President Donald Trump has reversed his plan to invite world leaders to attend an official government summit at his Florida golf course, but still says it would have been a fine thing to do -- though many say it would have violated the Constitution. As with so many of Trump's actions in office, it falls into uncharted territory -- no one really knows.

The Constitution has a rule against Presidents taking gifts. It's called the emoluments clause, and it's supposed to guarantee that America's top executive and commander in chief isn't swayed by gifts from foreign or domestic government officials.

Those were official gifts given to officials. Less clear is whether the Trump's decision to hold a massive G7 summit at Trump National in Doral, Florida, in June, is accepting gifts. Certainly the Trump Organization will benefit from the President's decision. And clearly there are ethical concerns about him using his office to help his own properties. Read more about those issues here.

House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.

But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.

"Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."

President Donald Trump spoke at length during a Cabinet meeting on Monday about his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria -- arguing that the US never agreed to protect Syrian Kurds forever, suggesting the US may secure an oil deal for the Kurds to bolster their finances and saying he's "the one that did the capturing" of ISIS fighters in Syria.

The President repeatedly said during the Cabinet meeting that a main reason behind his decision to have the US exit northern Syria was that it was something he campaigned on. He argued that though his stance was not popular in Washington, crowds at his rallies cheered loudly when he said he'd bring American troops home.

Trump appeared to be referring to a small number of US forces located near Syria's oil fields as well as the US base at At Tanf in southern Syria which is located near the border with Jordan and is seen by many analysts see as a curb on Iran's influence in the region. The Trump administration had previously said that the At Tanf forces would remain despite the pullout from Syria. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed Monday that the forces near the oil fields would also remain for the time being and that they were not part of the current withdrawal phase.

"I have a lot of really good proposals out there -- and I show how I'm going to pay for them," the Minnesota Democrat told a crowded room of voters here over the weekend, taking another not-so-subtle dig at one of her leading 2020 rivals. "I think we need to be really honest with people right now."It's lost on no one, of course, she's talking about Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Klobuchar, who has so far qualified for all of the primary debates but continues to see single-digit polling numbers, is in danger of missing the November debate stage.

With less than a month to qualify, a fresh sense of urgency surrounded her candidacy as her green campaign bus rumbled across Iowa on a visit this past weekend. Her itinerary was shaped by a swath of counties President Donald Trump turned red in 2016 that President Barack Obama twice carried.

In the wake of a recent "Keep America Great" rally in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump tweeted this: "We are going to fight with all of our heart and soul and we are going to win the great state of Minnesota in 2020." But probably not actually, at least according to a new poll conducted for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and released Monday. In it, Trump trails both former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren by double-digits in the state while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a 49% to 40% edge over the incumbent.

Those wide margins are a far cry from Trump's near-miss in Minnesota in 2016 when he lost by 44,000 votes out of more than 2.6 million cast -- one of the closest margins in the country.

To be clear: Trump doesn't need to win Minnesota to get reelected. He didn't win the state in 2016 and won the Electoral College relatively easily.

House Democrats stopped a Republican-led effort to force a floor vote Monday on a resolution to censure Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, one of the Democrats leading the impeachment investigation, "for certain misleading conduct" in his characterization of a phone call between President Donald Trump and the Ukrainian President.

The House voted 218-185 along party lines to table the proposal, effectively killing the resolution in the Democratic-led chamber.

It will be said of House Republicans, When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, They consoled themselves by attacking those who did," Schiff tweeted.

Rep. Justin Amash said his Republican colleagues are caught in an untenable position trying to defend President Donald Trump as the controversy surrounding his dealings with Ukraine continues to grow.

"I think they know better and I think, deep down, they wish they weren't, you know, trapped in this position," Amash said on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront."

He linked that dynamic to many of the recent retirements in Congress, describing them as "people who are just trying to ride out this President, and they might think of coming back into public office later on, once this President is gone."

Stephen Schwarzman, an informal adviser and donor to President Donald Trump, is hosting a fundraiser with Sen. Mitt Romney in support of several Republicans colleagues seeking reelection, according to two people with knowledge of the event.

Helping Romney bolster his standing in the party as he attempts to cement his position as a self-described "renegade Republican" during an impeachment inquiry is notable because of Schwarzman's support for Trump. Since the 2016 election, Schwarzman has donated a total of about $850,000 to Trump's inauguration and political action committees, based on records compiled by CNN and the Center for Responsive Politics.

Romney also took a shot at Trump's character in an interview with The Atlantic where he criticized Trump for "berating another person, or calling them names, or demeaning a class of people, not telling the truth."

Although the accounts posed as Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, many were united in their opposition to the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Graphika, a social media investigations company that Facebook asked to analyze the accounts. The Russian trolls who used social media to interfere in the 2016 election employed a similar tactic, going after Hillary Clinton from the right and also trying to spread a perception on the left that Clinton was not liberal enough and that liberals and African Americans especially shouldn't bother voting for her.

Facebook said the accounts combined had more than 250,000 followers, more than half of which were based in the U.S. Facebook did not disclose how many of those followers were real and how many might have been fake or bot accounts designed to make the main accounts look more legitimate. Facebook says it has removed the accounts.

"It looked like there was a systematic focus on attacking Biden from both sides," Graphika director of investigations Ben Nimmo, who analyzed the accounts, told CNN Business. In a statement responding to the news, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said, "We applaud Facebook for disclosing the existence of these fake accounts and shutting them down. ... [But] Donald Trump continues to benefit from spreading false information, all the while Facebook profits from amplifying his lies and debunked conspiracy theories on their platform. If Facebook is truly committed to protecting the integrity of our elections, they would immediately take down Trump's ads that attempt to gaslight the American people."

The political world's focus on the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump by the House has obscured a critical shift in the battle for control of the Senate: Democrats now have a genuine chance at retaking the majority come November 2020.

The 2020 map was always a bit of a challenge for Republicans. The party has to defend 23 seats next November as compared to just 12 for Democrats, the result of a 2014 election that delivered GOP wins across the Senate map. It's never an easy road when you are defending almost twice as many seats as your opponents.

Those raw numbers, however, looked to be a bit deceiving. After all, there are only two states -- Maine and Colorado -- among those 23 that a) Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and b) Republican incumbents are running for reelection. And, while Democrats have relatively little to worry about among their 12 seats, they do have to try to reelect Sen. Doug Jones (D) in Alabama -- a near-impossible task in a presidential election year.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- known as the DC Circuit and dubbed the country's "second highest court" -- handles a distinctive caseload testing the power of federal regulators and the executive branch.

Either way, in classic DC Circuit style, both sides have laid down markers on the fundamentals of congressional investigations, likely with an eye to the Supreme Court and to future litigation. The Tatel opinion for the majority was 66 pages; Rao's dissent was 68 pages.

The court's robust interpretation of Congress' oversight power arose in litigation that began before the Democratic-led House initiated its impeachment inquiry and started focusing on Trump's Ukrainian dealings. The subpoena fight involving Trump's longtime accountants, Mazars USA, had been simmering for months.

The commander paces in front of a line of troops, preparing them for the day's mission."We are in our country. We are in Mexico. We are enforcing our laws," he says, his voice getting louder with each point he makes."Nobody is going to come here to trample on our laws," he continues. "Nobody is going come here to trample on our country, on our land."

"I would like to thank President López Obrador of Mexico for the great cooperation we are receiving, and for right now putting 27,000 troops on our southern border," Trump told the United Nations General Assembly last month. "Mexico is showing us great respect, and I respect them in return."A few days later, Trump told reporters he was "using Mexico to protect our border" because Democrats weren't doing enough to fix the immigration system.

Yes, US taxpayers have been footing the bill for efforts to build new physical barriers at the US-Mexico border.But experts note that Mexico's massive deployment of National Guard troops over the past few months has played a major role in blocking migrants from reaching the US border in the first place. It's a point Trump himself has made at several recent events -- a dramatic change in tone from his sharp criticisms of Mexico earlier this year.

The religious and cultural divide between Democratic and Republican voters is widening, pointing toward even greater partisan polarization and social tension as the nation careens into a possible impeachment vote against President Donald Trump and potential record turnout in the 2020 presidential election.

An extensive national study released Monday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute showed that voters in each party now hold antithetical views not only on issues that dominate the immediate political debate -- such as health care and impeachment -- but also on deeper changes in the nation's demography, culture, race relations and gender roles, according to detailed results the institute provided to CNN.

This separation in attitudes is rooted in an even deeper divergence between the two sides: While whites who identify as Christians still represent about two-thirds of all Republicans, they now compose only one-fourth of Democrats, according to results provided by the Pew Research Center from a new study it released last week. Americans unaffiliated with any religion, and racial minorities who identify as Christians, now each make up a bigger share of the Democratic coalition than white Christians do, Pew found. Both groups remain only relatively minor components of the GOP coalition.

The International Rescue Committee and local partners opened this welcome center for asylum seekers July 27. When it was planned last winter and spring, ICE was releasing 200 or more asylum seekers a day in Phoenix, often dropping them outside the Greyhound bus station (as a courtesy and at their request, ICE said). The center was designed to offer up to 277 people at a time a safe, welcoming place to stay for a night or two while planning their travel to sponsors across the country.

Local churches helping asylum seekers say they, too, are receiving far fewer families. During September, ICE's Phoenix office said it released an average of 32 parents and children a day in Arizona -- down from 208 a day from Dec. 21 through the end of June.

Roughly 3,600 asylum seekers, mostly from southern Mexico or Central America, were in Mexicali, in Mexico's Baja California state, as of October 1, waiting for months to apply for asylum or to return to the United States for immigration court hearings, according to Altagracia Tamayo, manager of the Cobina shelter for families and children there. About, 1,500 were waiting in Nogales, in Sonora state, and 1,250 in San Luis Rio Colorado, south of Yuma, Arizona, according to officials managing the wait lists in those cities.

Bill Taylor, currently the top official at the US Embassy in Ukraine, will get his moment before congressional investigators Tuesday. Taylor was one of the officials whose text messages were released by House Democrats earlier this month. His explanation for why he said he felt the US was trading foreign aid to Ukraine for political favors to the President could be a key piece of evidence for House investigators.As investigators build their case for impeachment against President Donald Trump, half of Americans now say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, according to a newly released CNN poll. That's a new high in CNN polling on the topic.

Kurt Volker handed over the text messages that showed concern about a quid pro quo.Marie Yovanovitch said she was targeted by Rudy Giuliani and stood up for foreign service officers.Fiona Hill said that her boss, former national security adviser John Bolton, compared the shadow diplomacy being done on President Donald Trump's behalf to a "drug deal."George Kent, according to The Washington Post, said Trump soured on Ukraine after talking to Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orban. He also backed up Yovanovitch and said he lit flares in 2015 about Hunter Biden.Gordon Sondland said Trump told him to work with Giuliani on Ukraine.

Taylor is expected to be asked about the text messages he sent US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in September, before the whistleblower complaint was released.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren's silence on how she plans to pay for Medicare for All has turned into a problem at an important moment in her campaign. Right as she has become one of the clear frontrunners in the Democratic race — if not the frontrunner — she walked out of the fourth Democratic debate a bit bruised from her unwillingness to answer the question about whether she would raise taxes to pay for the benefits.

The plan will likely involve a package that mixes higher taxes and other revenue streams in exchange for eliminating the deductibles and premiums as well as other out-of-pocket expenses. Warren might make some adjustments to proposed benefits to lower the high estimates that are currently being projected. But to take control of this debate, Warren needs to offer more than a policy brief about finance. She has the chance to turn this challenge into an opportunity to make this part of her signature issue — restoring security to middle class Americans. It's an issue that has gotten drowned out with all the emphasis on health care.

While Barack Obama was in office, Warren made a name for herself by fighting for middle-class families and offering real solutions to the economic struggles that they faced on matters such as debt. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she fought to protect the rights of average Americans in the world in the financial sector.

An agitated President Donald Trump on Tuesday branded the Democratic impeachment process a "lynching" shortly before a crucial new witness is scheduled to give a deposition that could potentially unpeel new layers of the Ukraine scandal that is threatening his presidency.

Trump, who on Monday called on Republicans to be tougher in his defense, warned in a tweet that Democrats were setting a precedent that a president of their own party could be impeached in future without due process.Read More"All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here -- a lynching. But we will WIN!" Trump wrote.

A torrent of disclosures could dash hopes for a swift House vote on articles of impeachment before the Thanksgiving break as members follow fresh paths of inquiry beyond the original scope of questioning. That could in turn also hinder their effort to offer the public a crisp, easily understandable case against a President who habitually defies limits on his power.CNN reported Monday on growing expectations that historic votes on impeachment may now slip towards the end of the year -- even as Democrats also move to begin doing weekend work with a scheduled Saturday deposition for another State Department official. Such a scenario would make it more likely that a subsequent Senate trial of the President could overshadow and infect the Democratic Party's presidential primary votes early next year, a time when party leaders hope voters will focus instead on considering their own candidates for President.

Brexit watchers are shifting their attention to 11 p.m. local time (6 p.m. ET), the deadline for Boris Johnson to request an extension to Article 50 from the European Union. He is legally obliged to do so and has previously stated that the government would comply with the law. However, today in the House of Commons he caused huge confusion, after saying that the law didn't "compel" him to "negotiate" a delay to Brexit. Government officials elected not to clear up the messy words of the Prime Minister and as things stand, we are in the dark as to exactly what is going to happen, or if we will even hear what Johnson chooses to do. 

They need to not break the law, but they need to not look as though they've gone back on their pledge of not delaying Brexit. 

Canada votes in a general election on Monday, and the campaign rhetoric to this date has been toxic and "a desert from a public policy point of view," says veteran Canadian pollster Nik Nanos of Nanos Research. All that has undeniably turned off Canada's voters, and added another layer of complexity to one of the most unpredictable Canadian elections in recent history

The two top contenders are Liberal leader and incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer. Through it all, they've been tangled in a virtual tie for the popular vote. Neither has a clear path to governing in Canada's parliamentary system. "If people were to describe the election, it would be 'Indecision 2019'," says Nanos.

Canada's election takes place in 338 ridings or seats across the country, and preliminary results should be announced around 8pm on election night. One hundred and seventy seats are needed to be able to form a majority government, and polls show neither Trudeau nor Scheer are anywhere near that threshold.

Julián Castro announced Monday in an email to supporters that his presidential campaign needs to raise $800,000 by the end of October or he will end his 2020 bid.

The fundraising tactic is a last-ditch effort for a candidate who has struggled to raise money for much of his campaign; he entered the fourth quarter of 2019 with less than $700,000 in the bank. In the email, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary writes that the donations are needed to help him qualify for November's Democratic debate, something he has failed to do so far.

"I'm asking you to fight for me like never before," Castro says in the email. "If I don't meet this deadline, I won't have the resources to keep my campaign running. I'm counting on your $5 in this critical moment."