Pile Of Daunting Challenges Ahead For Next Defense Secretary

“Top House Republican leaders and aides are privately discussing using the debate over the $95 billion foreign aid package to make it harder to oust Speaker Mike Johnson. This comes as Johnson faces another uprising from his right,” Punchbowl News reports. “Right now, any member can file a motion to vacate the chair, which triggers a potential snap referendum on the speaker.

“Members of the Kennedy family will appear en masse and in force to endorse President Biden at a campaign event in Philadelphia on Thursday,” Axios reports. “It’s a public display of support that reveals a weakness Democrats privately acknowledge: Biden is likely more at risk from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party challenge than former President Trump is.” Bloomberg: “Biden will be introduced by Kerry Kennedy — the sister of the third-party candidate — and joined by fellow siblings including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor; filmmaker Rory Kennedy; former Congressman Joe Kennedy II, Christopher Kennedy, and Maxwell Kennedy Sr.”

“Seven jurors down, five more to go. The complicated process of picking a jury in the first criminal trial of an American president will continue for a third day on Thursday as lawyers on both sides choose the panel that will decide Donald Trump’s fate,” the New York Times reports. Politico: Two of Trump’s jurors are lawyers.

“With former President Trump tied up in court for much of the next six weeks or more, supporters are staging events and creating an online chorus that the trial-bound Trump later touts on social media,” Axios reports. “The Trump loyalists, operating separately from his campaign, are amplifying Trump’s grievance-fueled messaging well beyond his online rants and indignant statements before and after court sessions in Manhattan.”

“Germany detained two dual German-Russian nationals on suspicion of spying for Moscow and seeking to disrupt Western military aid to Ukraine in the latest espionage affair to shake the country,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Washington Post: “The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians — the first such wave in the country… Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year.” “But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out ‘obscene’ or ‘harmful’ titles.