For one, the GOP’s procedural options for advancing a tax package — a big deal that has probably received too little attention — narrowed meaningfully on Friday. According to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking minority-party member on the Senate Budget Committee, that chamber’s parliamentarian indicated that the reconciliation instructions Republicans adopted in January will expire at the end of the month. Republicans originally aimed to use that budget tool for their Obamacare replacement effort. Now that the GOP’s health-care agenda has collapsed, however, some had been eyeing repurposing those instructions for a tax bill.

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The party is still hoping to convince some politically vulnerable Senate Democrats to get behind its tax plan (a pressure campaign that President Trump kicked off last week with a visit to Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s state and that he will follow up this week with a trip to Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s North Dakota). But since leaders know they can’t expect to pick off the minimum of eight Democrats they would need to overcome a filibuster, their plan still remains to end-run the minority by using the reconciliation process.

The most straightforward way to do that continues to be passing a new budget for fiscal year 2018 and, along with it, new reconciliation instructions for a tax package. But House Republicans have struggled to unify their fractious conference around a spending blueprint.

One fallback plan — to pitch a budget that holds constant current spending levels, as Republicans did in January as a vehicle to fast-track a tax bill — could meet fatal resistance from conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus.

So recycling the now-expiring instructions appealed as a means to avoid another painful budget vote. Bill Hoagland, a veteran budget adviser to Senate Republicans who is now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said in an email that “from a practical perspective,” the Senate parliamentarian’s guidance “makes [such a tactic] difficult to accomplish.”

The Republican tax project faces other, less-obvious challenges. The Trump team has abandoned its campaign position that a tax code overhaul shouldn’t add to the debt or deficit. “The way we’re going to pay for things is with economic growth,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Fox News Sunday, acknowledging that “there may be short-term impacts on the deficit.”

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But with no plans to offset the money needed for Harvey repairs, and estimates for the federal tab as high as $200 billion, GOP leaders should have a tougher time making the case for deficit-financed tax cuts. As budget expert Stan Collender writes for Forbes, “A deficit already at or close to $1 trillion will make it much more difficult for Trump and congressional Republicans to agree on tax cuts that will increase the deficit even further. It will also hand Democrats a big issue for the 2018 election.”

Not to mention that some of the Harvey relief could come in the form of targeted tax provisions. Less than a month after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast in 2005, Congress passed such a package, at a cost of $16 billion. Repeating the effort for Harvey victims would presumably take time and consideration that tax writers otherwise would dedicate to a revamp of the code. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), who represents areas north of Houston that experienced flooding, said last week that the disaster won’t knock his committee off course.

The complications throw extra sand in the gears of a system straining to process an overstuffed agenda on an accelerated schedule. The “Big Six” tax negotiators are set to meet with the president today to review their progress and their options.

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MARKET MOVERS

— Buckle up. September looks likely to get off to a fast and bumpy start in Washington, with a crush of deadlines on intersecting, do-or-die legislative business and no indication that the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have a clear road map for navigating what's ahead.

The Post's Damian Paletta, Mike DeBonis, and Ed O'Keefe have the rundown: "On Sunday, a proposal from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to attach recovery aid to legislation raising the nation’s borrowing limit quickly drew objections from conservative lawmakers seeking spending cuts. And Trump and the White House have only recently engaged with congressional leaders, who must navigate the demands of conservatives but also those of Democrats, who have the votes to derail most bills in the Senate. Republicans are scheduled to discuss tax cuts at the White House on Tuesday, Trump’s first direct engagement with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell since early August, when the president criticized the Kentucky Republican on Twitter and in an expletive-laden phone call. On Wednesday, Trump will meet with leaders of both parties — his first face-to-face meeting with top Democrats since January."

— I'll raise you: Republican leaders are mulling an approach that rolls together a debt-ceiling hike and an extension of government funding through the end of the year with Harvey emergency aid. But they may need Trump, who so far has remained mum on the approach, to endorse it to provide cover to rank-and-file members.

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Politico's Burgess Everett and Rachel Bade: "Without Trump’s endorsement, the GOP could plunge into a month of intra-party battles that could rattle financial markets and threaten the economy. And absent relative GOP unity on a crucial fiscal deal, Republican leaders could be forced to beg for Democratic votes to avert catastrophe, a move that would invite criticism from the right ... Between the aid to recover the Gulf Coast and kicking the debt ceiling past the 2018 mid-term elections, GOP leaders think that Trump will back down on the [border] wall and that the dire situation in Texas could give them cover with conservatives who would otherwise rebel."

Here's the president, welcoming everybody back to work with what's likely to be a rare bit of understatement:

— Attorney General Jeff Sessions kicks off the week with an 11 a.m. news conference today announcing the administration's plans for DACA, the program that has shielded from deportation some 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Trump looks inclined to end the program but delay enforcement for six months — and word of the decision has already galvanized activists on either side of the debate.

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The Post's David Nakamura: "Moderate congressional Republicans, and even some conservatives, suggested that they are open to crafting a legislative deal that could offer permanent legal status to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been in the country illegally since they were children ... Yet the odds that a sharply polarized Congress could strike a deal — steep in the best of times — are considered especially difficult at a time when lawmakers face a busy fall agenda."

-- Business leaders from tech to agriculture are stepping into the breach to lobby for DACA. New American Economy, a business coalition founded by Michael Bloomberg, says it plans to have at least 100 business leaders lined up in 15 states to push back.

The Post's Tracy Jan: "The renewed pressure on Congress comes on top of a petition that more than 400 business executives — from Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and other companies — have signed urging Trump and Congress to protect the 'Dreamers,' 97 percent of whom are in school or in the workforce. Over the weekend, executives from a diverse array of companies, including AT&T, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, Ikea and Kaiser Permanente, added their names to the letter."

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Here's Apple CEO Tim Cook:

Washington-based chef José Andrés, who pulled his planned restaurant out of the Trump hotel in Washington, had harsh words for the president:

— The return of Congress also means the return of inquiries into the Trump team's alleged Russia ties. The subject is the most reliable Trump irritant, so the inevitable leaks from new revelations and closed-door interviews with key Trump figures is poised to distract the president at a moment that arguably requires his greatest focus.

Politico's Austin Wright and Ali Watkins set the scene: "The congressional Russia investigations are entering a new and more serious phase as lawmakers return from the August recess amid fresh revelations about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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In the coming weeks, both intelligence committees are expected to conduct closed-door interviews with high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, and potential witnesses could include Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. The two panels are also looking at possibly holding public hearings this fall. In addition, Trump Jr. is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting its own parallel investigation into President Donald Trump and his associates’ alleged ties to Moscow."

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POCKET CHANGE

— Car talk: Harvey destroyed more cars than any other single event in U.S. history, according to early estimates — with the number of ruined vehicles totaling in the hundreds of thousands.

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The Post's Avi Selk, Todd Frankel and Peter Holley: "The loss is having an immediate impact, preventing many people from being able to return to work, sending craftsmen scrambling for new vehicles as they hope to rebuild the region, and leaving auto dealers who face millions of dollars in losses racing to restock amid unprecedented demand... Harvey’s financial toll has drawn comparisons to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, but because Houston is larger than New Orleans and the city’s storm was more brutal than Sandy, the region’s cars appear to have taken a bigger hit. Sandy destroyed about 250,000 vehicles and Katrina claimed about 200,000, according to estimates. Harvey ruined 300,000 to 500,000 cars and perhaps far more, early analysis indicates, leaving as much as $2.7 billion to $4.9 billion worth of automotive damage in its wake, according to Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive"

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MONEY ON THE HILL

— The House will vote Wednesday on a $7.85 billion Harvey aid package. The measure, introduced Sunday night, does not include language raising the debt ceiling, as Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said it should in a Sunday appearance on Fox News Sunday. But the Senate could add that provision, though conservatives in the House strongly oppose the strategy, the Post's Laurie McGinley and Mike DeBonis report.

— My colleague Paul Kane has an important refresher on how the debt-ceiling vote went from a being mild political headache to an armed weapon threatening a financial apocalypse.

He says it's time to retire the procedure: "There’s a small but growing collection of lawmakers who want to eliminate the debt vote as a political weapon. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) brought up the idea in an unrelated interview with The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe, saying the issue has been used by Republicans and allied groups to confuse voters. 'People think that raising the debt ceiling is allowing the government to borrow more money next year. It’s not,' King said. 'In reality, it simply allows the government to pay the bills it’s already incurred to fund the spending that’s already been voted on.'"

— There's a new fissure in Democratic politics pitting critics of corporate concentration against the tech giants that have emerged as key party sponsors. Tensions over an intensifying internal debate spilled out publicly last week when the liberal New America Foundation fired an outspoken Google critic out of fear the company would choke off funds.

My colleague Dave Weigel reports that the anti-monopolists in the party are winning: "At issue is a decades-long relationship between Democrats and tech companies, with Democratic presidents signing off on deregulation and candidates embracing money and innovations from firms like Google and Facebook. Now, locked out of power and convinced that same coziness with large corporations cost them the presidency, Democrats are talking themselves into breaking with tech giants and becoming an antimonopoly party...

Antitrust issues garnered almost no attention during the 2016 presidential campaign. In April, Hart Research Associates conducted polling, circulated among Democrats and think tanks, that found an enormous opening for antimonopoly politics. The polling, which surveyed 1,120 voters overall and 341 from the decisive Rust Belt states, found just a slim majority saying Democrats favored 'average Americans' over 'large corporations and banks.' Those corporations and banks were toxic... Congressional Democrats who saw that polling factored it into the “Better Deal,” their economic agenda and attempt to rebrand the party."

— In Harvey's wake, environmentalists and small-government advocates have found some agreement on the notion that federal flood insurance policy has made floods more destructive.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), long a critic of the feds' approach, has been pushing to scale back the National Flood Insurance Program this year. A buzzsaw of resistance from industry groups has shredded the effort, Politico's Zachary Warmbrodt and Theodoric Meyer report.

"Lawmakers who want to reel in the program are finding that they must appease the influential industry groups whose support they need to move forward... Ron Jones, a Colorado builder who has been on the National Association of Home Builders’ board for more than two decades, said the association did what most of its members wanted when it pulled out the stops to fight Hensarling’s proposal. But he doesn’t think it was good for the country. 'How many times do you need to rebuild in certain areas before you say it might be better to locate somewhere else?' Jones said. Most home builders 'will be happy to build those houses as many times as somebody will pay for them,' he added. [Craig] Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, was more blunt. 'They won’t make money if they can’t sell crap to people' in flood zones, he said."

THE REGULATORS

— Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is finally dipping his toe in the water of the Ohio gubernatorial contest most observers expect him to join.

Cordray delivered a campaign-style speech at a union-organized Labor Day event in Cincinnati, though he stopped short of declaring his candidacy. "“We need to join together to help each other rekindle the hope, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to find and make our own opportunities,” he said in his speech, according to Reuters' Lisa Lambert. More from that story: "Though many had speculated he would use the occasion to announce his candidacy, activists and political leaders said any formal announcement about Cordray’s plans to enter the 2018 contest would wait until the CFPB finalizes a long-awaited rule restricting the activity of payday lenders."

TRUMP TRACKER

— Democrats competing in states that Trump carried are trying to seize the initiative back from him on criticizing trade deals, arguing to voters that the president has abandoned his campaign promises on the issue.

The Post's Bob Costa reports from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) is putting the strategy to the test: While progressive activists are highly motivated against Trump and some suburban voters are increasingly uneasy about Trump’s disposition, many working-class voters remain resentful of globalization and have lingering appreciation for Trump’s populist appeals... As [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer stares down a difficult 2018 election map for Democrats and tries to upend Republicans’ 52-seat control of the Senate, he has urged his colleagues to bring trade to the fore."

— Larry Summers weighs in on Gary Cohn, via his blog: "Given recent controversies, I was interested to read NEC chair Gary Cohn’s answer to a 'why are you staying?' question put by Stuart Varney of Fox News last week. To his credit Cohn did not back away from his reservations about the President’s response to Charlottesville. He said 'Look, tax cuts are really important to me. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We haven’t done tax cuts in 31 years. So, to be a part of an Administration that gets something done that hasn’t been done for 31 years is enormously challenging, enormously interesting to me.' The problem with this statement is how utterly wrong it is. Taxes were not cut 31 years ago. A central point of the 1986 Tax Reform Act was that it was revenue neutral. And since that time, taxes were cut in 1997, 2001, 2003, 2009 and 2015."

— Apology of the day: Louise Linton, Mnuchin's wife, opens up to Washington Life magazine about the firestorm she set off last month by posting a rude rant on Instagram in response to a random commenter. The Scottish actress wavered on whether to stick to the pre-arranged interview -- in which she posed on ball gown's as a tribute to this season's social calendar the same week as the controversy -- but ultimately kept the commitment in order to give what amounts to a full-throated mea culpa.

Dressed in exercise pants and a SoulCycle sweatshirt for the interview, Linton said she was trying to portray someone she isn't in the original Instagram post by bragging about the brands of clothing she wears. Here's what she has to say about the criticism: "I want to say I concede completely to the comments of my critics. My post itself and the following response were indefensible. Period. I don't have any excuses, nor do I feel any self-pity for the backlash I experienced."

THE FUNNIES

DAYBOOK

Today

Congress returns to Washington from recess.

Coming Up

House lawmakers are scheduled to consider the Harvey relief bill on Wednesday .

Wednesday . The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance holds a hearing on combatting the financing of lone-wolf and small-scale terrorist attacks on

Thursday. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will hold a hearing on “Evaluating Sanctions Enforcement and Policy Options on North Korea” on

BULL SESSION

President Trump meets first responders in Louisiana in the wake of Harvey:

Top Houston chefs band together to feed thousands of hurricane victims:

President Trump expected to phase out DACA, with six month delay: