Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) will announce Tuesday evening during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that she is launching an exploratory committee to raise funds needed for a 2020 presidential bid.
Why it matters: Gillibrand is the latest candidate and the third woman to join what is expected to be a large and diverse Democratic primary. Gillibrand has opposed 94.6% of President Trump's executive branch nominations, more than any other Senate Democrat.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, a staunch critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, has agreed to testify before the panel on Feb. 8.
Why it matters: Whitaker is expected to face questions over his decision not to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation. His testimony will come a day after President Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen appears before the House Oversight Committee.
The House passed a resolution Tuesday condemning Rep. Steve King’s (R-Iowa) racist comments by a margin of 424-1.
Details: King, who has previously said his comments have been "mischaracterized," voted in favor of the resolution. The one "no" vote came from Democrat Bobby Rush, who said he doesn't believe the resolution goes far enough in its denunciation. House Republicans voted to remove King from his committee memberships on Monday.
Freshman and centrist Democrats rejected an invitation Tuesday to negotiate with the White House, despite receiving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blessing to attend such a meeting, the AP reports.
The big picture: The invitation was the White House's attempt to appeal to Democrats who are facing pressure in districts carried by President Trump in 2016. It's now Day 25 of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, and — as the AP notes — the White House has discovered "the limits of trying to bypass Speaker Nancy Pelosi in shutdown negotiations." If the impasse is not resolved by next week, the House has said it will cancel its scheduled recess.
Attorney general nominee William Barr said Tuesday in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller is not purposely targeting President Trump and his administration, despite what the president has claimed.
Background: Barr, who drafted a memo last year criticizing Mueller's investigation, said he is going to make as much information from the special counsel public as possible.
A federal judge in New York on Tuesday ruled against the Trump administration's decision to include a citizenship question to the 2020 census, siding with critics who argue that it's a partisan move that would lead to an inaccurate census count.
Why it matters: With the current polarized political climate, opponents say legal and undocumented immigrants would refuse to participate, and demographers believe that an undercount would skew the distribution of federal funds among states and reduce the political power of heavily Democratic states with large immigrant communities during the next round of redistricting in 2021.
President Trump told top administration officials in private conversations throughout 2018 that he wanted to withdraw the U.S. from NATO, the New York Times reports.
Why it matters: Senior national security officials believe the withdrawal from the 29-country military alliance "would drastically reduce Washington’s influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades," the Times reports. The move would be "the wildest success that Vladimir Putin could dream of," Michèle A. Flournoy, a top defense official under President Obama, told the Times, which reported last week that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump was secretly working for Russian interests in 2017.
"Has the fire Berned out?" the Boston Globe's Michael Levenson asks on the front page.
The state of play: "[A]s Sanders weighs another campaign, some say that even as he has moved the Democratic Party ideologically — pushing issues such as Medicare for all, free college tuition, and a $15 minimum wage into the mainstream — the party has moved past him personally."
Out of the gate, Democratic women are swarming the 2020 presidential race — outnumbering and outmaneuvering men with early announcements.
What's happening: Sen. Elizabeth Warren started the trend, followed by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. In coming days, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York will continue the trend. Sen. Kamala Harris of California will soon after cement the trend.
