Good morning from the WSJ Washington Bureau. 

Trump's Day: The president addresses the Historically Black Colleges and Universities conference in Washington and meets with congressional Republicans at the White House.

Congress: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and HUD Secretary Ben Carson testify in the Senate on efforts to overhaul mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Hurricane Spat: The National Weather Service chief lauded forecasters who contradicted Mr. Trump's claim that Dorian posed a threat to Alabama as a debate intensified over the politicization of public-safety information.

Mr. Trump goes all-in on a special election both parties are watching as a bellwether for 2020. Today’s do-over congressional vote in North Carolina is seen as a test of how voters, particularly suburbanites, view Mr. Trump. Democrat Dan McCready is facing Republican Dan Bishop, Valerie Bauerlein reports.

The president earlier dismissed a Republican primary challenge from former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, describing him and two other long-shot opponents as “The Three Stooges" and suggesting he wouldn't agree to debate them, reports Catherine Lucey.

• Mr. Upton thinks former Vice President Joe Biden could beat Mr. Trump in the state in 2020, should he win the Democratic nomination.

The Trump administration’s campaign of economic sanctions is weighing heavily on Iran, writes Jerry Seib. Less clear is where the pressure is driving Iran, which has declared that it won’t negotiate to redo the nuclear deal until it first gets relief from sanctions.

North Korea vowed to reconvene nuclear talks with Washington later this month—and then test-fired two projectiles. Pyongyang said it was ready for talks about relinquishing the regime’s nuclear arsenal, shortly before its latest short-range weapons test, which has been an irritant for the U.S., Timothy W. Martin and Andrew Jeong report.

Mr. Trump declared that talks were dead between the U.S. and the Taliban. The president also warned the U.S. could do “certain things” that would cost millions of lives in a move to end the war in Afghanistan, a step he said he doesn’t want to take, Vivian Salama and Michael C. Bender report.

With talks between the U.S. and the Taliban on the rocks after Mr. Trump's cancellation of a previously secret plan to hold a summit meeting at Camp David, here are three likely things to happen next.

A California federal judge restored a nationwide injunction that blocks the Trump administration's restrictions on asylum claims, reports Brent Kendall. The restrictions, issued in July, would cut off access to the U.S. asylum system for those arriving on foot from Central America.

• The order almost certainly won’t be the last word in the litigation.

Three House panels are investigating whether Mr. Trump sought to pressure Ukraine in a bid to help the president's re-election. Lawmakers want more details over why the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani tried to get Kiev to pursue two investigations: one linked to 2016 election, the other to Joe Biden, Rebecca Ballhaus reports. 

An aggressive new phase of House Democrats’ oversight of President Trump commences this week, report Siobhan Hughes and Natalie Andrews. The House Judiciary Committee is likely to authorize chairman Jerry Nadler to designate certain hearings as part of a probe into determining whether to begin impeachment proceedings.

Congress is set to avoid a government shutdown—for now.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on Monday that the Senate would move to pass a temporary funding measure by the end of the month. House Democrats last week indicated that they would move to pass a stopgap spending bill, though Senate Republicans had not publicly endorsed the proposal until Monday.

“A major focus of the Senate this month will be moving forward as many of the regular appropriation bills as possible and then passing a temporary continuing resolution for the outstanding parts of the government before the end of September,” Mr. McConnell said.

Funding for the federal government will run out on Oct. 1, and lawmakers were quickly approaching that deadline without even beginning many of the most contentious spending negotiations.

Delayed by talks this summer to set overall spending levels and raise the debt ceiling, the Senate has yet to consider any spending legislation, while the House has passed the vast majority of its spending bills. The Senate Appropriations Committee will begin marking up its own spending legislation today.

Top Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), and House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D., N.Y.), met on Monday to discuss spending. Several lawmakers said that the stopgap measure will likely last into mid-or-late November. 

“There’s a lot of discussions, but we expect there will be a CR, that’s inevitable,” Ms. Lowey said, referring to a continuing resolution.

Write to Andrew Duehren at andrew.duehren@wsj.com

The U.S. has filed criminal charges against a Chinese professor in Texas who had been accused of stealing a U.S. startup’s technology for Huawei. The complaint against Bo Mao doesn’t mention Huawei by name, but the case it lays out closely parallels a civil suit filed by CNEX Labs against Huawei, report Kate O'Keeffe and Aruna Viswanatha.

A bipartisan group of 50 U.S. attorneys general launched an antitrust probe of Google, saying its dominance raises troubling concerns, reports Brent Kendall. The investigation, which was expected, is just the latest challenge for Big Tech.

• The Government vs. Big Tech: Arguments Each Side Could Make

• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross threatened to fire officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after the agency's weather service office in Alabama contradicted President Trump's claims that Hurricane Dorian was on track to strike the state. (New York Times)
• While many Democratic presidential candidates pledge to reduce the prison population, few talk about the main cause of incarceration: violent crime. (Huffpost)
• National security adviser John Bolton, always an odd fit with President Trump, seems to be following the same arc as other aides who departed after a time. (American Conservative)

This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics on Twitter.