Former National Security Adviser John Bolton reportedly tried to do his part during President Trump's impeachment hearings.Bolton famously refused to testify during Trump's impeachment trial regarding the president's alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine, only confirming the deal months after the fact. But Bolton apparently did try to divulge some details from his book regarding Trump's Ukraine dealings — the White House just wouldn't let him, an official overseeing Bolton's book's prepublication review said in a Wednesday court filing.Ellen Knight, a career federal official formerly overseeing the National Security Council's records, was tasked with reviewing Bolton's book and making sure it didn't contain classified information, The New York Times describes via the filing from Knight's lawyer. During that process, Bolton requested a speedier review of a part of his book regarding Trump and Ukraine so he could release it during the impeachment trial. Knight's lawyer said at that point, Bolton's memoir The Room Where it Happened didn't have any classified information and Knight was "prepared to clear the manuscript," but White House aides still denied his request.Through her lawyer, Knight alleged that the "apolitical process" of prepublication review was "commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose." Bolton's book was the only time Knight had been asked to take several "unusual" steps within the review process, and she hadn't heard of predecessors having to do so either, her lawyer said.The court filing comes a week after the Justice Department opened a criminal inquiry into Bolton's book to determine whether it shared classified information. The White House tried to shut down the publication of Bolton's book even after copies of it were already in the hands of journalists.More stories from theweek.com America needs to hear the bad news first A mild defense of Republican hypocrisy on the Supreme Court Trump is the only one being honest about the Supreme Court fight

Senate Republicans have released their controversial report on Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s former dealings with Ukraine in a politically-charged move to taint Biden’s campaign weeks out from Election Day.The investigation, which was spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) focuses on Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings—a key issue in last year’s impeachment of President Donald Trump. The probe was launched despite no evidence of any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden ever being established.The report contains little that wasn’t already known. Its headline finding is that two Obama administration officials raised some concerns to the White House in 2015 about Hunter Biden serving on the board of Burisma, but the report does not support Trump’s baseless claim that Joe Biden tried to use his influence as Vice President to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect his son’s gas firm. Senate Democrats tried earlier this week to prevent the report from being published, warning that the document would only serve to amplify Russian disinformation about Biden ahead of November’s election. The Treasury department has sanctioned Andriy Derkach, an associate who has pushed similar theories with the help of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, because U.S. intelligence services believe he is an active Russian agent. It was reported on Tuesday that the CIA believes President Putin is probably directing the disinformation campaign against the Bidens personally.The GOP investigation, launched after Biden became a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, has been framed by Johnson as explicitly political—drawing condemnation even from Republican senators. Last week, Johnson said his report would reveal that Biden "is not somebody we should be electing president of the United States."On Wednesday, following the publication, the Biden campaign immediately dismissed the report as politically-motivated nonsense.Biden spokesman Andrew Bates reportedly said: “As the coronavirus death toll climbs and Wisconsinites struggle with joblessness, Ron Johnson has wasted months diverting the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee away from any oversight of the catastrophically botched federal response to the pandemic, a threat Sen. Johnson has dismissed by saying that ‘death is an unavoidable part of life.’”The report trumpets one quote as its central finding: That a State Department official, George Kent, raised concerns in 2015 with unidentified officials at the White House about Biden’s son working with Burisma. Kent wrote in one email to unidentified colleagues of his: “The presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.”However, Kent said as much to congressional investigators during his testimony last year, when he said he was worried that Hunter Biden’s position could appear like a conflict of interest, and that he had raised that issue with the White House.Kent, who was the acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine at the time, also said that the U.S. government never made a decision about Burisma that was affected by Hunter Biden’s board position.Kent said in October last year that “in the aggregate (Hunter's job) didn't have any discernible effect.”Generally, the report aims to paint Hunter Biden’s activities as unseemly, and his father as complicit. What’s missing is any fresh new evidence bolstering the notion that Hunter Biden's activities actually subverted U.S. policy in Ukraine, beyond concerning U.S. officials. In the course of the investigation, Johnson’s committee pursued a sweeping set of subpoenas for former Obama-Biden administration officials to appear for testimony. They secured several interviews, including with former State Department official Victoria Nuland and Biden adviser Amos Hochstein. Yet, the report relies just as heavily—if not more so—on media reports that had been in the public realm long before the GOP committees took interviews. A New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden from 2019, in particular, is heavily cited. When it is not attempting to raise the specter of general sketchiness by the Bidens, the GOP report reads as a general airing of grievances by the chairmen, particularly Johnson, who has increasingly bristled at scrutiny of his contentious investigation.A full 10 pages of the 87-page report, slotted in the middle of material about Biden and Ukraine, serves as a venue for the Republicans to vent against Democrats for arguing that the GOP probe advanced Russian disinformation efforts and for “media leaks.”There is plenty of disdain, too, for the media outlets that reported critically on the investigation. “The Democrats’ false narrative has continued to be picked up, amplified, and circulated by a broad network of Democrat-friendly media outlets and Democratic members of Congress,” says the report.Elsewhere in the report, Republicans simply dump assorted dirt on Biden’s son. Hunter, say the Republicans, paid women who were Russian nationals and allegedly linked to a prostitution ring. There’s an entire section of the report devoted to how Hunter Biden received U.S. Secret Service protection on trips abroad while his father was vice president.The GOP also raises Hunter Biden’s China ties—a topic that Team Trump openly encouraged the Chinese government to probe in 2019—and says the connections “raise criminal concerns and extortion threats” without citing any specific evidence other than “records acquired by the committee.” These are cited in the report frequently as “confidential documents.”Those mysterious documents also form the basis of the Republicans’ parting shot: that they may not be done yet with Hunter Biden. Republicans say they will continue to review the documents in their possession. “There remains,” reads the report’s final sentence, “much work to be done.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

For a year, Senate Republicans have teased a bombshell investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden that could rock the former vice president’s campaign for the White House.

But an interim report, issued by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) less than six weeks before the presidential election and released publicly on Wednesday, is largely a compilation of previously public information — some of it rehashed anew by witnesses who already testified during the House’s impeachment inquiry last year — as well as news articles and strongly worded insinuations with little evidence to back them up.

The report, titled “Hunter Biden, Burisma and Corruption,” reprises these year-old claims and adds little new to a discussion first raised by President Donald Trump’s defense team in his impeachment trial before the Senate earlier this year, when the president was acquitted by GOP senators on charges of abusing his power by seeking to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The report does little to substantiate allegations against the Democratic presidential nominee, which have been fueled in part by foreign actors linked to the Kremlin whom U.S. officials have said are attempting to interfere in the 2020 election.

The report relies on vague assessments already revealed publicly — namely, from top State Department official George Kent, who said Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company was “very awkward” for U.S. officials who were carrying out an anti-corruption policy in Ukraine. Kent made a similar remark during his impeachment testimony last fall.

The report also highlights a year-old New Yorker article describing a conversation between Biden and a top aide about his son’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, but notes that the article provided no evidence about how Biden reacted. The aide, Amos Hochstein, a former special envoy for international energy in Barack Obama’s administration, declined to discuss his conversation with Biden about the subject when he testified last week before Johnson’s panel.

The GOP senators have been investigating allegations that a Democratic public-relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, sought to influence the Obama-era State Department by leveraging Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Trump has pushed Republicans to use their investigative powers to probe his political rivals.

The investigation — which lacked majority support among members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Johnson chairs — found that two officials, including Kent, raised conflict-of-interest concerns to Biden when he served as vice president. The report states that Hunter Biden’s role “cast a shadow” over U.S.-Ukraine policy, but provides no evidence that U.S. foreign policy was impacted.

Democrats raised concerns that Johnson would not honor a recent committee vote to release all of the witness interview transcripts alongside the report, except for in cases where classified information might be revealed. Johnson’s staff did not immediately release full transcripts on Wednesday, only quoting from witness testimony in the report, often without full context.

Democrats, led by Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon, accused Johnson of publicly hyping a damaging report on Joe Biden only to issue a report that included no such evidence.

"Chairman Johnson repeatedly impugned Vice President Biden in public on the basis of secret evidence he claimed to have obtained," the Democrats said. "Contrary to his public insinuations, the Chairmen’s investigation found no evidence that the former Vice President did anything wrong in his efforts to carry out official U.S foreign policy in Ukraine."

The Johnson-Grassley report devotes 10 of its 87 pages to criticizing Democratic attacks and media reports about the investigation, including several from POLITICO. And it ends stating that “there remains much work to be done,” citing lack of compliance from the executive branch.

Allegations that the Democratic firm Blue Star Strategies attempted to sway the State Department during the Obama administration follow the argument Trump’s lawyers made during Trump’s January defense against impeachment charges that he abused his power by pressuring Ukrainian leaders to investigate Biden and his son. Johnson ramped up his Biden-focused probe during the House’s impeachment inquiry and though it briefly faded from view as Biden’s presidential candidacy seemed to sputter, he intensified it again in February after Biden surged back into contention.

Trump’s allies allege that Biden — who led anti-corruption efforts for the Obama administration in Ukraine — forced the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while Hunter Biden sat on the board. But high-level State Department witnesses repeatedly discredited this claim, emphasizing that Biden’s removal of the prosecutor, who was widely seen as corrupt, was official U.S. policy and actually made it likelier that Burisma would face a serious corruption investigation.

Nevertheless, Johnson pursued the allegations, even amid increasingly loud warnings — from some Republicans, too — that some of the actors perpetuating the same narrative were doing so at the behest of Russia, which intelligence officials say is interfering in the 2020 election to denigrate Biden.

As a result, Johnson’s investigation has been mired in growing controversy. Democrats have accused Johnson of aiding Vladimir Putin’s attack on American elections, a charge whose potency grew after the Treasury Department sanctioned pro-Russia Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, calling him a Russian agent who is fueling false narratives about Biden. Senators have openly clashed in classified settings over Johnson’s probe.

In the report, Johnson and Grassley reject the notion that Derkach’s material, or any evidence he has purported to gather, made its way into their report.

“Since the offices of Chairman Johnson and Chairman Grassley did not receive, and were unaware of, the information that Derkach had allegedly sent, it is impossible that Derkach’s efforts could have shaped the committees’ investigation in any way,” they wrote.

Johnson’s allegations against the Bidens mirror those pushed by Derkach, who sent packets of information about Biden to Johnson and other Trump allies on Capitol Hill. But Johnson’s office has denied that the senator received anything from Derkach or is relying on his claims. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has met with Derkach and sought to spur an investigation into the Bidens, led by the Ukrainian government — an effort that ultimately got Trump impeached by the House.

Derkach has been releasing leaked tapes of phone calls between Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, none of which support the narrative Derkach has pushed but which have fueled fear of a high-level plot. Trump has amplified reports about those tapes despite warnings about Derkach from the intelligence community.

In a statement, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said Johnson has “wasted months” investigating the Bidens while the coronavirus pandemic rages. He said Johnson sought to “subsidize a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars — an attack founded on a long-disproven, hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory.”

The report leans heavily on 100 citations from 14 "confidential documents" in lengthy passages detailing Hunter Biden's financial connections to foreign nationals. The documents are actually Suspicious Activity Reports kept by the Treasury Department, in which financial institutions flag transactions but don't verify whether any wrongdoing has occurred. Peters said the GOP senators' decision to rely on these reports, and publicize their details without any independent investigation, was an unprecedented use of congressional power.

In addition, Democrats emphasized that the reports were "generated at the request of law enforcement" in the fall of 2019, an unusual development for reports typically created by the financial institutions themselves. "Specific details about which law enforcement personnel requested the documents were redacted," the Democrats noted.

"The Republican Chairmen’s use of confidential Treasury documents to justify its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks against Vice President Biden’s family is grossly irresponsible," the Democrats said. "The information in the documents cited by the Republicans has not been verified, and we are not aware of any other Congressional committee ever releasing this sort of information in this manner."

It's unclear if the documents refer to bank statements or government filings or other materials that would help provide a roadmap for how the committee investigated the son of the former vice president.

Despite the release of what Johnson dubs an “interim” report on Wednesday, he has faced several roadblocks in recent months.

Earlier this year, Johnson tried to issue a subpoena to Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has pushed unsubstantiated claims about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. But he ultimately scrapped the subpoena after the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force briefed committee aides about Telizhenko, prompting unease among Republicans.

For months, Johnson pushed back on the idea that his probe was intended to help Trump politically. But more recently, he has confirmed those suspicions.

“People need to take a look at this report very carefully and understand what the ramifications are for electing Joe Biden as president,” Johnson said on a local radio program Tuesday, the day before he released the report.

Indeed, some of Johnson’s fellow Republicans have criticized the investigation as a political exercise, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who sits on the Homeland Security panel. Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump during the Senate impeachment trial.

“It is not the legitimate role of government, for Congress or for taxpayer expense, to be used in an effort to damage political opponents,” Romney said last week.

Other Republicans have distanced themselves from Johnson’s actions, refusing to defend the investigation but declining to openly criticize it. POLITICO previously reported that Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, confronted Johnson privately about the probe, telling the Wisconsin Republican that it could aid Russia’s election-meddling efforts.

Still, Johnson has pressed on, as Trump’s allies pressured him to keep the heat on the Bidens. Johnson has also launched a separate investigation centering on the Obama administration’s actions during the presidential transition period, stemming from the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in 2016 that targeted the Trump campaign.

Fox News devoted multiple segments on Tuesday night to defending accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse, describing the 17-year-old charged with shooting several Kenosha protesters as an “all-American” and a “little boy out there trying to protect his community.”Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who justified the shootings earlier this summer, kicked off his program Tuesday night by airing a video detailing the August shootings produced by a fundraising group led by Rittenhouse’s attorney, L. Lin Wood.The heavily narrated video, which purportedly details Rittenhouse’s actions that night, largely uses previously shown footage while portraying the victims as criminals, going so far as to show their rap sheets when identifying them. Rittenhouse, meanwhile, is described as a lifeguard who has devoted hundreds of hours to community service.The video also tries to sow doubt about whether Rittenhouse actually killed Jason Rosenbaum, the first victim. Acknowledging that Rittenhouse shot four times toward Rosenbaum, the narrator notes that other shots were fired in the vicinity, suggesting that the shot that killed Rosenbaum could have been fired by someone else.After showing the slickly produced clip from Rittenhouse’s defense team, Carlson turned to pro-Trump Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, who immediately took the opportunity to defend Rittenhouse.“We still don’t know if Kyle did the kill shot, because we can’t get the autopsy or the ballistic reports yet,” she said. “But if you move on to the second shooting, what you realize is this kid is not a mass murderer, there were several times he could’ve continued shooting. Twice he shot in the air, once he turned around and the guy put his hands up, he didn’t shoot him, he kept moving.”After applauding Rittenhouse’s apparent restraint in not shooting more protesters that night, Pirro called on the district attorney to drop the charges against Rittenhouse, saying there’s “no shame in exonerating a defendant if he’s not guilty.”“Kyle Rittenhouse has been villainized here, and he's been demonized, and I think it should be just the opposite,” she continued, adding: “This one kid is an innocent man, he’s looking to help, he’s all-American, and he’s trying to just make sure his town is safe.”Notably, Rittenhouse is not from Kenosha, or even Wisconsin. He traveled to the Jacob Blake protests that night from Antioch, Illinois, roughly 20 miles away.The following hour on Trump confidant Sean Hannity’s show, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi—who served on President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team—piggybacked on Pirro’s portrayal of Rittenhouse as a clean-cut kid trying to make a positive difference.After Hannity played a bit of the video, Bondi said she was glad Wood was the attorney before justifying Rittenhouse’s alleged actions, saying Kenosha was a “war zone.”“You have got a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state,” she exclaimed. “He is helping people who have been injured. He has paramedic training for being a lifeguard. He is taking graffiti off walls. He is trying to mitigate the chaos out there.”Once again, it should be noted that Rittenhouse is not from Wisconsin.The “video speaks volumes,” Bondi said, adding that the victims were criminals who were “chasing him down” before claiming that it is “too soon to charge him” with anything.“They charged him two days later and there were bullets flying everywhere. Other people were firing,” she said. “This kid was out there trying to help people. Were people killed? Absolutely.”“We have a little boy out there trying to protect his community,” Bondi continued. “Should he have been out there with a gun? No. But should he have been charged with murder? We just don’t know yet and they charged him two days later. So it’s a war zone out there.”The former attorney general concluded by seemingly placing the blame for the shootings on local leadership, asking, “What’s it coming to in these liberal cities when teenagers have to go out there to try to provide aid to other people who are getting injured by these rioters?”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have to worry about confirming a Supreme Court nominee, but she’s got her own drama to deal with.

The California Democrat is under pressure to placate an animated liberal base eager to battle Republicans over filling the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the waning weeks before the election.

Pelosi also must attempt to appease a coalition of vulnerable moderate Democrats, desperate for a coronavirus relief deal they see as key to their reelection. These centrist Democrats are worried the Supreme Court fight could overshadow any negotiations, not to mention make the party seem extreme.

Both factions see their priorities as key to delivering Democrats sweeping power in the House, Senate and White House next year. Whether Pelosi can keep her sprawling caucus from splintering in the month before the election will be critical.

“Leadership has to try to tend to the many different voices in a big very tent. And I understand that,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a senior member of the House Oversight Committee.

“But I think this goes beyond an issue of politics,” Connolly added. “It’s about the future of the country. And that’s why I favor robust action that would have been considered really out there — bold — a few years ago.”

Since the death of the liberal icon on Friday, Pelosi has carefully sought to temper progressive expectations about the Supreme Court fight without dampening their enthusiasm — and risk depressing voter turnout on the left over the issue.

Liberal Democrats, both in Congress and leading grassroots groups across the country, have been incensed as they watched Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lock down support for a vote before the election or during a lame duck that could give the court a conservative majority for decades.

Cash is flooding in, and protests have lined the streets of Washington. Activists and even some elected Democrats have begun to talk seriously about packing the courts or an end to the Senate filibuster — historic institutional changes that establishment Democrats have long rejected.

Some chatter even emerged on the left of pursuing the impeachment of a Trump appointee like Attorney General William Barr in a last-ditch attempt to slow the process, though progressives in Washington have been far more restrained in their messaging. Senior Democrats have also repeatedly privately dismissed the idea, saying it wouldn’t work anyway.

“We’ve got to talk about what’s at stake now, what’s at stake in the lives of millions and millions of people,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) when asked about liberal calls for court-packing or ending the filibuster. “Health care is on the ticket once again. ... This fight touches the lives of every single person in this country.”

The most progressive voices in the party, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), have clearly articulated their support for Senate Democrats to ultimately strike back, such as eliminating the legislative filibuster and adding justices to the court.

“Frankly, I think if Vice President Biden wants to accomplish anything significant in his term, that is what is going to be necessary,” the liberal Democrat told POLITICO. “If I’m Joe Biden and I completely shut down the possibility of expanding the court, I would seriously question what you can even accomplish as president.”

But Ocasio-Cortez has also made a concerted effort to stay on message with the Democratic party leadership in the crucial final run-up to the November election.

Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez appeared alongside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a New York City press conference, where both insisted that Democrats would keep their options open. And Ocasio-Cortez also said even though Biden hasn’t embraced far-left ideas like court-packing, he is at least “open” to different ideas and she thinks he is “calculating correctly.”

The demands of the far left could hardly look more different than the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, which is more worried about holding onto their seats in November. They say the party’s only response should be talking more about the threats to Americans’ health care — repeating the playbook that helped propel the party back to power in the House in 2018.

And most centrist Democrats have little interest in heeding demands of outside liberal groups and even some members, which they fear will cause lasting damage to the institution and may only backfire the next time the Republican party seizes power.

“We have to focus on right now and protecting health care today,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who leads the caucus’ messaging arm. “If we’re privileged enough to win the House, the Senate and the White House, we’ll have lots of opportunities to talk about solutions. But right now, we need to call out the president for what he is attempting to do.”

Moderate Democrats were privately furious that some of their more liberal counterparts, like Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), would float the idea of expanding the court in retaliation for Republicans ramming through a new Supreme Court justice this year.

And even publicly, some congressional Democrats argue that the vocal calls for scorched-earth tactics right now could have unintended consequences for the party.

“Why provide anybody any ammunition at all to attack us for something that is speculative?” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Judiciary Committee. “The Republicans would love nothing more than to shift this into an academic discussion about the number of times that the Supreme Court’s size has changed.”

Pelosi refused to rule out extreme dilatory tactics like impeachment during an interview on ABC on Sunday, saying the House will use “every arrow in our quiver” to stop Republicans from confirming President Donald Trump’s third high court nominee. But Democrats privately shut down the idea of pursuing impeachment. And Pelosi has repeatedly tried to shift the focus to what the Supreme Court fight means for preserving or destroying Obamacare.

Pelosi and Schumer circulated talking points encouraging Democrats to frame the Supreme Court fight in those terms. And Pelosi has repeatedly emphasized the success of Democrats’ almost singular health care message in 2018.

Pelosi speculated that Republicans and Trump were rushing to fill the high court vacancy to strike down the Affordable Care Act, a move she predicted would backfire on the GOP like the party's effort to dismantle the law in 2018. The Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in the Trump administration's challenge to Obamacare the week after the election.

“You overturn the Affordable Care Act, you overturn preexisting conditions, 2018 will be a way of life for Republicans,” Pelosi told Democrats on a private call Tuesday, according to sources on the call.

Many moderate Democrats have already made health care a top issue in their reelection campaigns this fall.

But they’ve also begun to feel the intense pressure on another issue: economic relief for tens of millions of Americans who’ve been left struggling as the U.S. economy sputtered over the last six months due to the pandemic.

“People in my district are worried about their pocketbooks and their kids,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a frontliner, said in an interview Tuesday. “And while they feel very strongly about the importance of a lifetime appointment … they want to know when the next Covid emergency relief bill is gonna be here, they want to know how they can get masks and supplies to keep their businesses open, they want to know what’s happening with unemployment.”

Democrats in the most competitive races have begun vocally pressing Pelosi and her leadership team for more dramatic steps on a coronavirus relief package. More than 20 Democrats, including Slotkin, signed a bipartisan letter to Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday urging them to keep lawmakers in Washington until a relief bill can be passed — even if it means less time to campaign before November.

“This should be our number one priority in the coming days,” lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was first reported by the New York Times and obtained by POLITICO.

At least a dozen Democrats are also privately discussing joining a GOP discharge petition that would force a vote on additional aid for small business grants, known as the Paycheck Protection Program. That includes Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.) and Jared Golden (D-Maine) — all facing tough reelection battles this fall.

In one sign of hope, Pelosi told her members in a private call on Tuesday that she’s still pushing to secure a pandemic aid package with GOP leaders — regardless of the intense discussions over the court across the Capitol — with hopes of delivering relief before the election.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told members on Tuesday they should be expected to remain in town next week and he is keeping the schedule open for a potential vote.

“Getting into these beltway arguments, in this bubble, when people are hurting, small businesses are going out of business every day for good. … What are we quibbling about here?” said Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.), referring to the debate over court-packing and nuking the filibuster.

“There’s still an alarming rate of Covid positive tests in this country. I just think it’s a little premature to talk about what Democrats are gonna do in the Senate in January.”