Presented by Business Roundtable

Good morning, Playbookers. I'm Deputy Editor Zach Stanton. It is Thursday, October 19th,

and that means it's day three of Jim Jordan's quest to become speaker, day 16 of the House

not having a speaker, and just 29 days until a government shutdown.

We'll have more on the speaker vote in a second.

But first, President Joe Biden is back today from the Middle East, and he returns to a

Washington where his steadfast support of Israel and Israel's response to Hamas' terrorist attacks

is emerging as a dividing line

in the Democratic Party's left flank. Yesterday, demonstrators advocating for a ceasefire descended

on Capitol Hill, sitting in at the Cannon House Office building, and staging a protest on

the lawn of the Capitol. Now, at that demonstration, Congresswoman

Rashida Taleb, who is a Democrat from Michigan, and the only Palestinian-American member of

Congress and one of two Muslim women in the House, repeated a claim that Israel bombed a hospital

in Gaza. Now, by all appearances, that claim seems to be false.

President Joe Biden has disputed it. He cited U.S. intelligence in blaming a misfired rocket

by Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad for that catastrophe. And yesterday, the Senate

Intelligence Committee's top Democrat and top Republican, that being

Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, respectively, released a statement saying that their own

review of the intelligence gives them the confidence that, and I quote, the explosion was the

result of a failed rocket launch by militant terrorists, and not the result of an Israeli airstrike."

And yet, even after all of that, Taleb repeated the debunked claim and tearfully

vowed to demonstrators that she will not forget what President Biden has done on this issue.

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