Axios

The next trillion-dollar fight concerns the debt ceiling. Global markets freak out any time members of Congress or White House officials float anything other than a drama-free debt-ceiling hike.

The state of play: As a House conservative, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney pushed to use the debt ceiling as a lever to cut spending. And as Trump's budget director, he favored the concept of "debt prioritization" — an idea that thrills some in the conservative movement but horrifies the markets, the Treasury secretary and the leadership of both parties.

Shortly after becoming President Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney conveyed a blunt message to several Cabinet secretaries. According to a senior White House official with direct knowledge and another source briefed on the private conversations, Mulvaney told the Cabinet officials that their "highest priority" over the next year would be deregulation.

What they're saying: "We knew there was one thing we could do without legislation," the senior official told me. When Mulvaney sits down with the president to discuss the Cabinet secretaries' performance, the official said, "Dereg is going to be top of the list."

A senior government official who was involved in the spending negotiations over the past few weeks told me the experience taught them something disturbing.

"We're going to go to the edge on everything," the official said on Friday, shortly after Trump signed the bill to fund the 25% of the government that had shut down for 35 days on his watch.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CBS' "Face the Nation" that he will hold a hearing regarding former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's allegations that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hosted discussions about removing President Trump via the 25th Amendment.

Details: Graham said he would call both McCabe and Rosenstein for questioning, saying, "The whole point of Congress existing is to provide oversight of the executive branch." He added, "So I promise your viewers the following — that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened."

Go deeper: Timeline: Trump's turbulent relationship with Andrew McCabe

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said on "Fox News Sunday" that President Trump "will protect his national emergency declaration" for the border, refusing to answer whether Trump would veto a resolution of disapproval that Congress may pass.

Backdrop: Trump plans to tap into $3.6 billion of additional funding for the border wall via the Department of Defense's military construction fund. Trump's decision to declare a national emergency to fund a border wall has been criticized by both Republicans and Democrats as a dangerous precedent that could grant expanded executive power to future presidential administrations.

Resigning in shame isn't really a thing anymore. Hanging on for dear life, and hoping everyone will forget about your scandal, is the new thing.

Why it matters: It's not just Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. It's a growing group of elected officials who are still hanging around despite scandals that would have been considered fatal in the past. That's a sign of our shorter attention spans and the lightning speed of today's news cycles — but it's also a sign of how our standards have changed.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) have met with the House general counsel to discuss legal options for finding out the contents of President Trump's one-on-one meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Politico reports.

Why it matters: The Washington Post reported last month that Trump has repeatedly sought to conceal the details of his face-to-face conversations with Putin from senior officials in his own administration — even going as far as to confiscate notes from his own interpreter and instruct them not to discuss the contents of the conversation. The meetings will be one of many investigative priorities for House Democrats, who were blocked by Republicans in their attempts to subpoena Trump's interpreter while in the minority.

The 2020 Democratic field splits into two rough camps: anger vs. optimism.

The big picture: Democrats ultimately have to choose between someone who's the mirror image of President Trump (an angry fighter) — or the opposite (an optimistic pragmatist).

In a partially-redacted transcript of a hearing this week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson called direct attention to the significance of lies Paul Manafort told about longtime business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Mueller investigation believes has ties to Russian intelligence.

"[W]e've now spent considerable time talking about multiple clusters of false or misleading or incomplete or need-to be-prodded-by-counsel statements, all of which center around the defendant's relationship or communications with Mr. Kilimnik. This is a topic at the undisputed core of the Office of Special Counsel's investigation..."

Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Friday filed the first of what is expected to be a series of lawsuits challenging the legality of President Trump's emergency declaration, BuzzFeed News reports.

Details: Public Citizen is representing three Texas landowners and the Frontera Audobon Society, who have been told by the federal government that portions of Trump's proposed border wall would cross their properties. They argue that the president has exceeded his power under the federal National Emergencies Act — disputing that there is any immigration emergency whatsoever — and that Trump's declaration infringes upon separation of powers.