Good morning,

Again, just to remind: TNR has moved the daily newsletter, which you used to get in the late afternoon, to mid-morning, with a short introduction, which is brought to you today by TNR staff writer Matt Ford. Let’s get started.

The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday night not to crash the global financial system (for now). Senate Democrats broke a filibuster that had blocked a clean suspension of the debt ceiling until December 3 with 61 votes. Among those in favor were 11 Senate Republicans who supported the measure as part of a compromise worked out between Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his GOP counterpart, Mitch McConnell. The House is expected to pass the bill early next week, staving off what would be the first-ever default on the national debt and a partial collapse of the American economy, until at least the holidays.

France’s Tucker Carlson is surging in the presidential polls, Axios notes. Éric Zemmour, a controversial TV host and journalist, has leapt ahead of fellow far-right figure Marine Le Pen in the race to challenge French President Emmanuel Macron next April. Zemmour rose to national fame for his polemical views on immigration and national identity, including his espousal of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Despite his previous conviction for inciting racial hatred, Zemmour is currently poised to face off against Macron in the Fifth Republic’s two-round presidential election. A victory in the first round would be a grim sign about the fortunes of the French far right—and for European unity.

Elon Musk is going to the Lone Star State. The Tesla CEO announced that his company will relocate its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in an implicit rebuke of California’s governance. Though he insisted that the electric car manufacturer would maintain a sizable presence in the Golden State, the move was taken as a sign of deeper alienation from the West Coast home of America’s largest tech companies. Musk first threatened to leave the state when county officials closed Tesla facilities during last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns.

Op-ed of the day: The New York Times’s Jesse Wegman took a look at Florida’s felony disenfranchisement law and the extraordinary barriers it places on some Floridians’ right to vote. The Sunshine State voted in a 2018 referendum along bipartisan lines to scrap what was one of the toughest schemes in the country, but Republican lawmakers passed a law that only allowed those affected to cast a ballot if they paid off all fines and fees first. The result, Wegman writes, is a “Kafkaesque” bureaucratic nightmare that keeps hundreds of thousands of Floridians from enfranchisement. “There is no central database with those numbers, and counties vary in their record-keeping diligence,” he notes. “Some convictions are so old that there are no records to be located.”

At NewRepublic.com today, we have Grace Segers on Cory Booker and why he’s (somehow) still optimistic about the Senate, Timothy Noah on Democrats’ strange thinking about the optics of the debt ceiling fight, Maggie Doherty on the morality and moralizing of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, and Jake Bittle on the Danish environmentalist who thinks climate change is real but thinks the cost of fighting it is too high. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Have a happy Friday, 

Matt Ford, TNR staff writer

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

Answer: Because the House tried it and concluded it didn’t work. One by one, the House eliminated various tactics to delay a vote. In 1811, it for the first time permitted debate on a measure to be ended by majority vote. In 1841, it limited the length of time any individual member could speak to one hour. And in 1889, it ended a practice in which a band of dissenters could deny the body the necessary quorum to vote merely by declining to vote yes or no. The House membership’s brisk growth as the nation expanded westward made delaying tactics especially disruptive. Today the House, its membership fixed by statute at 435, runs much more efficiently than the Senate, with power consolidated tightly in the office of the speaker.

Today’s U.S. politics question: The Supreme Court has heard thousands of cases on appeal since its establishment in 1789. How many times has it conducted a criminal trial?

Today’s world politics–history question: In what year did Germany make its final reparations payment for World War I?

Our writers and editors are fighting for a fairer world—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic.