January 24, 2019

Two Senate bills to end the longest government shutdown in history failed Thursday, as expected. The competing bills needed 60 votes to pass — an impossible task with senators largely voting along party lines.

President Trump's plan to reopen the government with $5.7 billion in border wall funding was on the table first, offering up some protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients but limiting asylum protections. It was resoundingly voted down, with 50 votes for and 47 votes against. All Democrats voted against it save for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), a centrist who indicated earlier in the day he'd side with Trump. Two Republicans, Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Mike Lee (Utah), voted "no" to join the Democrats.

The Democratic bill, which provides just two weeks of government funding, also failed in the GOP-controlled Senate, with 52 voting for and 44 against. Six Republicans sided with Democrats, but it needed 13 GOP votes to pass. It was aimed at re-opening the government for just enough time to allow further border talks, and included no funding for the border wall. The Democratic-controlled House had already passed a nearly identical bill, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) added some disaster aid to this version.

Both bills, had they passed, would've headed to the House for another vote before arriving at the president's desk. Kathryn Krawczyk

8:16 a.m.






7:47 a.m.





6:41 a.m.

Two U.S. diplomats will testify Friday in the House impeachment inquiry of President Trump, one publicly and one behind closed doors. House impeachment investigators will depose David Holmes, an aide to acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, about his assertion he overheard Trump ask U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about the status of proposed Ukrainian "investigations" into former Vice President Joe Biden.

Taylor's predecessor, career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch, will testify in public before the House Intelligence Committee about the shadow campaign, apparently led by Trump lawyer and fixer Rudy Giuliani, that led to her dramatic late-night recall from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. Yovanovitch testified in October that Ukrainian officials had warned her to "watch my back" and she felt personally targeted by Trump. Months after her ouster, Trump told Ukraine's president that "the woman" Yovanovitch "was bad news" and "she's going to go through some things," according to the White House partial transcript of that July 25 call.

On Friday, Yovanovitch will face "Trump's fiercest congressional defenders, nearly all men, about a campaign by other male allies of the president to force her from her post," The Washington Post notes. "The symbolism of that conflict underscores the significance of the historic probe, which was initiated by the female speaker of the House — Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — and made possible by female voters who helped deliver the House to Democrats in the last election."

"Seeing someone like Masha Yovanovitch come forward is going to be an extremely difficult moment for Trump," Nancy McEldowney, a former ambassador to Bulgaria who now teaches at Georgetown University, tells the Post. "What I suspect the world will see when she walks into that hearing room is an individual who is not tall physically but really is a towering figure of integrity, inner strength, and unswerving devotion to public service and telling the truth." Peter Weber

5:01 a.m.

The Indiana Supreme Court suspended three judges this week over an incident in May that involved a night of drinking, an unsuccessful attempt to visit an Indianapolis strip club, and a 3 a.m. altercation outside a White Castle that left two of the judges with gunshot wounds, NPR News reports. The unanimous eight-page opinion from the Supreme Court "lays out the events as soberly as possible, but the details remain spicy," NPR notes, singling out this part of the document:

While in town to attend a statewide educational conference for judicial officers, 10 hours before the program convened, respondents walked the streets of downtown Indianapolis in a heavily intoxicated state. When Judge Bell extended her middle finger to a passing vehicle, neither Judge Adams nor Judge Jacobs discouraged the provocation or removed themselves from the situation. [Indiana Supreme Court]

Judge Sabrina Bell flipped off two men in a truck, Alfredo Vazquez and Brandon Kaiser, after she and three other judges arrived at the White Castle. While the fourth judge was inside the White Castle, Vazquez and Kaiser parked and confronted Bell and Judges Andrew Adams and Bradley Jacobs. The men started fighting, then Kaiser allegedly pulled out a gun and shot Adams in the stomach and Jacobs twice in the chest. Both underwent emergency surgeries.

Jacobs, who was in the hospital for two weeks, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery and served two days of his 365-day jail sentence. Kaiser has been charged with 14 crimes in connection with the incident, NPR reports.

Adams, Jacobs, and Bell "engaged in judicial misconduct by appearing in public in an intoxicated state and behaving in an injudicious manner and by becoming involved in a verbal altercation," the high court said, and their actions "gravely undermined public trust in the dignity and decency of Indiana's judiciary." Jacobs and Bell were suspended for 30 days without pay, while Adams was suspended for 60 days without pay. Peter Weber

4:20 a.m.

An average of 13.1 million people tuned in to the six major networks during Wednesday's live coverage of the first public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry, according to preliminary numbers Nielsen released Thursday. If you add PBS, Telemundo, CNN, and HLN to the numbers for Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS, the average viewership rises to 13.8 million from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday.

To put those numbers in perspective, nearly 13 million people watched former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's testimony in July, while about 20 million people tuned in for former FBI Director James Comey's post-firing hearing in 2017 and 2018's confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Wednesday night's CMA Awards drew 11.1 million viewers to ABC.

Fox News, somewhat ironically, drew the highest viewership numbers, with an average of 2.89 million people tuning in, followed by MSNBC's 2.7 million. Next came ABC (2 million viewers), CBS (1.97 million), CNN (1.9 million), and NBC (1.7 million). ABC won the coveted 25-54 demographic, with an average of 496,000 viewers, followed by Fox News and NBC. The numbers don't include C-SPAN or most streaming viewers.

These numbers fall "far short of blockbuster level," Vulture notes, but given the obscurity of the two witnesses — U.S. Ambassador William Taylor and State Department official George Kent — and today's "era of audience fragmentation and streaming services," Wednesday's hearings actually "drew a big audience by 2019 standards." Peter Weber

2:53 a.m.

Acting U.S. Ambassador William Taylor tied President Trump directly to the campaign to bribe Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden in Wednesday's public impeachment hearings, and that testimony led to a second "bombshell" Thursday, news of a second witness to Trump's overheard phone call, Stephen Colbert said on Thursday's Late Show. "So Taylor's testimony was historic — unless you ask Kellyanne Conway, who was not entertained," telling Fox News the hearings were a snoozefest starring "a bunch of gossip girls." Colbert was confused: "Well, is it boring or is it Gossip Girl? Because it can't be both! Gossip Girl was a very successful show."

"But it wasn't just Kellyanne," Colbert said. "Even NBC News tweeted the testimony 'lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention.'"

"What do you mean, it lacked pizzazz?" asked Seth Meyers on Late Night. "The only politicians who have ever been entertaining were the ones in Hamilton. What do you want them to do, show up with their own backup dancers?" Ironically, he added, "Trump's defenders in the Republican Party and on Fox News" were the most invested in working "to dismiss the entire thing as a fake scandal invented by Democrats for TV."

"There are a lot of hot takes out there right now — one of the dumbest is that these impeachment hearings aren't interesting enough," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. "These were two career civil servants giving sworn testimony about a potential attempt to undermine our democracy — they're also supposed to have 'pizzazz'?" Amazingly, he said, that actually "seems to be an emerging line of defense for Republicans," who very clearly "don't want to talk about the facts."

"Even though millions of people have been talking about these hearings," Fox News seems determined to get people to tune out, Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show. Their main argument is that "Americans are too dumb to follow these impeachment proceedings," but "sometimes if you watch Fox, it looks like they're straight-up trying to hypnotize their viewers into not caring," he added. If those fail, "Fox has come up with another reason to ignore the impeachment hearings": They're "boring and unsexy."

"These hearings are investigating whether the president of the United States committed high crimes or misdemeanors," Noah said. "They're supposed to be serious, not about excitement. Impeachment is like a family reunion: If it's sexy, something has gone horribly wrong." Peter Weber

2:04 a.m.

It was a milestone decades in the making.

On Friday, a Qantas airplane loaded with 100 metric tons of jet fuel flew 11,060 miles from London to Sydney, nonstop. The journey lasted 19 hours and 19 minutes, and shattered two records, becoming the longest commercial airline passenger flight for both distance and duration, CNN reports.

The new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner departed from Heathrow Airport at 6 a.m. Thursday morning, and flew over Germany, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Kazakhstan, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. This was a test flight, and while the plane can hold up to 256 people, there were just 50 on board. All passengers were outfitted with monitors, and researchers from Australia's Charles Perkins Centre will study how sleep patterns, movement, and food consumption on an extremely long flight affect a person's health.

The last time Qantas attempted to fly this route without stopping, it was 1989. The airline used a Boeing 747, ripping out most of the seats and loading the plane with as much fuel as possible, even towing it to the runway in order to conserve gas, CNN reports. "Flying nonstop from the east coast of Australia to London and New York is truly the final frontier in aviation, so we're determined to do all the groundwork to get this right," Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said. Qantas is hopeful it can start offering nonstop flights from London to Sydney and vice versa in 2022. Catherine Garcia

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