Good morning. It is Monday, May 25th, 2026, Memorial Day, and this is your Morning Brief.

COHOST: Today has that holiday-weekend split screen. The markets are closed, the pace is lighter, but a lot of the biggest stories are not actually resting. They are just paused between one forcing event and the next.

HOST: We start in Washington, where the clearest continuity story is still the one that says the most about the limits of Republican control. Senate Republicans went home for Memorial Day without passing the roughly seventy billion dollar immigration enforcement package that was supposed to be one of the White House's cleaner political wins.

HOST: Associated Press reports the bill got snarled first by the now-dropped push for one billion dollars in security money tied to the White House complex and the president's ballroom project, and then even more seriously by the Justice Department's new one point seven seven six billion dollar settlement fund for Trump allies who say they were politically prosecuted. The backlash was strong enough that leadership delayed the vote until lawmakers return the week of June first, which had been Trump's own deadline for getting the bill done.

COHOST: That is what makes this more than a scheduling miss. Immigration is supposed to be one of the president's strongest lanes, and even there senators decided they did not want to carry extra baggage that looked politically toxic.

HOST: Exactly. The story this morning is not that Republicans suddenly oppose more enforcement money. It is that they showed operational resistance when the White House tried to pack the bill with side fights that made it harder to defend. Mitch McConnell called the settlement idea morally wrong, and the internal blowback got loud enough that leadership chose recess over a public failure.

HOST: So the Monday read is pretty direct. If Senate leaders come back next week with a stripped-down package focused narrowly on border and enforcement agencies, that is an admission the revolt worked. If they still cannot move it, then the bigger takeaway is that Trump's leverage over his own conference is weaker in practice than it appears in headline politics.

HOST: The second Washington story is another delay, but on an issue with much larger geopolitical stakes. AP reports House Republicans called off a planned vote on a war powers resolution that would force President Trump to withdraw from the war with Iran after it became clear they were struggling to find the votes to kill it.

COHOST: So once again, leadership did not win the argument. Leadership avoided the roll call.

HOST: Right. That is the important distinction. The House had scheduled the vote, then backed away when the numbers looked dangerous. AP says Democrats believed they had the votes, and the Senate has already shown real Republican slippage on the same question. That means the fresh development is not just policy disagreement. It is visible procedural caution from leadership that no longer seems confident it can contain the dissent.

HOST: This keeps mattering beyond Capitol Hill because the Iran story still runs straight through oil prices, shipping risk, inflation expectations and public confidence. AP's Friday market coverage pointed to a new record low in consumer sentiment, with households especially worried about the inflation effects of the war and higher energy costs. So when Congress shows it still has not settled the legal or political endgame, markets and consumers hear that uncertainty too.

HOST: On the AI and technology side, the biggest policy move is now official and it is worth understanding because it marks a shift from rhetoric to state-backed financing. The Export-Import Bank announced on May twenty-first that it is launching ExportAI, a new initiative meant to speed financing for American artificial intelligence exports and help U.S. companies move trusted AI systems into foreign markets faster.

COHOST: In plain English, Washington is trying to do more than protect the home market. It wants to help American firms lock up the global market too.

HOST: That is the point. EXIM says the initiative is supposed to deploy American AI at scale, unlock new markets, and accelerate deals by replacing some administrative bottlenecks with a more streamlined process. The official line is that potentially billions in financing could be unlocked. Whether that happens quickly is still the test, but the significance is already clear. The U.S. government is treating AI less like a normal tech sector and more like strategic infrastructure.

HOST: That matters in Central Ohio because this region keeps absorbing the physical footprint of that strategy through data centers, power demand, land use fights and infrastructure planning. And that brings us to the local AI-adjacent story that may deserve more attention this week than it is getting nationally.

HOST: WOSU, drawing from Signal Ohio and the Associated Press, reports Ohio's data-center sales-tax exemption cost the state about one point five seven billion dollars in 2025, roughly one point four billion more than the original estimate. That came after the same break cost about five hundred fifty-five million dollars in 2024, already far above what state forecasters had projected.

COHOST: Those are no longer rounding-error numbers. That is the scale where lawmakers start asking whether they are subsidizing a growth story or subsidizing some of the richest companies on earth without enough public visibility.

HOST: Exactly. This is why the story matters now. Ohio built this incentive in a very different era, before hyperscale data centers and the AI boom turned these facilities into massive tax, power and land-use questions. Now the state is discovering that the price tag is far larger than expected, while the political arguments around jobs, electric load and local impact are getting harder to wave away. Lawmakers have already created a bipartisan committee to dig into data-center issues. These new numbers increase the odds that scrutiny turns sharper in the next few days, especially in a region like Central Ohio where the buildout is not abstract at all.

HOST: The private-market mirror of that policy story is still Nvidia. AP reports the company once again beat Wall Street expectations, with revenue surging to eighty-one point six two billion dollars in its February through April quarter, and it also approved an eighty billion dollar stock buyback.

COHOST: Which is almost a weird problem for the market now. Nvidia is still delivering enormous growth, but every quarter resets expectations even higher for the whole AI trade.

HOST: That is exactly the tension. Nvidia keeps validating that demand for high-end AI infrastructure is real and still expanding. But investors are no longer asking whether the boom exists. They are asking how long the boom can stay exceptional enough to justify the valuation of nearly everything connected to it. That is why Nvidia is still the most useful signal stock in the market. It does not just report earnings. It tests whether the broader AI narrative can keep carrying indexes and capex plans at the same time.

HOST: Closer to home, one of Columbus' most visible housing-accountability stories is still active because the city is trying to turn a demolition into a policy proof point. WOSU reports officials are using the teardown of Sawyer Towers on the Near East Side to argue that reforms passed after the buildings failed residents are supposed to prevent a repeat.

COHOST: The message from City Hall is basically this: do not treat Sawyer as a scandal that ended. Treat it as a stress test for whether the city can enforce what it says it learned.

HOST: Right. Demolition is expected to take roughly six months, and officials are tying the moment to relocation help, the city's housing stability work and the coming rental registry. They are also saying out loud that enforcement capacity is now the real question. Passing rules is one thing. Having enough people and money to enforce them before another building reaches crisis point is something else.

HOST: That is why the Sawyer story still belongs in the active file. It remains visible, it remains local, and it still has a near-term watch item. Do leaders attach measurable timelines, hiring, funding or inspection capacity to this accountability language while the demolition keeps public attention on the site?

HOST: The ownership side of housing is still another pressure point for Columbus and Central Ohio. Freddie Mac's latest weekly survey shows the average thirty-year fixed mortgage rate jumped to six point five one percent on May twenty-first, up from six point three six percent the week before. The fifteen-year fixed rose to five point eight five percent.

COHOST: That is the kind of move that does not sound huge on paper but changes the monthly-payment math fast enough to chill buyers all over again.

HOST: Exactly. And the local market is still sending a mixed signal. WOSU's latest Central Ohio housing report says April closed sales fell thirteen point six percent from a year earlier to two thousand two hundred two, while inventory rose and the median sales price climbed to three hundred forty-six thousand five hundred dollars, up eight point three percent.

HOST: So buyers do have more options than they had during the frenzy years. Homes are not getting twenty or twenty-five offers the way they once did. But more choice is not the same thing as real affordability relief. The market is normalizing in behavior while still feeling abnormal in cost. And Fannie Mae's May housing forecast reinforces the ...