Welcome to From the Politics Desk, a daily newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
In today’s edition, Natasha Korecki files a dispatch from the recent Democratic National Committee meeting in Austin. Plus, we preview the key primaries to keep an eye on before polls close tonight.
Sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox every weekday here.
AUSTIN — The big news coming out of the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting over the weekend was that the party set its 2028 presidential primary calendar.
But some Democrats say they see significance in a pair of resolutions the DNC advanced that didn’t get as much attention.
The committee greenlit a measure supporting the abolishment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It also passed a resolution supporting the Leahy Laws, which call for the U.S. not to fund nations that commit human rights violations.
It’s important to note the DNC doesn’t set party policy and its resolutions do not dictate the formal party platform. But these measures can serve as an indication of where the party is leaning.
For the ICE-related resolution, the DNC endorsed what not long ago was considered a fringe position. As recently as this spring, DNC members were unable to advance any measure calling for ICE to be abolished, instead settling on pushing for reforms.
DNC member Michele Johnson of Louisiana, who sponsored both the ICE and Leahy Laws resolutions, said she had changed her view on ICE as she watched incidents in Minneapolis and other cities play out between residents and immigration officers.
“Over the course of last year I began moving away from reform to abolition,” Johnson said in an interview. “This is a rogue agency, they are killing people, they are killing U.S. citizens, they have to be held accountable.”
The Leahy Law resolution didn’t have the word “Israel” in it — another issue that has divided the party — and Johnson said the intent was to address the issue in a broader sense.
“I left it without mentioning any country specifically because we shouldn’t be funding any countries that are committing human rights violations,” Johnson said. “There’s many countries that this applies to.”
“We need to make sure that when we are spending money, we are spending it on things that are morally right and morally just,” she continued.
But Sam Rosenthal, the political director at the grassroots advocacy group Roots Action, said he saw the Leahy Laws resolution passage as a step toward re-evaluating the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
“It is an attempt to go back to basics. Can the DNC commit to holding up U.S. law? Given that, what does that mean?” Rosenthal said. He added that he hopes this is the first in a “series of steps to rebuild consensus around the DNC’s stance on what the Israel-U.S. relationship should look like.”