Good morning,

TNR has moved the daily newsletter, which used to appear in late afternoon, to mid-morning, with a short introduction written most days by Michael Tomasky (editor). Today, and at most Thursday performances, the role of Tomasky will be played by Timothy Noah (staff writer). We regret the inconvenience and will make refunds available at the box office. For those who wish to remain in their seats, let’s get started with installment number four.

The Senate struck a temporary deal this morning on the debt ceiling that will raise it just high enough to prevent default before December 3. The agreement, which may be voted on as early as today, raises the debt limit by $480 billion, The New York Times reports, citing an unnamed Senate aide. The arrangement is less than ideal, but it’s an encouraging sign that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans are starting to worry they’ll get blamed for any economic damage their infantile partisanship incurs; The Wall Street Journal reports that stock futures rose this morning on word of a deal after a jittery week of trading. “Mitch McConnell finally saw the light,” Senator Bernie Sanders told Politico. The Democrats say they still won’t bow to McConnell’s demand that they fold the December debt ceiling increase into the reconciliation bill.

President Joe Biden should just invoke the Fourteenth Amendment’s dictum that “the public debt of the United States” shall “not be questioned,” writes Mike Lofgren, a former Republican staffer on the House and Senate budget committees, in a New York Times op-ed. Your correspondent finds this option more appealing than having Treasury mint a $1 trillion coin, mostly because he worries Janet Yellen would forget to take it out of her pants pocket before sending them to the dry cleaner. But it’s far from clear that it would pass muster in the courts.

Speaking of courts, a federal judge in Texas blocked implementation of the state’s draconian new abortion law. It isn’t clear how effective the injunction will be, The New York Times points out, because Texas lawmakers had some inkling when they wrote the law that courts would object and, in response, allowed abortion clinics to be sued retroactively for abortions performed while a court blocked the law. 

The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to the Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, described by Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson as “one of the world’s most prominent post-colonial writers.” According to British bookmakers cited by the Los Angeles Times, Gurnah beat out “Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, French writer Annie Ernaux, Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Canada’s Margaret Atwood and Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid.” Amazon’s Gurnah page shows precisely two Gurnah works available in translation, one of them selling in hardcover for $62. That will change.

At New Republic.com, Alex Shephard argues that Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to explain her opposition to President Joe Biden’s reconciliation bill, far from establishing her as a bipartisan centrist, is so self-indulgent that it will damage her chances for reelection. Daniel Fernandez questions Biden’s nomination of Rahul Gupta for drug czar, noting that when Gupta was West Virginia’s state health commissioner, he authorized a 2018 report that, Fernandez reports, bowed to political pressure by raising gratuitous criticisms of the state’s needle exchange program. And Tanvi Misra compares the government’s numerical limits on Afghans and other refugees to the immigration quotas imposed a century ago on Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans based on bigoted eugenic pseudoscience.


Over and out,

Timothy Noah, TNR staff writer

Yesterday’s question: Which countries attacked which other country on this day in 1973, launching which war? And what world leader was assassinated on this day in 1981 (perhaps overly generous hint: He led one of the countries that commenced hostilities in 1973)?

Answer: The two countries that attacked a third country on October 6, 1973, were Egypt and Syria. The third country was Israel, and the war that commenced that day was the 19-day Yom Kippur War. (Does that mean yesterday was Yom Kippur? No. The lunisolar Hebrew calendar situated the Jewish Day of Atonement this year in mid-September.) 

The world leader assassinated that same day in 1981 was Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, who by then was an advocate for peaceful coexistence with Israel, having lost the Yom Kippur War and in 1978 signed the Camp David accords with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Today’s political question: Why does the House of Representatives not have a filibuster as the Senate does?

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