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By Lauren French (@laurennfrench or
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lfrench@politico.com )

With help from Burgess Everett and Manu Raju.

OBAMA MAKES A BET ON DIVERSITY. Alex Burns and James Hohmann report, "With Barack Obama's sweeping move to reorder the nation's immigration system through the stroke of the presidential pen, Democrats say the White House is making a dramatic and likely irreversible bet that the ultra-diverse Obama coalition will sustain the party through 2016 and beyond. For months, the premier political question haunting Democrats - aside from Hillary Clinton's yes-or-no decision on 2016 - has been whether Obama's unprecedented support from young people, women and nonwhite voters will roll over into a new campaign, with a new candidate at the top of the ticket. The president's decision to use his executive
powers to protect some 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation is bound to draw a backlash from middle-of-the-road white voters. Republicans assailed Obama's handling of immigration in the midterm elections, catering to a conservative and notably less diverse electorate with ads in states such as Arkansas and New Hampshire. Early polling shows significant suspicion of Obama's unilateral action: An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 48 percent of Americans preemptively opposed to the executive actions, versus 38 percent ready to endorse them."
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THE REPUBLICAN RESPONSE. President Obama's speech hadn't even begun before Republicans were denouncing the executive action on immigration as widely overstepping the constitutional bounds of the executive branch. Yesterday, Sen. Mitch McConnell pledged that the Republican response would be swift. Watch Speaker John Boehner today to give a better idea of where his conference is at. Ideas have been floated to starve out the executive action by cutting its funding sources and expand the lawsuit against Obama to include immigration.

HOW OBAMA GOT HERE. Carrie Budoff Brown, Seung Min Kim and Anna Palmer write, "Nine months ago, the new Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, received a request from the White House. President Obama wanted him to personally take on perhaps the administration's toughest political assignment: looking for creative ways to fix America's immigration system without congressional action-or executive overreach.... That request to Johnson would prove critical: a moment when the president set on the path of a much more ambitious change than the narrow changes in civil enforcement policy he and his aides had initially explored. In the remaining months of 2014, Obama would come to support a
sweeping executive action to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, as Congress lurched from willingness to consider changes to strained immigration laws to refusing to tackle the issue at all. Meanwhile, interest groups from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to the Business Roundtable, from K Street's shrewdest lobbyists to the most hard-nosed union bosses, intervened to try to shape the direction of the order."
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DEMS LAMBAST MCDONOUGH OVER CIA REPORT. Senate Democrats gave an earful to President Barack Obama's top aide at a closed-door Thursday meeting, demanding the White House clear key portions of a report sharply critical of CIA interrogation programs before year's end. In the meeting, the Senate's chairwoman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein of California, along with Sens. Mark Udall of Colorado, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Ron Wyden of Oregon, pushed White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on an issue that has roiled relations between the Senate and White House for much of the year. The four senators pushed McDonough to back off the
administration's insistence on redacting a key portion of a long-awaited classified report on interrogation programs that the Democrats want to publicly release before Republicans take control of the chamber in 2015.

A good portion of the roughly two-hour meeting focused on this dispute, sources said, but the exchange was characterized as civil yet spirited. The caucus applauded both Feinstein and McDonough at the end of their remarks. But not everyone left happy. 'The problem is everything is being orchestrated by the White House,' Rockefeller later fumed.

HAPPY FRIDAY, November 21, 2014. Welcome to the Huddle, your play-by-play guide to everything Capitol Hill. I'm off to Florida to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family. Here's wishing you and yours a safe, healthy and wonderful holiday. Thanks for waking up early with me all week. The lovely Seung Min Kim will take over next week. As always, you can reach me at @laurennfrench on Twitter or
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lfrench@politico.com and her at
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skim@politico.com .

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TODAY IN CONGRESS - Both the House and the Senate are out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Speaker John Boehner will hold a press conference at 9:15 a.m. to discuss the executive action unveiled by President Barack Obama last night. The Capitol Christmas Tree will arrive at 10 a.m. and there are photo opportunities available at the West Front.

AROUND THE HILL - Sen. Jeff Sessions will speak at the Heritage Foundation at 11:30 a.m.to discuss Obama's immigration executive action.

NOW IN THE MAJORITY, REPUBLICANS ARE UNSURE ABOUT TO WHAT TO DO WITH THAT OH-SO-HATED RULE CHANGE? From the Washington Post's Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz, "The incoming Senate Republican majority is already showing some division in its ranks over how to deal with the Democrats' filibuster rules change. The word from the office of soon-to-be Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) is that 'his members are discussing' whether to reverse the nuclear option they spent the better part of a year denouncing or leave it in place to stick it to the Democrats. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) argued for the former on a radio show Monday night. Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), in a cantankerous speech, said
Republicans should give the new minority 'a taste of their own medicine.'"
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UTAH REPUBLICAN PROMISES LESS COMBATIVE OVERSIGHT. From your Huddle author and John Bresnahan, "Jason Chaffetz is now the House GOP's chief inquisitor. And compared with his predecessor - the colorful and controversial Darrell Issa - he is promising not to let things get too personal as the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Not with the House GOP leadership, other GOP committee chairmen or even his Democratic colleagues - he and Ranking Member Elijah Cummings of Maryland, are friendly. Chaffetz said in an interview on Wednesday that he would focus on how to fix the Secret Service, embassy security and mundane tasks like U.S. Postal Service reform. Issa,
instead, tried to dig up dirt on Benghazi, the administration's treatment of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service and Attorney General Eric Holder. A series of blunders, misstatements and overreaches damaged his credibility, and he is exiting the post because of term limits for Republican chairmen."
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FROM OUR NOTEBOOKS. There is always a bit left out of stories that reporters find interesting. In talking with Chaffetz, your Huddle author was intrigued by his plan for D.C. The Republican said he wanted to follow Issa's lead and not overly play in local politics but he's not for statehood and his ideal plan would be to retrocede the residential parts of the District to Maryland and keep D.C. proper just government buildings. "I'm not in favor of D.C.Statehood, I'm not going to go there.I have a solution for that, it's retroceding the residential areas back to Maryland but I don't think we're going to go there. I don't want to get into that fight but that's been my position. We have a lot
of issues but fixing Washington D.C. is not one of them," he said.

But pot smokers can rejoice. Chaffetz said the recently passed bill legalizing some marijuana will not be taken up by his committee because the time limit on Congress to act against D.C. laws will pass before he has the gavel.

GET BACK TO WORK. Mitch McConnell is promising Friday workdays for senators once he is sworn in as majority leaders. To the absolute joy (horror?) of congressional reporters, the Kentucky Republican outlined a work schedule that is a bit more robust than ones adhered to by the Senate in recent years.
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CLOSED BOOK(ER): While many of us Senate lurkers had hoped that Cory Booker would be a bit more chatty in the marbled hallways of the Capitol now that he's run reelection, he told us that's not the case. The high-profile New Jersey senator is sticking to his stance of avoiding the big gaggles and hallway chats with reporters for now - and he gave no timeline for any change of heart. Booker is not alone in this stance - Elizabeth Warren famously avoids the Capitol Hill press - and Booker said the main reason is he wants to focus on legislating, rather than the distractions of the media. What could possibly be distracting about dozens of random people jabbing a microphone in your face as you
prepare to vote on the Senate floor?

CONGRESSIONAL BESTIES WANT A #GIVINGTUESDAY. Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and Republican Rep. Aaron Schock have introduced legislation to make the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Giving Tuesday, a national day of recognition for volunteerism. The idea behind the service day is to encourage Americans to help others at the start of the holiday season.

THURSDAY'S TRIVIA WINNER - Andy French - of no relation - was the first person to name Sarah Josepha Hale as the letter-writer who encouraged Abraham Lincoln to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Let's get her a place in Statuary Hall.

TODAY'S TRIVIA -Andy has today's question. Most of us learned that the first Thanksgivingwas in New England with the Wampanoag Indians. However, some historians claim an earlier encounter. What state and native tribe lay claim to the first thanksgiving and what types of foods were gobbled up? Hint: definitely not a turkey.The first person to correctly email the answer to
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