Politics | featured news

Vince Fong (R) was on the ballot this fall for an Assembly race, “but he didn’t want to win it. After all, he left that job for Congress earlier this year, and he planned to stay in the nation’s capital,” the AP reports.
“He even went so far as to endorse the Bakersfield city councilmember who was listed as running against him on the November ballot.”

“Fresh from a devastating loss to Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris may now head to Capitol Hill to defy him in what could be her last major act in office,” NBC News reports.

“President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to end business-as-usual at the Justice Department apparently include replacing FBI Director Christopher Wray, Vice President-elect JD Vance indicated in a social media post on Tuesday,” Politico reports.
“Vance revealed he and the president-elect were conducting interviews for the crucial FBI post in a since-deleted post on X.”

“President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he intends to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” the New York Times reports.
Trump said that Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will pay $5 million to any Gaza resident who returns a hostage plus safe passage out of the war-ravaged territory, Bloomberg reports.

“As Republicans circle the wagons around Matt Gaetz and his nomination to be attorney general, Donald Trump and his surrogates have started calling GOP senators to feel them out on the confirmation battle,” NOTUS reports.
“The calls are not going well.”

Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) — who lost her re-election bid earlier this month — is in the mix to be Donald Trump’s Labor secretary and, notably, has the backing of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, Politico reports.

“Progressive media outlets are trying to curry favor with President-elect Trump, ruffling the feathers of their audiences,” Axios reports.
“Resistance media benefited enormously from outrage engagement during Trump’s first term, but the dynamics are different now.”

“We do have a history, but I don’t have any bitterness. I don’t hold anything against him. No hard feelings or anything. I’d have a beer with the dude. Whatever. That’s the game.”
— Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), quoted by NOTUS, on his willingness to vote for confirm Dr. Mehmet Oz (R) to oversee Medicare.

A new NBC News analysis of precinct-level data shows the extent to which President-elect Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and Vice President Kamala Harris’s losses — were driven by weak turnout in heavily Democratic cities.