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Capital Journal
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Good morning from the WSJ Washington bureau. We produce this newsletter each weekday to deliver exclusive insights and analysis from our reporting team in Washington. Sign up.
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White House: President Biden pays his respects in a congressional tribute for U.S. Capitol Police Officer William Evans at 11 a.m. ET as Mr. Evans lies in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus at 2 p.m.
J&J Vaccine: The U.S. recommended pausing use of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine as the FDA reviews rare blood-clotting cases.
Congress: The House and Senate return to work.
Shootings: Police and protesters clashed during a second night of unrest in a Minneapolis suburb after the fatal shooting of a Black man, Daunte Wright, whose death police described as a tragic accident. Separately, a shootout at a high school in Knoxville, Tenn., Monday left a student dead and a police officer wounded.
(Readers: This version of the newsletter corrects a typo. Thank you for reading.)
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President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with members of Congress in the Oval Office on Monday. PHOTO: AMR ALFIKY/PRESS POOL
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President Biden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers discussed how to pay for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure package. Republicans said they oppose raising taxes on corporations and pushed for a narrower package. Mr. Biden showed an openness to breaking his proposal into smaller parts and considering different ways to pay for it, according to lawmakers who attended the meeting, Andrew Duehren and Catherine Lucey report.
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Mr. Biden called for a bipartisan push to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor industry in a meeting with auto and tech executives that he used to pitch his infrastructure proposal, Alex Leary reports. The White House characterized the meeting as part of ongoing engagement to address the global chip shortage.
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As a surge of migrants at the southern border has become an early challenge for the Biden administration, the White House will nominate two critics of the Trump administration’s border policies to lead key immigration agencies inside DHS, Michelle Hackman reports.
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Chris Magnus, the police chief in Tucson, Ariz., will be nominated to lead U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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Ur Jaddou, a longtime Democratic immigration-policy official, will be nominated to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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The White House said it would nominate Kenneth Polite to serve as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, reports Dylan Tokar. He served as U.S. attorney in New Orleans under President Barack Obama.
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The White House nominated women for terrorism, Army, and DEA roles, Rachael Levy and Warren P. Strobel report. It has tapped Christine Abizaid to head the National Counterterrorism Center, Christine Wormuth to be secretary of the Army and Anne Milgram as Drug Enforcement Administration director.
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Inside Look: Republican Party
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Republicans Unveil Policies to Match ‘Working-Class Party’ Claim
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Republicans have taken to calling themselves the party of the working class, but their policy preferences haven’t reflected that. A growing group of GOP lawmakers is setting out to change that.
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To some extent, this evolution in Republican thinking can be traced to former President Donald Trump, who turned the party in a populist direction and showed little regard for traditional conservative maxims on government’s role in the economy, intervention in the marketplace or deficit spending. The new burst of Republican economic thinking also raises some uncomfortable questions. Read the full Capital Journal column for more.
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U.S. and Chinese officials meet in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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China’s message to America: we’re an equal now. That is a big shift for Chinese leaders, who for decades took care not to challenge the U.S. as the world’s leader and followed the dictum Deng Xiaoping set decades ago: “Keep a low profile and bide your time," report Lingling Wei and Bob Davis.
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From senior editor Bob Davis:
For decades China was content to play second fiddle to Washington in world affairs. No longer. Xi Jinping sees China as America’s equal. That was evident when China’s top diplomat lectured U.S. officials in Alaska last month on America’s failings. Now China competes with the U.S for allies and focuses on reclaiming Taiwan. The Biden team sees Chinese actions as provocative. Mr. Xi views the U.S. as a declining power. Chances for miscalculation abound.
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136,744,941 cases world-wide and 2,948,317 deaths.
31,268,952 cases in the U.S. and 562,608 deaths.
Source: Johns Hopkins University, as of 8 a.m. ET.
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Newly reported U.S. cases increased Monday after dipping for two straight days. The U.S. reported more than 69,000 new cases for Monday and 463 Covid-19 fatalities. Follow the latest updates.
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Federal spending soared in March as the government sent another round of stimulus payments to Americans, widening the budget deficit to a record $1.7 trillion in the first half of the fiscal year, reports John McCormick. The budget gap is now more than double what it was for the same period a year ago, the Treasury Department said Monday.
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▶️Video: The pandemic disrupted the global economy in ways that may affect your 2020 taxes. WSJ tax reporter Richard Rubin explains.
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The Supreme Court's decision on Bridgegate is rippling through other white-collar cases, possibly buttressing appeals by other defendants who say federal prosecutors have become too aggressive in using antifraud laws to go after dishonest conduct, reports Dave Michaels.
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The court last year threw out the fraud convictions of two aides to former Gov. Chris Christie, ruling that a political-retribution scheme that involved crippling a town with traffic jams wasn't federal fraud.
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The decision could hurt prosecutors’ efforts to preserve convictions in a case that exposed ethical failures at KPMG LLP.
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Efforts to broker a peace settlement in Afghanistan suffered a setback. The Taliban backed out of participating in a U.S.-backed summit that was slated to start later this week in Turkey, report Jessica Donati and Nancy A. Youssef. A Taliban spokesman said the group wouldn’t attend because “our consultations have not ended on this topic.”
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The Biden administration had hoped the Turkey talks would yield a cease-fire agreement and an interim government that included the Taliban, enabling U.S. and NATO allies to withdraw their troops.
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NATO has called for Russia to end a military buildup on its borders with Ukraine that has sparked concerns of a major escalation in the conflict between the two countries, James Marson reports.
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Democrats are exploring a range of big changes to the health-care system, including expanding the Affordable Care Act and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare. (Axios)
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A coalition of Democratic pollsters has prepared a report seeking to explain how they overestimated how a range of their party's candidates, including President Biden, would perform in 2020. (Politico)
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Event planners are seeing an uptick in business as coronavirus worries ease, but they still expect a slow recovery. (Associated Press)
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This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Kate Milani, Troy McCullough, James Graff, and Toula Vlahou. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics on Twitter.
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