Today's Politico Playbook Audio Briefing is presented by Google.

Good Thursday morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to your Politico Playbook Audio Briefing.

And I'm Jake Sherman. It might be easy to forget amid this pandemic that has killed 100,000

of our fellow Americans, but there's a big complicated country that needs to be run. Critical programs

expire, funding runs dry,ies need reconsideration, votes need

casting. And for eight of the last 10 years, the United States has voted for an uneasy power

sharing agreement in which Republicans and Democrats both had roughly equal claim to a governing

mandate. And the result, those programs have expired. Funding has run dry. The policies that need

reconsideration have not gotten their

due attention. Politics has turned so acidic that doing one's job is a career liability instead

of a prerequisite for election. We have a president who changes his mind more frequently than some

work from home employees change their clothes. And now, as if this weren't challenging enough, the governing gods

decided our elected officials need to do all of this in an era where breathing the wrong

particle of air could quite literally be lethal. And that's what leads us to today, this Thursday

morning, May 28, 2020, 159 days before Election Day. President Donald Trump said two

nights ago that he didn't like a key surveillance law that officials have said is crucial

to keeping Americans safe. Yes, that one, FISA, a renewal of which lawmakers in both parties

have been molding into shape for some weeks. So we tweeted it on Tuesday night, kill it, he said, and his party quickly fell in line. The White House started telling its allies to build opposition. House Republican leadership began whipping against it. By Wednesday morning, progressive Democrats long skeptical of the law, got in on the fund and said they'd vote against it, and a right-left coalition against the Pfizer renewal was born.

Sure, call it a win for the White House if you want, but a win means you scored more points than the other team and have the opportunity to advance to a subsequent round in which you have a plan to do it again. It's not clear to the White House what their plan is because Trump is looking for some amorphous explanation about spying that he believes occurred in the 2016 election in exchange for his support for the law.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who like Mitch McConnell The amorphous explanation about spying that he believes occurred in the 2016 election in exchange for his support for the law.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who like Mitch McConnell can usually squeeze a complex bill through a tortured chamber, doesn't have a ton of options here.

She could dare Republicans and progressive Democrats to vote no.

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