The planned fight over border wall funding after Election Day could lead to a month-long partial government shutdown, according to top congressional aides.

The Senate has OK’d $1.6 billion, the House $5 billion, and a compromise might be $3 billion. But pro-wall conservatives are urging the president to hold out for $5 billion, and cheering a shutdown that could last from December 7 to early January. ...

Key Senate leaders in the nation’s recovery from the 9/11 attacks last week compared relations in the chamber after the Brett Kavanaugh fight to the anthrax attacks in 2001. One of the anthrax targets, then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, said he’d take those terrible September-October 2001 days to the Kavanaugh uproar. “There was an incredible demonstration of bipartisanship,” he said. And, he added, when his and other offices were closed, “you had Democrats offering Republicans office space.”...

That was the ageless former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, 86 and in a suit and tie, lunching at the National Press Club’s members-only Reliable Source bar and grill last week. Lugar, still a voice of reason in Washington, chose the buffet. …

Former Trump national security advisor Sebastian Gorka is worried about the dumbing down of America. “No one reads anymore. Not books, anyway,” he writes without irony in his new book, “Why We Fight.” He said that reading a book “is, for millions, an unknown experience.” And he scolds, “Real knowledge doesn’t come in a tweet, a video of cute animals, or even a topical podcast.” …

Erik Prince stopped by the newsroom to talk up his plan to “Afghanize” the war in Afghanistan. Now making money developing mines, he flicked off those who suggest his days running Blackwater in Iraq hurts his argument to take over the mission. He countered, “I think if other people were advocating it they probably wouldn’t be as credible.” ...