make the 2020 presidential primary look like it was a small gathering. This is going to be frenzied, it’s going to be competitive. There will be no punches pulled. And I think that’s a good thing,” a former Fetterman staffer said. “I hope we let it all out this time and the strongest person emerges.”
(WASHINGTON) — Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has helped fundraise for Donald Trump, is the president-elect’s choice to lead the Department of Treasury.
Bessent has advised Trump on economic policy and has been a frequent presence at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club over the last two weeks.
The announcement for the job, which needs Senate approval, was supposed to come earlier but had been stalled due to intense infighting among Trump’s top advisers — including transition co-chair Howard Lutnick — about who should get the job.
“Scott is widely respected as one of the World’s foremost International Investors and Geopolitical and Economic Strategists. Scott’s story is that of the American Dream,” Trump said in his announcement statement.
Bessent, 62, has been involved in financial firms for over 35 years.
Born and raised in Conway, South Carolina, Bessent graduated from Yale University in 1984.
After graduating from Yale in 1984, Bessent went to work for different investment companies.
He worked for Democratic megadonor George Soros from 1991 to 2000, where he was a managing partner. Later, he returned to Soros Fund Management (SFM) – the private investment firm that manages assets for the Open Society Foundations – as chief investment officer from 2011 to 2015.
Bessent has also been associated with Brown Brothers Harriman, The Olayan Group, Kynikos Associates and Protégé Partners.
Economists from both sides of the aisle believe Bessent is a middle-of-the-road pick.
Bessent made large donations supporting Trump and served as an economic adviser. He has also made several television appearances on behalf of the president-elect.
Bessent spoke at a conference run by the Manhattan Institute in June, where he laid out a three-point economic plan that he intended to propose to Trump.
“Well, I might even advise him to campaign on three arrows,” Bessent said. “It would be 3% real economic growth, and how do you get that? Through deregulation, more U.S. energy production, slaying inflation and forward guidance on competence for people to make investments — so that the private sector can take over from this bloated government spending.”
Bessent, who is gay, resides in New York City with his partner and two children.
As the highly anticipated treasury pick lingered, Elon Musk threw his support behind Howard Lutnick over Scott Bessent.
“Would be interesting to hear more people weigh in on this for @realDonaldTrump to consider feedback. My view [for what it’s worth] is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change,” Musk wrote on X. “Business-as-usual is driving America bankrupt, so we need change one way or another.”
