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John,

At the start of the week, we were taken by surprise when every member of Congress got an email telling us there was a new “foreign military capability.”

We were all invited to schedule a time to go into a secure room and get a briefing, which I did.

I can’t tell you anything about what I saw in that room. I also can’t confirm any reporting based on anonymous sources discussing what we were shown in that room, because that would be an indirect way of telling you what I saw.

My sense is that I will be allowed to go into more detail with you in the coming weeks. As soon as I am allowed to do that, I certainly will. This is just a moment when I’m not allowed to be as transparent as I’d like, and I wanted to tell you that directly.

Internal Warfare

My hope was that this would be the week we finally saw some progress on the budget. We’ve punted three times so far, each time just before the clock ran out and we went into shutdown.

The clock is set to run out again in two weeks. We have a staggering amount of budget work to do between now and then if we want to avoid another punt… and yet, things aren’t moving.

As far as I can tell, we didn’t make any progress last week, or this week.

In fact, we were sent home a day early this week because of an internal fight within the majority party about whether to bring certain bills to a vote.

It’s easy to say, “This is Congress being dysfunctional.” And broadly speaking, that’s true.

But we can be a little more specific. What’s actually happening is there are about 30 folks in the House who have a veto on almost everything, and they are choosing to use it on almost everything.

“Well Jeff, that’s because they are fighting for more conservative policies.”

Well, not exactly. Having watched these folks up close for over a year, they’re up to something else.

The way you can tell this isn’t about policy is that these 30 folks don’t have a strategy to actually achieve their goals. Their big push - which has been to shut down the government - would almost certainly backfire and make it less likely that they’d get the budget concessions they want, simply because of how massively unpopular a shutdown would be.

They absolutely know this. They are smart enough at politics to understand that the course they are recommending would most likely drag their agenda backwards.

But they believe that if they use a lot of tough-sounded language, their supporters won’t notice.

So if you were a brand new member of Congress and I were one of these 30 people and I decided to pitch you on joining our effort - and I was willing to be super candid with you - it would sound like this:

“Ok, so here’s what we do. We use our numbers to block a ton of legislation. We don’t have enough numbers to actually pass our own. And here’s the important part: When they try to compromise with us and give us some of what we want, we say no. At that point, they have to try to go around us. That means we’re not going to get anything that we want. But it also means we get a huge amount of media attention, and we can tell our supporters that we’re the strong ones and everyone else is caving. So basically what we do is trade policy wins for political wins, but we use a ton of super-heated rhetoric to cover that up. You’ll get less done with us, but you’ll get 10x more attention. So whaddya say?”

And… it’s basically working for them. No policy wins, but the vast majority of the attention. Crazy political strategy, but in their own way, highly successful.

Campaign Update - serious news

There’s been a development in our primary and you need to know about it.

As most of you know, I am running for Attorney General in North Carolina.

Early voting in our primary began this week, and please vote if you haven’t already. (You can find your polling locations here [[link removed]] .)

In the last few days, a new dark money super PAC has sprung into existence. Its sole purpose is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV ads and mail to try to defeat us.

They haven’t had to disclose anything about themselves, so we don’t know who is behind it.

We are in a strong position, but we can’t let this go unanswered. We will respond with a positive message about why I’m running and what I hope to accomplish as Attorney General.

In my last email, I itemized what our budget for the primary looked like. All of that still holds.

However, now we have to add some television advertising to counter what just happened.

I am asking you to help us fund our response. However much people contribute to this is how strongly we will be able to respond, and we’d like to have a very strong response.

You can contribute here [[link removed]] (ActBlue) or here [[link removed]] (non-ActBlue). Both options fund our campaign directly.

If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

CHIP IN $10 NOW [[link removed]]
CHIP IN $15 NOW [[link removed]]

CHIP IN $25 NOW [[link removed]]
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And I’ll keep you posted.

Best,

Jeff
Paid for by Jeff Jackson for Attorney General
Jeff Jackson for Attorney General
P.O. Box 470882
Charlotte, NC 28226
United States
www.jeffjacksonnc.com [[link removed]] | [email protected] [[email protected]]
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