Biden’s agenda on the line as Democrats jockey over government funding and the debt limit. Garrett Haake, newly minted Senior Capitol Hill correspondent, with NBC News correspondents Leigh Ann Caldwell and Ali Vitali.

After the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, mixed-messaging on Covid booster shots and a rising migration problem at the southern border, Chuck talks with Executive Producer John Reiss about what made it on-air and what we learned on Sunday.

Chuck talks with George Will, syndicated columnist and the author of a new book, “American Happiness and Discontents,” in which he writes about Afghanistan, social-distancing and of course, American history.

California Governor Gavin Newsom easily beat back a recall effort this week, thanks to trends inside the state’s Democratic electorate … and thanks to the ongoing shifts inside the Republican party in the wake of former President Trump. Chuck talks with Christina Bellantoni, Director of the Annenberg Media Center at the University of Southern California and Tim Miller, political strategist and writer at the Bulwark.

Ben Nelson, former Democratic senator from Nebraska, built a reputation from 2000 to 2013 pushing for bipartisanship and bucking his party. He joins Chuck to talk about his new book, “Death of the Senate.”

With a little more than a year to go before the midterms, the terms of the campaign are still in flux. Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster and co-founder of Echelon Insights joins Cornell Belcher, Democratic pollster and president of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies, talk to Chuck about the political impact of the Texas abortion law.

If you take a close look at almost every political issue today — whether it’s Covid, voting, policing or climate — you will find one problem at the root of it: Polarization. Mark Sanford, former South Carolina governor (R) and former congressman talks to Chuck about partisanship in politics and his new book, “Two Roads Diverged.”

President Biden spoke from the White House to defend his decision to pull forces out of the country, but his legacy may be more about the “how” than the “why” ... And that’s assuming that Afghanistan doesn’t once again become a haven for terrorist attacks. NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel talks about his firsthand reporting from Kabul as the U.S. mission came to an end.

For years, top universities have been overwhelmed by potentially qualified student candidates, but unable to fit them on campus … leading to a race to the top that no student can ever really win, often leaving students from diverse backgrounds struggling for a chance to get ahead. Professor David Kirp proposes a radical idea to expand the world of higher education.