Presented by the Independent Community Bankers of America, with nearly 45,000 locations,

community banks used deposits to provide $4 trillion in local lending.

ICBA urges Congress to preserve the time-tested value of community banks

by extending the prohibition on yield-bearing payment stable coins to all digital asset market participants.

Allowing yield-bearing payment stable coins

could shrink community bank lending by $850 billion,

diminishing access to credit for consumers,

small businesses, and rural communities.

To learn more, visit ICBA.org'm Anna Palmer. And I'm Jake Sherman. And welcome to The Daily Punch,

brought to you by Punch Bowl News. It's Wednesday, March 4th, 2026. Let's get in the mix here.

Are your Washington headlines of the day. Number one, what does

77 million dollars get you? A GOP runoff in Texas. Number two, what's next for Congress and Iran?

And number three, DHS Secretary Kristy Noam on the hot seat. All right, Jake, let's get to it.

Happy Wednesday. You are in Texas. You are there for Texas primary night.

Tell us a little bit about the situation there. I'm in Austin right now. Very good weather, by the way, yesterday when I landed here. Bummer. But I think it's getting nice in D.C. And I think I'm going to bring the warm weather back to the District of Columbia. But John Cornyn, in a runoff with Ken Paxton. With 89% of the vote in, Cornyn had 41.9.

Paxton had 40.9.

Wesley Hunt had 13.4.

This means that this will go on for another 12 weeks.

And Anna, if you thought it was messy up until now, just wait.

Cornyn all but said last night that he's going to put out as much as he has and he has more on Paxton.

Now, the pressure is now on Donald Trump.

You and I were talking about this over the last couple days, which is a bad situation would have been if Cornyn lost by like three or something like that or was behind Paxton by three, because then you'd have a lot of decisions to make if

...