Supreme Mess: The White House has granted the FBI a limited expansion of its investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell says he plans to bring the nomination to a floor vote this week, no matter what.

The White House says the FBI can interview anyone they think necessary, but they still have to wrap it up by Friday. “The FBI should interview anybody that they want within reason, but you have to say within reason,” President Trump told reporters.

The FBI has already interviewed Kavanaugh’s high school buddy Mark Judge, who has been accused of being present during a 1980s assault on a 15-year-old girl who is now a college professor.

Reporters are digging as well and The NY Timesreports that Kavanaugh was questioned by the police after a bar fight in 1985 while he was a junior at Yale. He was accused of throwing ice into the face of another patron. A friend threw a glass, cutting the other person’s ear.

“It was sort of a general feature of hanging out with Brett in college,” according to Charles Ludington, a former Yale basketball player who’s now a professor at North Carolina State University. “When you’re having beers on a Friday or Saturday night, that was kind of Brett’s shtick. He was aggressive. He was belligerent.”

It’s not the biggest deal, but it’s contrary to Kavanaugh’s portrayal of himself as a hard-studying choir boy who occasionally drank a few beers. It also feeds the question of whether he has the temperament to be a Supreme Court Justice

Harvard constitutional law Professor Lawrence Tribe writes in The NY Timesthat if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court there would be many issues for which he would have to recuse himself.

Tribe says, “Judge Kavanaugh’s attacks on identifiable groups — Democrats, liberals, ‘outside left-wing opposition groups’ and those angry ‘about President Trump and the 2016 election’ or seeking ‘revenge on behalf of the Clintons’ — render it inconceivable that he could ‘administer justice without respect to persons,’ as a Supreme Court justice must swear to do, when groups like Planned Parenthood, the NRDC Action Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Naral Pro-Choice America or the American Civil Liberties Union appear as parties or file briefs on behalf of plaintiffs and defendants.”

Trading Up:The Trump administration has ripped up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement to replace it with, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or USMCA, a name that doesn’t sing, except to the President. At least he didn’t name it “Trump.”

A prime target of the deal is to help American automobile manufacturing. It requires that vehicles made in Mexico or Canada must be composed of 75 percent American-made parts. Under Nafta it was 62.5 percent.

It also says that by the year 2023, any tariff-free car must be made with labor paid at least $16 an hour. That’s about triple what workers are paid in Mexico and President Trump hopes this will return jobs to the US, but it will also raise the cost of a car.

The deal also opens up the Canadian market to American milk and cheese. Canada has been very protective of its dairy industry.

The Prize: A Japanese and an American scientist share the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work in harnessing the body’s own immune system to fight cancer.

James Allison, 70, is chair of the department of immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Dr. Tasuku Honjo, 76, is a professor at the Kyoto University Institute.

In other Nobel developments, the man whose criminal case led to cancellation of this year’s prize in literature, was sentenced to two years in prison by a Swedish court that found him guilty of rape. Jean-Claude Arnault, 72,the husband of a former member of the Nobel literature committee, was found guilty of raping a woman in a Stockholm apartment in 2011.

In late 2017, 18 women accused Arnault of sexual harassment and assault in incidents that were said to have happened at properties owned by the Academy or at his literary club. The scandal ended up ripping apart the Swedish Academy’s literature committee.

Aftermath: The death toll is now 1200 and rising after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Palu, Indonesia, and the situation is growing worse. People have gone days without food and water. Survivors have been looting shops and blocking aid trucks. Thousands of people are camped at the airport, hoping to get out.

In Brief:California has become the first state to require publicly-traded companies to appoint at least one woman to their corporate boards. — Melania trump is in Africa on her first solo diplomatic trip. She’s visiting Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt.— More than 80,000 Americans died of the flu last winter, the highest number in over a 10 years. Ninety percent of those who died were over age 65.

Bumped Out:On the anniversary of the Las Vegas massacre yesterday,  President Trump said that the devices known as bump stocks that allow a rifle to fire like a full automatic will soon be illegal. Many of the 23 rifles used to kill 58 people in the shooting were fitted with the stocks. He said the matter is working its way through regulations and public hearings and “We are knocking out bump stocks. I’ve told the NRA. Bump stocks are gone.”

He would be the first to dictate a gun restriction to the NRA and get away with it.

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