Sponsored by the National Retail Federation.

Hey, good morning. I'm Playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's January 19th, and it's Friday.

Good news for federal workers and, you know, the country writ large this morning. Both the House and

Senate managed to pass a six-week

CR before leaving town yesterday. That means no government shutdown tonight. But appropriators

will still have a lot of work to do when they come back next week to ready fiscal

2024 spending bills for the long term. They've got until early March. This morning in Playbook,

we have one crazy way to save a border deal. With Senate negotiators expected to unveil this

bipartisan border deal any day now and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer floating the idea of

voting on the full White House $106 billion supplemental as soon as next week.

The coffee pot chatter on Capitol Hill right now is about one elephant-sized remaining obstacle.

How the hell are they going to get this border deal passed in the GOP-led house?

Speaker Mike Johnson is under tremendous pressure right now from former president Donald Trump

and other conservatives not to give Joe Biden a win on the border before the 2024 election. Members like

Marjorie Taylor Green, meanwhile, are openly threatening to oust the Louisiana Republican if he

allows a new tranche of Ukraine aid to sail

through the House. But given the political fallout from the migrant crisis, the stakes are so

high that some Democrats are considering a kind of insane idea to try to land this plane,

trading a border deal for protection for Speaker Johnson. You heard me right there. Several Democrats,

including House Armed Services, ranking Democrat Adam Smith, House Homeland Security Committee,

ranking Democrat Benny Thompson, and Texas border congressman Vincent Gomez told me yesterday on

Capitol Hill that if Johnson puts any Senate-passed border deal on the

...