On Politics: For Sanders, It All Began in Canada

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/politics/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all.html

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Good Tuesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.

How did Bernie Sanders become animated about “Medicare for all”? He took a trip up north. The Vermont senator has staked his presidential campaign, and much of his political legacy, on transforming health care in America. His mother’s illness, and a trip he made to study the Canadian system, help explain why.

Senator Kamala Harris released a sweeping proposal to overhaul the criminal justice system. The plan is a wish list of progressive policies, many of which she rejected during her years as a district attorney and state attorney general.

President Trump declared that peace talks with the Taliban were “dead.” He now faces a difficult choice: He can reduce the number of American forces in Afghanistan anyway, but he then risks forfeiting negotiating power in any future talks with the Taliban.

The secretary of commerce, Wilbur L. Ross Jr., is said to have threatened to fire top employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after the agency’s Alabama office contradicted the president’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit the state.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports were having no impact on the United States economy, an assertion that was at odds with increasingly gloomy economic data and industry surveys.

An informant extracted from Russia in 2017 sent secrets to the C.I.A. for decades and was a vital source about Moscow’s 2016 election interference.

Staring down a three-week deadline, Congress is bracing itself for another round of bitter spending battles to hash out 2020 spending. The race to reconcile must-pass bills to avert a shutdown is particularly tense.

Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas is one of only a handful of House Democrats with “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association. Now he faces a primary challenge from the left.

Jon Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker, announced he would run for Senate in Georgia. He is a Democrat who nearly flipped a conservative House district in the state in 2017 and hopes to become the first Georgia Democrat elected to the Senate in almost 20 years.

Gun control groups applauded some retailers’ moves to enact “open-carry prohibitions” in their stores, but some guns rights groups seem unworried.

Today’s On Politics briefing was compiled by Isabella Grullón Paz in New York.

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