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Tag: house gop

  • It’s “Possible” Mike Johnson Will Lose Speakership Over Ukraine: Rep. Don Bacon

    It’s “Possible” Mike Johnson Will Lose Speakership Over Ukraine: Rep. Don Bacon

    Representative Don Bacon acknowledged Sunday that it is “possible” that Speaker Mike Johnson will lose the top House job over an impending vote on aid to Ukraine. “I’m not going to deny it,” the Nebraska conservative told NBC’s Kristen Welker.

    The comment comes as the House enters the second half of a two-week recess, which came on the heels of a tense fight over a government funding bill that barely averted a shutdown. Johnson entered the break promising to “turn our attention” to Ukraine, an issue that has divided the fractious House GOP caucus and kept the U.S. government from approving an aid package, even as the Senate passed a $95 billion bill in February.

    George Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has long been staunchly opposed to U.S. aid to Ukraine, filed a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership right as the House went into recess, warning that Johnson “should not bring funding for Ukraine” to the House floor. Greene has yet to say when she plans to move forward with the motion.

    “We have one or two people that are not team players. They’d rather enjoy the limelight, the social media,” Bacon said Sunday, without calling out any of his House GOP colleagues by name. “It’s a very narrow majority, and one or two people can make us a minority.”

    Republicans’ razor-thin House majority means that members who support Ukraine aid have had to work with Democrats, further enraging parts of the far-right GOP flank. Bacon called for a “bicameral, bipartisan solution” to the issue on Sunday. “We put a bill together that focuses on military aid — a $66 billion bill that provides military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan,” he said, referencing a bipartisan House national security package released in February. “If we do this bill, and I think we will, there’s enough support in the House to get this done. And I want to make sure that we have support in the Senate.”

    How exactly Johnson plans to proceed when the House returns from its recess is still being determined. CNN reported Sunday that the Speaker has been strategizing on the issue with a surprising ally: Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who helped orchestrate the ouster of Johnson’s predecessor Kevin McCarthy last fall.

    Gaetz is reportedly pushing Johnson to move forward with an aid package that is fully funded by spending decreases elsewhere. “If there were no offsets, we’d be really disappointed,” he told CNN Sunday. “I think we need to not deficit-spend to fund Ukraine. I also think that we need to have our own border prioritized. And I think Speaker Johnson shares that viewpoint.”

    But such a move would immediately alienate House Democrats, whom Johnson may have to rely on to save his job if Greene pushes forward with the motion to vacate. “I do think there will be Democrats, though, who do not want to see this dysfunction,” Bacon said of a potential vote on Johnson’s leadership. “And I think they’ll probably vote present or maybe not be there for a vote.”

    On Sunday, South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn told NBC’s Welker that “if [House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries] were to call me and say, ‘Look, I would like to have your vote in support of Johnson,’ he’s got it.” Jeffries said in February that if Johnson does “the right thing” on Ukraine, enough Democrats will likely vote to save his speakership if it comes to that point.

    Jack McCordick

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  • Mike Johnson’s House Is Imploding

    Mike Johnson’s House Is Imploding

    At a time when Republicans want voters to give them more power, by putting them in control of the Senate and White House with ballots in November, let’s take a look at the job they’ve done running the House. The 118th Congress, first under Speaker Kevin McCarthy and now Mike Johnson, has truly been a do-nothing Congress, responsible for an anemic 47 laws; the original “do-nothing Congress,” which Harry Truman ran against in the 1940s, actually passed 906 bills. And several of the bills passed by the current GOP majority have simply been meant to keep the government open, with Johnson and company again bringing the country to the brink of a shutdown before Congress passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill a little after 2 a.m. on Saturday.

    Johnson, of course, is in way over his head, having vaulted from backbencher to the most senior official in the House after three Republicans with more leadership experience failed to get the votes. What pushed Johnson over the top was not his talent for legislating nor his dexterity with vote counting, but instead the work he did with Donald Trump’s election-denial scheme. Johnson promoted the fringe “independent state legislature” theory that even the Trumpified Supreme Court shot down. This is the person Republicans chose, unanimously, for the Speaker job, which is a really hard gig, even if Nancy Pelosi made it look easy.

    The ascension of Johnson came in the weeks after McCarthy was ousted by the “Gaetz eight” for passing a debt-limit deal and helping prevent the economy from crashing (though it may have also been payback from Matt Gaetz for a congressional ethics investigation). And now Johnson finds himself potentially on the chopping block for keeping the government funded. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a charter member of the burn-it-all-down GOP caucus, filed a motion to remove Johnson after the spending package passed.

    “I filed a motion to vacate today, but it’s more of a warning and a pink slip,” Greene told reporters Friday. It was a statement that, in typical MTG fashion, made little sense; something that is a pink slip is very much not a warning but a firing. Greene, a former McCarthy ally who opposed his removal, added that she did “not wish to inflict pain on our conference and to throw the House into chaos.”

    Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

    Good luck! Greene’s motion to vacate was a topic of conversation on the Sunday shows, with CNN’s Jake Tapper asking Chip Roy if he’d support it. Roy “suggested that Johnson should not put a bill that would approve funding for Ukraine on the House floor when answering the question,” The Hill noted.

    Congress is on vacation for two weeks, so maybe Greene will forget about it. But the mood was grim as members of the House and Senate left Washington, with Punchbowl summing it up in Monday’s newsletter headline: “Everyone’s mad at each other.” As John Bresnahan wrote, “The 118th Congress is the least productive in decades. And everyone left town mad as they do the bare minimum legislatively with the November election looming.”

    The bad news about Johnson is that he’s a Trumpist—ergo, he doesn’t really believe in democratic norms and cares more about his religion than your rights. But the good news about Johnson is that he’s truly terrible at being Speaker and his majority keeps shrinking. This is yet another case of American democracy being saved by Trumpists’ incompetence rather than institutional guardrails.

    House Republicans, who held a five-seat majority six months ago, will soon only have one vote to spare. Mike Gallagher recently announced he’ll be leaving early, an exit that will follow those of McCarthy, George Santos (though not by choice), and Ken Buck, who voiced his disgust on the way out.

    “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress, and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress,” said Buck, who criticized his own party, which has been trying to impeach Joe Biden despite not having any evidence of wrongdoing. “We’ve taken impeachment, and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept—this place keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend more time here.”

    House committee chairs Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Mark Green announced last month that they will not seek reelection, while Kay Granger, who also won’t be running for reelection, plans to give up early her perch as House Appropriations Committee chair. Members of Congress with powerful committee assignments tend not to leave those posts. McCarthy, for all his faults, was able to keep his caucus together. Not so with Johnson.

    Johnson has committed a breathtaking number of unforced errors along the way. He decided not to whip the vote against removing fraudster and inadvertent comic genius George Santos, and though all of the House GOP leadership voted against removing him, Santos ultimately didn’t have the numbers to stay. This made leadership look incompetent. Perhaps this was a case in which good old-fashioned math would have been more helpful than prayers? Johnson later said it was a “regrettable day,” and with that, he completely ceded the moral high ground after expelling a member.

    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Rep. Mike Gallagher To Leave Congress, Further Shrinking House Republican Majority

    Rep. Mike Gallagher To Leave Congress, Further Shrinking House Republican Majority

    Mike Johnson’s razor-thin House majority got even tinier on Friday, after Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher announced plans to retire in April.

    Gallagher, who has served in Congress since 2016 and currently chairs a congressional select committee investigating the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement that the move came “after conversations with my family,” but did not elaborate on his reasons for leaving. Puck News’ Teddy Schleifer reported Friday that Gallagher plans to take a job at Palantir, the major analytics company founded by Peter Thiel.

    Though the Iraq war veteran had announced last month that he wouldn’t seek re-election next year, the move still comes as a major surprise, as Gallagher was considered a rising star in the party, and departing Congress mid-term is generally unusual for a committee chair.

    The congressman’s resignation will become effective on April 19, according to his statement. “I’ve worked closely with House Republican leadership on this timeline and look forward to seeing Speaker Mike Johnson appoint a new chair to carry out the important mission of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party,” Gallagher said.

    Gallagher’s seat will remain empty for the rest of his term, which means that the GOP can only spare one defection in future votes in which all members are present. That margin will likely dwindle even further in late April, as Democrats are set to fill a blue seat vacated in February by Representative Brian Higgins, though the GOP will likely claw a couple seats back in two subsequent special elections to fill seats vacated by Ohio’s Bill Johnson and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    “It’s tough, but it’s tough with a five-seat majority, it’s tough with a two-seat majority, one is going to be the same,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Friday, per Politico. “We all have to work together. We’re all going to have to unite if we’re going get some things done,”

    Gallagher’s original decision not to seek re-election came after he was one of just three Republicans to vote against the impeachment of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which drew blowback from his own party.

    The move comes at an inauspicious moment for Speaker Johnson, who is facing a brewing revolt from far-right members of the House GOP caucus over the budget deal that passed Friday with disproportionate Democratic support. Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has already filed a motion to vacate Johnson’s speakership—the same process that felled his predecessor. Gallagher’s departure increases the odds that, if Greene does decide to move forward with the motion, Johnson will be forced to rely on Democratic votes to maintain his hold on the speaker’s gavel.

    The chaos that has engulfed the House over the past year has contributed to a wave of retirements, including the recent departure of Colorado Representative Ken Buck, whose decision to retire imminently seemed to take Johnson by surprise. “I think, I hope and believe that that’s the end of the exits for now,” Johnson said earlier this month of Buck’s decision to leave.

    Jack McCordick

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  • ​​Congress Looks Like Just Another Trump Campaign Arm

    ​​Congress Looks Like Just Another Trump Campaign Arm


    Even Donald Trump understands the economy is getting better under Joe Biden—so much so that he’s taking credit for it. The stock market is surging, he recently said on Fox Business, “because they think I’m going to be elected.” While the president’s poll numbers don’t reflect the improved state of the economy, it’s getting harder to see how Trump can run effectively on the issue in the general election. However, Trump, who campaigned the first time around on building a wall on the southern border, will undoubtedly seize on immigration, which his loyalists in the GOP seem determined not to reform before November.

    Trumpism takes a page from tea party nihilism, essentially; Michele Bachmann walked so Donald Trump could run. “By the 2010s—just before Donald Trump emerges—the tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction,” Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol told Politico after right-wingers ousted Kevin McCarthy for not letting the debt ceiling expire and crashing the economy. That removal, she said, “is where it leads.”

    Today’s burn-it-all-down GOP caucus has a vested interest in the federal government failing because it proves its thesis that government is bad. In this election year, those in the caucus also have a vested interest in making Biden look bad—and so, by acting almost as an arm of the Trump campaign, they appear willing to torpedo any compromise that could be perceived as helping the president’s reelection chances. Republican congressman Troy Nehls admitted as much last week during a video interview. “Why would I help Joe Biden improve his dismal 33%, when he can fix the border and secure it on his own?” he asked. “He can do it on his own through executive order.”

    But Republicans, who talk endlessly about the southern border, have at least pretended in the past to want to craft legislation to address it. Last December, Republicans who were not anxious to allocate funding for Ukraine—presumably because they knew it would irritate their guy, Donald Trump—decided to tie aid to the country—something that the Biden White House desperately wanted—to border security.

    It looked like an impossible task; America hasn’t passed any meaningful immigration reform in 20 years. It was so unlikely to happen that Republicans decided to run with it. Kansas senator Roger Marshall told NewsNation, “At the end of the day, Republicans aren’t budging [on Ukraine] until we secure the border. That’s the question that all America is asking Joe Biden right now: Why do Republicans have to beg Joe Biden to secure the border? That’s part of his job.”

    Of course, Congress controls the money that Biden would need to secure the border; last year he requested almost $14 billion for the border, to be used for things such as hiring border patrol agents, immigration judges, and asylum officers. But House Republicans, who last month posed for photos at the Texas-Mexico border, seemed determined not to provide resources to fix a problem they’re fixated on. That’s because a crisis at the border provides something for Trump to run on, something for Fox News pundits to obsess over, and something for the news media to cover exhaustively in the midst of a presidential race.

    But what Republicans didn’t count on was the ability of this White House to lean on Senate Democrats to negotiate a border bill. Democratic senator Chris Murphy, independent senator Kyrsten Sinema, who caucuses with the Democrats, and Republican James Lankford were able to agree on something. The $118 billion bipartisan border-security bill unveiled Sunday night includes support for Ukraine ($60 billion) and Israel ($14.1 billion), as well as humanitarian aid for civilians in Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank ($10 billion). Biden, majority leader Chuck Schumer, and minority leader Mitch McConnell have also expressed support for the measure.

    It didn’t take long for the MAGA chorus to reject it, with Donald Trump Jr. quickly denouncing the “RINO-Dem immigration deal” and Representative Elise Stefanik saying the “Joe Biden/Chuck Schumer Open Border Bill is an absolute non-starter.” But Trump and company were already bashing the bill before they knew exactly what was in it, with the former president last month calling the compromise a “bad bill” and a “betrayal of America.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson, before seeing the text of the bill, declared it “dead on arrival.”

    You’ll remember that Johnson really does serve at the pleasure of Donald Trump, with the congressman having acted as one of the legal architects of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Johnson’s election denial and fealty to Trump helped propel him to the Speaker’s job, whereas the former president targeted another Republican contender, Tom Emmer, who didn’t try to block the certification of Biden’s victory. Given that just one member can call for a motion to vacate, Johnson is largely controlled by whoever is the most disruptive—and in this case, it’s his party’s right flank.





    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Congress Spends $40K To Change Color of House Lapel Pins From Green to Navy Blue Because They Can

    Congress Spends $40K To Change Color of House Lapel Pins From Green to Navy Blue Because They Can

    With a government shutdown looming in less than a week, the GOP-led House of Representatives started 2024 by checking off an essential item of business: buying new navy-blue identification lapel pins for House members to the tune of $40,000, replacing the green ones with which they started the term.

    “Today we’re getting a new pin, half way through the term because the @HouseGOP didn’t like the color,” Illinois Democrat Sean Casten wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Big congrats to them on their first tangible accomplishment of the 118th.”

    Casten was referring to the fact that this legislative session has been one of the most unproductive in U.S. history, with the combination of a divided Congress and vicious Republican internecine squabbling keeping the legislative branch from passing little but a handful of uncontroversial laws.

    “I’m awfully proud of these guys for getting something done,” Casten told HuffPost. “When we have a war in Ukraine that we can’t get funding to, a crisis in Israel and Gaza, and a government shutdown eight days away, and we’re prioritizing the color of fashion choices, that speaks for itself.”

    Every lawmaker in the House of Representatives and the Senate is given an identification pin at the start of the congressional term, which allows them to get through security without having to wear an identification card. The pin’s background color changes every two years and has been apple green since the beginning of the 118th session of the House in January 2023. As of Saturday, the reasons for making the change midway through this current Congress were unclear.

    So far, opinions on the switch have been mixed. North Carolina Democrat Deborah Ross told Semafor that some congresswomen complained that the new pin was too small to affix on larger chains, while South Carolina Republican Ralph Norman said he knew “there were many congressmen who didn’t like the green pin.” Indiana Republican Rudy Yakym III told a reporter for NOTUS, a new publication from the Albritton Journalism Institute, that he preferred the new pin. And former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she didn’t understand why House leadership made the switch mid-session — at all.

    The news of the $40,000 splurge—sources with knowledge of the pin change confirmed the number to both Semafor and The New York Times—comes as Congress rapidly approaches a January 19 government funding deadline. Without a spending deal by then, 20 percent of government funding is set to expire. The rest expires in early February.

    Throughout the past week, arch-conservative House Republicans continued to pressure Speaker Mike Johnson to reject the topline funding agreement he struck with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last weekend. Johnson said Friday that he stood by the deal. “Our topline agreement remains,” he said in a press conference. “We are getting our next steps together, and we are working toward a robust appropriations process. So stay tuned for all that.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Representative Elise Stefanik Refuses to Commit to Certify 2024 Results, Calls January 6 Prisoners “Hostages”

    Representative Elise Stefanik Refuses to Commit to Certify 2024 Results, Calls January 6 Prisoners “Hostages”

    New York Representative Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking member of House Republican leadership and a staunch defender of former President Donald Trump, refused to say whether she would certify the 2024 presidential election results.

    “We will see if this is a legal and valid election,” Stefanik told Kirsten Welker of NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” Stefanik went on to accuse Democrats of “suppression of the American people,” referencing the various legal efforts to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024.

    Welker pressed Stefanik on whether she’d “only commit to certifying the results if former President Trump wins.” “No, it means if they’re constitutional,” Stefanik replied. “What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”

    As the House Republican conference chair, she has repeated on numerous occasions Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, and was one of 147 Republicans to vote on January 6, 2021 against certifying Biden’s victory.

    In an interview on NBC, President Joe Biden‘s deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, refuted Stefanik’s claim that Democrats are attempting to subvert democracy. “I’m not sure that this ‘I know you are, but what am I’ situation is going to work when it comes to democracy,” he said.

    Stefanik’s interview aired a day after the third anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Welker asked her whether the people who participated in the attack should be “held responsible to the full extent of the law.”

    The senior New York Republican replied that she had “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” using Trump’s favored term for the over 1,200 people arrested for their roles in the riot. “We have a rule in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners, and I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.”

    In an interview on CBS, former GOP Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who served as vice chair of the House January 6 Select Committee, called Stefanik’s comments “outrageous” and “disgusting.” Stefanik replaced Cheney in the House leadership in 2021 after House Republicans removed the conservative from the Cowboy State from her position as conference chair for her refusal to back Trump’s election lies.

    “It’s disgraceful for Donald Trump to be saying what he’s saying, and then for those who are attempting to enable him or attempting to further their own political careers to repeat it,” Cheney said. “You cannot say you are a member of a party that believes in the rule of law, you cannot say you are pro-law enforcement, if you then go out and you say these people are ‘hostages.’”

    Jack McCordick

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  • To Panic, or Not to Panic: The 2024 Election Question

    To Panic, or Not to Panic: The 2024 Election Question

    It’s 2024, and the Iowa caucuses are just days away. Host Brian Stelter talks with Michael Calderone, editor of Vanity Fair’s the Hive, and Vanity Fair executive editor Claire Howorth about the defining issues of the 2024 election and how to cover them, including what’s to come in the GOP primary, liberal fantasies and panic, and Trump ideology now. 

    To an extent, the media has been preparing for how to cover Donald Trump in 2024 for almost a decade—his rise, his victory in 2016, his loss (despite what he might tell you) in 2020, his 91 criminal charges, and his authoritarian ideology. The team discusses what the news media has learned, the forceful objectivity that has tripped up some news organizations in covering the former president, and the MAGA mediaverse that still exists. 

    Of course, Trump and his allies haven’t been shy about his authoritarian plans if he’s reelected, like calling for retribution against political adversaries and saying he’d be a dictator on “day one.” They discuss voter political fatigue and why down-ballot races this year could be particularly important.

    Brian Stelter

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  • Lauren Boebert Switches Congressional Districts in a Desperate Bid To Save Political Career

    Lauren Boebert Switches Congressional Districts in a Desperate Bid To Save Political Career

    Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert announced Wednesday that she was switching districts in next year’s 2024 House race, in a bid to salvage her scandal-plagued political career.

    In a video announcing the move, Boebert said she’d be running in Colorado’s 4th district—the state’s most conservative—which represents the eastern part of the state, instead of the 3rd, which covers a huge swatch of the state’s south and west. Boebert said that, if elected, she’d move to her new district, though House members only need to reside in the state where they’re elected.

    Boebert said her decision was partly motivated by “not allowing Hollywood elites and progressive money groups to buy” her current seat. “The Aspen donors, George Soros, and the Hollywood actors that are trying to buy this seat, well, they can go pound sand,” she added. “We aren’t going to give them the opportunity to steal the third.”

    The move makes it more likely that Boebert, a major supporter of former President Donald Trump, will be able to remain in Congress next year. In her 2022 re-election bid in the 3rd district, Boebert barely eked out a 546-vote victory against Democrat Adam Frisch, an outcome that shocked political observers and triggered a recount. The 4th district is significantly more conservative: Trump carried it by 20 points in 2020, compared to just 8 in the 3rd.

    Boebert was facing a rematch with Frisch next year, and so far in the campaign, had been significantly outraised. As of the last campaign finance deadline in late September, the congresswoman’s campaign had over $1.4 million on hand, while the Frisch campaign reported over $4.3 million, according to Open Secrets, a group tracking money in politics.

    It wasn’t even clear that Boebert would make it out of the Republican primary, with her opponent, the more moderate Jeff Hurd, garnering significant financial support from some of the state’s top Republicans.

    Boebert acknowledged that the move was also a “fresh start” after “a pretty difficult year for me and my family.” Boebert filed for divorce from her husband in May, and the divorce was finalized in October. (The Boeberts’s gun-themed restaurant, Shooters Grill, closed in 2022.) And in September, Boebert was kicked out of a showing of Beetlejuice in Denver. Video footage of the crowd captured her repeatedly vaping and groping her date. The congresswoman, who initially lied about what happened at the event, later apologized.

    In her new district, Boebert has the advantage of running for a seat that Republican Ken Buck is currently vacating. Buck announced in November that he would not seek re-election, citing the many Republican leaders who he said were “lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing Jan. 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system.” Buck has represented the district since 2015.

    Frisch, whose campaign against Boebert recycled the slogan “stop the circus” from his 2022 bid, said that Boebert’s departure would not change his approach to the race.

    “I have been squarely focused on defending rural Colorado’s way of life, and offering common sense solutions to the problems facing the families of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District,” he said in a statement. 

    One of Boebert’s new primary opponents in the 4th District, Republican state representative Richard Holtorf, mocked her for “carpetbagging” after the announcement. “Seat shopping isn’t something the voters look kindly upon,” he said Wednesday. “If you can’t win in your home, you can’t win here.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • “I Will Support Donald Trump”: Ex-Speaker McCarthy Endorses 2024 GOP Frontrunner, Mulls Cabinet Role

    “I Will Support Donald Trump”: Ex-Speaker McCarthy Endorses 2024 GOP Frontrunner, Mulls Cabinet Role

    Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was unceremoniously ousted by hard-right conservatives after 269 days in office, is now endorsing former President Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election bid. “I believe [he] will win, I believe that Republicans will gain more seats in the House and that Republicans will win the Senate,” McCarthy told CBS News’ Robert Costa in a preview of an upcoming interview. He and Trump, McCarthy said, are “very honest with one another.”

    Pressed by Acosta to say whether his statements amounted to an endorsement of the former president, McCarthy responded, “I will support President Trump.”

    McCarthy announced on Wednesday that he would be retiring from Congress at the end of the month, joining a mass exodus of more than 30 representatives, most of which have been voluntary, with one notable exception.

    In a Wall Street Journal article explaining his departure, the California Representative promised to “continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office.” In the weeks after he lost the top House job, McCarthy had hinted that he’d seek to punish the eight Republicans, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who voted for the initial “motion to vacate,” which set his eventual ouster in motion.

    In the CBS interview, McCarthy also addressed the possibility of nabbing a cabinet position in a future Trump White House. “In the right position, if I am the best person for the job, yes,” McCarthy told Costa. “I worked with President Trump on a lot of policy. We worked together to win the majority.”

    McCarthy’s cabinet comments come after an Axios report on Thursday revealed that Trump is mulling an extremely far-right slate of picks for a potential future cabinet, including Tucker Carlson, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon.

    The Trump campaign distanced itself from the report on Friday. “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” wrote Trump senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. The two added that “people publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump … and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction.”

    McCarthy’s warm words for Trump are just the latest development in an up-and-down relationship. McCarthy famously gave a speech soon after the January 6 attack arguing that Trump “bears responsibility” for the events of that day, before proceeding to go to Mar-a-Lago to ask for forgiveness and do a conciliatory photo-op. (In her latest book, former congresswoman Liz Cheney says McCarthy claimed his visit to Mar-a-Lago came out of concern for Trump’s health, telling her, “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”) During his ill-fated attempt to keep the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy reportedly never reached out to the ex-president for help.

    And in a phone call weeks after the historic ouster, McCarthy cursed at Trump after the former president went after him for not expunging his two impeachments or endorsing him in the 2024 presidential race, The Washington Post reported in November, citing people familiar with the conversation. McCarthy responded by telling Trump, “Fuck you.” (A McCarthy spokesman denied this at the time.)

    Jack McCordick

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  • Representative George Santos, Facing Likely Expulsion, Says Congress Is Filled With “Felons Galore”

    Representative George Santos, Facing Likely Expulsion, Says Congress Is Filled With “Felons Galore”

    New York Congressman George Santos admitted his days in the Capitol are numbered in a rollicking, three-hour-long Friday conversation on X Spaces, formerly Twitter Spaces, hosted by journalist Monica Matthews. Despite growing calls for him to resign, Santos, who said he would not seek reelection next year, remained defiant. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “Come hell or high water, it’s done when I say it’s done.”

    To resign, Santos said, would be to “admit everything that’s on” the damning 56-page report released on November 16 by the House Ethics Committee, which investigated Santos over nine months and uncovered what it described as a “complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.” Santos also currently faces 23 criminal charges, including wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.

    “I’m not running for reelection, not because this was a damning report,” Santos claimed Friday. “I’m not running for reelection because I don’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites.”

    During the stream, Santos wildly lashed out at his colleagues, accusing Congress of being filled with “felons galore” and “people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds.” Some House members, he said, are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on.”

    At one point in the conversation, California Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia joined the space and encouraged Santos to apologize and resign, vowing that the House would vote to expel him.

    Garcia has been at the forefront of Democrats’ efforts to oust Santos. In February, the California Democrat introduced a resolution to expel his colleague, and forced a floor vote in May. Republicans voted on party lines to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee instead of voting to oust the freshman congressman. Santos easily survived a second attempt to expel him on November 1. Garcia told Axios that he plans on submitting a privileged resolution to expel Santos “the second that the House opens” on Tuesday.

    Garcia’s isn’t the only expulsion resolution floating around Congress. Less than 24 hours after the House Ethics Committee released its report, committee chair and Mississippi Republican Michael Guest introduced a resolution to expel Santos, but hasn’t exercised the option to bring it forward as a privileged resolution. Santos openly goaded his fellow Republican on Friday, calling on him to “stop being a pussy” and force a vote on his expulsion.

    Santos acknowledged that he knows he will “get expelled when this expulsion resolution” comes to a vote when the House returns to session after the Thanksgiving recess.

    A whip count compiled by Politico on the day the House Ethics Committee report was released found that nearly 60 Republicans were already planning to expel—more than double the number of GOP representatives who voted to boot Santos less than three weeks earlier.

    “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good,” Santos said, adding that if expelled, he’d “wear it like a badge of honor. I’ll be the sixth expelled member of Congress.” (Three of the previous five House members to be expelled were booted for encouraging secession during the Civil War. The other two were convicted of federal crimes.)

    The Long Island fabulist is planning to hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol on November 30.

    Jack McCordick

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  • Speaker Mike Johnson Announces Release of 40,000 Hours of January 6 Footage

    Speaker Mike Johnson Announces Release of 40,000 Hours of January 6 Footage

    House Speaker Mike Johnson announced on Friday plans to release more than 40,000 hours of security footage taken during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, pleasing former president Donald Trump and far-right members of the Republican Party and infuriating some Democrats, who charge that the footage poses a security risk.

    “Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement. “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations, and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”

    On Friday, roughly 90 hours of security video was posted to the website of the House Administration Committee, which oversees and processes the January 6 footage. Johnson added that a viewing room within the Capitol complex will be made available to members of the public.

    The push to make January 6 footage publicly available has been led by some of the most far-right Republican members of Congress, including Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Texas Congressman Chip Roy. Trump, slated to stand trial in March on federal charges related to his attempt to overturn the election, applauded Johnson’s decision.

    “Congratulations to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for having the Courage and Fortitude to release all of the J6 Tapes, which will explicitly reveal what really happened on January 6th!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

    The GOP-led Administration Committee handling the footage is chaired by Georgia Representative Barry Loudermilk, who in March launched an investigation into the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6 attack and urged criminal referrals against the former president. As part of its work, the bipartisan congressional committee investigated Loudermilk for a tour of the Capitol he gave to constituents the day before the attack.

    “The goal of our investigation has been to provide the American people with transparency on what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and this includes all official video from that day,” Loudermilk said in a statement Friday. “We will continue loading video footage as we conduct our investigation and continue to review footage. As I’ve said all along — the American people deserve transparency, accountability, and real answers supported by facts instead [of] a predetermined political narrative.”

    Democrats quickly slammed the decision as posing a serious security risk. “It is unconscionable that one of Speaker Johnson’s first official acts as steward of the institution is to endanger his colleagues, staff, visitors, and our country by allowing virtually unfettered access to sensitive Capitol security footage,” ranking Democratic member of the Administration Committee Joseph Morelle said Friday. “That he is doing so over the strenuous objections of the security professionals within the Capitol Police is outrageous. This is not transparency, this is dangerous and irresponsible.”

    Hannah Muldavin, a former spokesperson for the January 6 committee, told Roll Call that the release poses a “serious security concern and shows that [Speaker Johnson’s] allegiance, like Kevin McCarthy’s before him, is to Donald Trump and the ultra-right-wing faction of the House.” Muldavin added that Johnson had not only voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory but also led “the legal campaign to overturn it.”

    Johnson confirmed that the videos would blur the faces of private citizens to “avoid any persons from being targeted for retaliation of any kind.” He also estimated that 5% of the videos, which “may involve sensitive security information related to the building architecture,” would not be available.

    The footage, which shows how the January 6 rioters breached and entered the Capitol, has long been a point of controversy, with Democrats worried that the recordings could be used to jeopardize Capitol security or mislead the public about the events of January 6. In February, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted exclusive access to the footage to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who used it to downplay the severity of the attack.

    At the time, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described Carlson’s use of the footage as “one of the most shameful hours we have ever seen on television.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Speaker Mike Johnson Unveils Never-Before-Attempted Budget Proposal to Avert US Government Shutdown

    Speaker Mike Johnson Unveils Never-Before-Attempted Budget Proposal to Avert US Government Shutdown

    With a partial government shutdown looming in less than a week, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson unveiled a two-step plan on Saturday to fund the government through the new year. The stopgap funding bill, often referred to as a “continuing resolution,” would extend funding for several federal agencies until late January, while the rest of the government would be funded through early February.

    Johnson defended the bill as bucking “the absurd holiday-season omnibus tradition of massive, loaded up spending bills introduced right before the Christmas recess,” in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

    The Louisiana conservative, who has been in the top House job for less than a month and has never chaired a House committee, faces a steep climb to get the bill passed before the November 17 midnight deadline. If all Democrats are present and vote against the bill, Johnson can afford only four defectors in his own party in a vote that could come as early as Tuesday.

    Yet the bill has to satisfy two dramatically opposed constituencies. On one side are the far-right House GOP members who ousted Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, over his resistance to imposing deep spending cuts during the budgeting process and have called for a staggered funding process. On the other hand, more moderate members in both chambers of Congress don’t like the idea of bifurcating the deadlines for funding federal programs. Johnson conceded during a private conference call with lawmakers Saturday that the bill likely would not get universal support from Republicans, The New York Times reported.

    In just the last week alone, the House GOP punted on two separate funding votes due to divisions between hardline and moderate members, a sign that the sharp divisions that opened up during the speakership fiasco have not disappeared.

    Already, some members of Congress in both parties are voicing their displeasure with Johnson’s proposal. Texas Representative Chip Roy, a hard-right House Freedom Caucus member, wrote that his opposition to the bill, which does not include any spending cuts, “cannot be overstated.” In another post, he wrote that he opposes the bill “100%”. On Thursday, amid reports that Johnson was weighing pushing forward with a staggered bill, Senate Appropriations Committee chair and Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray called the plan “the craziest, stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

    The Biden administration immediately pounced on the plan. In a statement hours after Johnson unveiled the bill, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called it “a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns.”

    “With just days left before an extreme Republican shutdown — and after shutting down Congress for three weeks after they ousted their own leader — House Republicans are wasting precious time with an unserious proposal that has been panned by members of both parties,” Jean-Pierre said.

    The White House is reportedly already prepping surrogates to use the likelihood of a shutdown to boost Joe Biden’s stubbornly low approval ratings. “The clock is ticking,” reads a copy of talking points distributed to Biden allies and obtained by Politico. “We are just X days from an Extreme Republican Shutdown that would: Force servicemembers and law enforcement officers to work without pay—risk significant delays for travelers. Undermine public health. Cut off funding for small businesses.”

    On Friday, the ratings firm Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit outlook to “negative,” citing “continued political polarization” within Congress.

    Jack McCordick

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  • Speaker Johnson: GOP Funding Israel Aid By Gutting the IRS Is Just Us Being “Good Stewards of the Taxpayer’s Resources”

    Speaker Johnson: GOP Funding Israel Aid By Gutting the IRS Is Just Us Being “Good Stewards of the Taxpayer’s Resources”

    Freshly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson is defending his plan to fund U.S. aid to Israel by gutting the Internal Revenue Service as evidence of Republicans “trying to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s resources,” even as research points to the plan adding significantly to the government deficit.

    Johnson’s first significant move since his meteoric rise to power was to push forward with a bill to pay for a $14.3 billion aid package for Israel by cutting the same amount from the IRS.

    The bill, which passed the House largely along party lines on Thursday, faces a steep uphill battle in the Senate, given that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promises to avoid bringing it up for a vote.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’d prefer to have the Israel aid incorporated into a broader aid package that would include funding to Ukraine and Taiwan as well as reforms to U.S. border policy. President Joe Biden—who in October proposed a $106 billion foreign aid package that would do just that—has also threatened to veto the House legislation if it comes across his desk

    Johnson defended his plan in a Sunday interview with Fox News’ Shannon Beam. “We weighed priorities and said, ‘It is more important to protect Israel than to hire more IRS agents,’” he said.

    “Instead of printing new dollars or borrowing it from another nation to send over to fulfill our obligations and help our ally, we want to pay for it. What a concept,” he added. “We are trying to change how Washington works.”

    A nonpartisan report released by the Congressional Budget Office challenges Johnson’s assessment and finds that the plan would actually result in over $26 billion in lost government revenue over the next decade, which translates to adding over $12 billion to the deficit.

    That’s because the cuts target funding to the agency provided by Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act that focuses on making it easier for people to pay their taxes and for the agency to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.

    “All of those [Inflation Reduction Act] funds go to increased scrutiny on tax evasion going on at the highest wealth — that is millionaires, billionaires, large corporations and large complex partnerships,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said last week. “When you reduce those audits, you reduce the amount of money that we can collect and return to the Treasury for other priorities,” Werfel predicted the GOP plan would add up to $90 billion to the deficit.

    In his Sunday interview, Johnson dodged a question from Beam about whether his plan would add to the deficit. “Right now, we have a $33.6 trillion deferral debt. Just last week, the Treasury Department of the Biden administration said we’re going to have to borrow over $1.5 trillion over the next two quarters, six months to continue our operation as a government,” Johnson said. “This is not a sustainable track. We can take care of our obligations, but we can do it in a responsible manner, and that’s what we’re committed to.”

    Johnson also defended the House GOP’s plans to marry funding for Ukraine with funding for the U.S. southern border. “When you couple Ukraine and the border, that makes sense to people,” he said. “If we’re going to protect Ukraine’s border … we have to take care of our own border first.”

    Though the House’s Israel aid bill is almost certainly dead on arrival in the Senate, Johnson’s intransigence does mean that Congress will likely continue to struggle to approve any emergency spending plan that would provide aid to Israel and Ukraine in the coming weeks.

    Jack McCordick

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  • House Speaker Mike Johnson Responds to New Round of Scrutiny About Black Son

    House Speaker Mike Johnson Responds to New Round of Scrutiny About Black Son

    Mike Johnson’s meteoric elevation from an under-the-radar congressman from Louisiana to second-in-line to the U.S. presidency sent journalists, Democrats and Republicans alike to uncover information about the personal and professional history of the most right-wing and least experienced House Speaker in history, who took the top job on Wednesday. 

    On the day Johnson was voted in, several major right-wing social media accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, began circulating clips of an interview Johnson gave to PBS in 2020, in which he told journalist Walter Isaacson that the police killing of George Floyd was “an act of murder” and called for “systemic change.” Notably, Johnson said in the interview that he had learned about racism in America through the experience of raising a Black son, Michael. 

    Johnson said his Black son had a more difficult life than his white son “simply because of the color of his skin.” “Michael being a Black American, and Jack being white Caucasian. They have different challenges,” he said. “My son Jack has an easier path. He just does.”

    Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh described Johnson’s comments as a “full-fledged endorsement of the Left’s racial narrative,” while far-right anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer accused the new Speaker of being an “undercover Democrat.” Pro-DeSantis conservative influencer Pedro Gonzalez wrote that Johnson had “completely internalized left-wing racial libel about white supremacy and privilege.”

    Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on Friday that there were no photos of Michael on Johnson’s House website or his Facebook page. His son also does not appear in Johnson’s official biography.

    Speculation about whether Michael was a real person prompted Johnson’s office to clarify. “When Speaker Johnson first ran for Congress in 2016, he and his wife, Kelly, spoke to their son Michael—who they took in as newlyweds when Michael was 14 years old,” said Corinne Day, Johnson’s communications director, in a statement first reported by Newsweek. “At the time of the Speaker’s election to Congress, Michael was an adult with a family of his own. He asked not to be involved in their new public life.” Day added that Johnson “maintains a close relationship with Michael to this day.”

    Day told Newsweek that the Johnson family did not formally adopt Michael because of the “lengthy … process,” and declined to say whether Michael used the same surname as the family.

    Johnson’s Black son came up in 2019, when Johnson testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee considering a resolution that would establish a commission to examine possible reparations proposals. In comments that drew boos from some in the hearing, Johnson said that he had asked his son about the idea of reparations for slavery, and that his son said he opposed it.

    In his first major interview after ascending to the top House job last week, Johnson appeared to downplay his previous comments about how racism affected Michael’s life. “Having raised two 14-year-old boys in America and the state of Louisiana, they had different experiences,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “And I’m not so sure it was all about skin color, but it is about culture and society. Michael, our first, came from a really troubled background and had a lot of challenges.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Jim Jordan and Allies Unleash Public Pressure Campaign on Speaker Vote Holdouts

    Jim Jordan and Allies Unleash Public Pressure Campaign on Speaker Vote Holdouts

    As Ohio Representative Jim Jordan rushes to secure the necessary votes in advance of a Tuesday vote for Speaker of the House, he and his allies are activating a public pressure campaign, attempting to rally the GOP base into strong-arming wavering lawmakers who are either ideologically opposed to the far-right congressman or soured by his faction’s responsibility for sending the House into unprecedented turmoil over the past two weeks.

    Jordan allies are hoping that when House members return to Capitol Hill after the weekend recess, it will generate local pressure from the GOP base for the party to rally around the Ohio congressman, who has forged close ties with former President Donald Trump. “Everybody’s going to go home, listen to their constituents, and make a decision,” said Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee. “Honestly, the grassroots, there’s nobody stronger” than Jordan.

    Several GOP representatives and conservative activists are working to fan public support for Jordan, taking to social media to browbeat likely “no” votes into supporting the Ohio politician. “You want to explain to your voters why you blocked Jordan?” Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, late Friday evening. “Then bring it.”

    Several Jordan supporters have posted the phone numbers of House members considered likely holdouts, encouraging constituents to flood their representatives with pro-Jordan calls, reports The New York Times.

    It’s a controversial strategy that Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Jordan supporter, called “the dumbest thing you can do” in a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

    “I’m supporting Jordan. I’m going to vote for Jordan. As someone who wants Jim Jordan, the dumbest thing you can do is to continue pissing off those people,” Crenshaw said. “When I ask people who are taking that tack, I’m like, ‘Did that work on you, when you were one of the 20 against McCarthy, and everybody was bashing you?’” he added. “Everybody’s got to grow up, get it together. If there’s differences, let’s sort them out.”

    It’s been clear that Jordan will face an uphill battle since his nomination on Friday, after which a second private vote revealed that 55 members were opposed to his speakership. Jordan can only afford four GOP defections in the likely scenario in which the Democrats vote unanimously against him.

    An anonymous senior GOP House member told CNN Sunday that there are roughly 40 “no” votes within the caucus, and that he’d personally heard from 20 members who have pledged to block Jordan’s path to the top House job if he forces a vote on the floor Tuesday. “The approximately 20 I’ve talked to know we must be prepared,” the representative said. “We cannot let the small group dictate to the whole group. They want a minority of the majority to dictate, and as a red-blooded American, I refuse to be a victim.”

    But some close to Jordan believe he can capitalize on moderate Republicans’ allergic reaction to the public revolts and political brinkmanship that have typified the GOP’s hard-right flank. “These 60 members are not voting against Jordan on the floor,” Russell Vought, a Jordan ally and president of the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, wrote on X. “Take it to the floor & call their bluff.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Dana Milbank on “Destructionist” House Republicans, the Trump-Led Primary, and the Joys of Gardening

    Dana Milbank on “Destructionist” House Republicans, the Trump-Led Primary, and the Joys of Gardening

    “Have I been too glum?” Dana Milbank asked me.

    I had just spent 20 minutes with the Washington Post columnist talking about the GOP, the party that is currently struggling to unite around a House Speaker after ousting Kevin McCarthy. The party that appears to be on the cusp of nominating Donald Trump—the twice-impeached former president facing four separate felony indictments, who less than three years ago capped off his term by inciting a failed insurrection at the Capitol. The party that is not just in disarray—but is dragging the country down with it into a dark hole of conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and disinformation. Was Milbank being depressing? Maybe. But what else was he supposed to be, given the matter at hand?

    “I think your tone was appropriate,” I told him.

    In an interview, which has been edited for clarity and length, the opinion writer discussed the chaos of the House GOP and the Trump-dominated presidential primary; the comfort he’s taken in writing columns about gardening instead of politics; and The Destructionists, out in paperback later this month, which traces the history of the Republican Party’s antidemocratic streak from the early 1990s to now. “It is our democratic way of life at stake here,” as Milbank told me. “I think it’s the number one issue, because without a functioning democracy, no other issue that you care about can be resolved.”

    Vanity Fair: The hardcover of your book came out in August 2022. Would you say, in your view, the outlook for democracy has improved, worsened, stayed about the same, or been more of a mixed bag since then?

    Dana Milbank: Unfortunately, I think it’s sort of steadily worsening. It spreads cancer-like—to use that overworked metaphor. You know, in many ways, I think after [Joe Biden’s] election, and that little event of January 6—I think people thought, Alright, we’ve got a reprieve here. Things are going to return to normal. But that never happened. We returned to some sense of calm—you didn’t wake up one day and find out, you know, we’re trying to buy Greenland or something. But the same ills that brought us 2016 and the Trump presidency, the January 6 insurrection—they’re still there. The disinformation, the white nationalism, just sort of this hacking away at the institutions of democracy. That has continued apace. So you’ve seen just a continuation of the sort of inability to govern—the anti-government actions that at this moment have just completely paralyzed the House. And then you’ve seen it with the constant attacks on the rule of law and the prosecutors and the judges in the various Trump cases. You’ve seen it in the ways people have gone after the president, who is somehow simultaneously completely senile yet also a criminal mastermind. And you see it with [the way] disinformation has become the coin of the realm. Once you start down that track, it just keeps getting worse and worse, so that’s the most worrisome thing—that the disinformation is just so commonplace. Now we can’t even have a debate in the United States, because we have no overlapping, shared set of facts anymore.

    Eric Lutz

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  • Donald Trump Endorses Staunch Ally Jim Jordan for House Speaker

    Donald Trump Endorses Staunch Ally Jim Jordan for House Speaker

    Ending speculation that he would actively seek the newly-vacated House speakership, former President Donald Trump endorsed Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for the top job on Friday, jumping into what for now is a two-way race between Jordan and Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, who currently serves as House Majority Leader.

    Dubbing Jordan a “STAR,” Trump called the Ohio congressman “STRONG on Crime, Borders, our Military/Vets, & 2nd Amendment,” adding that he “will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”

    So far, only Jordan and Scalise have officially jumped into the race that began on Tuesday when California Representative Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership—a historic first.

    Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, is a hardcore Trump loyalist and is a divisive figure within the GOP. From his congressional leadership perch, he has launched investigations into the Biden family and is one of the leaders of the ongoing impeachment inquiry into the president.

    It’s unclear how much the endorsement will actually help Jordan, as the GOP needs to unite a fractious caucus before the speaker vote next week. “It likely hurts more than helps,” one GOP lawmaker, speaking anonymously, told Axios Friday. “Likely Jordan accelerates getting the votes he was going to get anyway but hardens those he wasn’t getting faster.” Another said Trump’s endorsement “works both ways. Some will be impressed, some are sick of him and would like him to stay in Florida.”

    A conservative lawmaker who supports Jordan told Axios that “the real question is can Republicans in districts Biden won vote for a Trump-endorsed Speaker?” noting that House members in vulnerable seats are going to have to publicly cast votes on the House floor—one that could potentially haunt them in 2024.

    On Friday, McCarthy, who has said he will not seek the job again, declined to say who he might support as his replacement. Asked for his opinion about Trump’s endorsement, McCarthy simply noted that “only members vote” in the speaker election. “I think the members can sit down, and they can make the decision,” he said.

    McCarthy added that Jordan and Scalise sought his advice before a forum for speaker candidates next Tuesday. “They’re both good friends,” he told reporters. “I’ve talked to both of them.” The House will vote on Wednesday.

    Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who led the charge against McCarthy, has praised both Jordan and Scalise as good options. Either, he said Wednesday, would be a “monumental upgrade” from McCarthy. According to The Washington Post, Speaker Scalise or Speaker Jordan would be the most ideologically conservative Republican to hold the post in recent history.

    Jack McCordick

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  • The Exquisite Agony of Being Kevin McCarthy

    The Exquisite Agony of Being Kevin McCarthy

    On Inside the Hive, host Brian Stelter talks to Vanity Fair’s Abigail Tracy and veteran political journalist John Harwood about Kevin McCarthy’s failure to control his House GOP caucus as a government shutdown looms. 

    “You talk to pretty much any lawmaker on the Hill, and there’s sort of just an acceptance, reluctant though it might be, but an acceptance that there will be a shutdown,” says Tracy, as a group of “rogue Republicans” keeps “making demands, shifting the goalposts, but nothing is going to placate them.”

    Bomb throwers like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are “not serious people,” says Harwood, a Polis Distinguished Fellow at Duke University. “They’re on television, they have podcasts or whatever,” he adds, “but they’re not built to do what politicians have to do to make government work.” 

    Brian Stelter

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  • Can Elise Stefanik Become MAGA’s Messenger in Chief?

    Can Elise Stefanik Become MAGA’s Messenger in Chief?

    Stefanik endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid in November of 2022, before the former president had even formally announced his intention of running again. She voted against certifying Biden’s election win, amplified conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems, and doesn’t appear to have acknowledged that Biden won legitimately. Stefanik called the New York District Attorney’s case against Trump an all-caps “WITCH HUNT” on Twitter, directing people to donate to the ex-president’s campaign. A little over a month later, when another of Trump’s many legal woes—the defamation and rape case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll— saw its resolution in court, Stefanik declined to comment. When communications unveiled through the Dominion lawsuit against Fox revealed Trump confidants’ acknowledgments that their stolen-election claims were toothless, Stefanik was mum. With news of the second indictment against Trump in the classified documents case, she posted a photo of herself with the president: “STAND WITH TRUMP!” she wrote. If she talks, she’s always on message. If she doesn’t, I get the sense it’s because she’s realized silence is most expedient.

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    When I ask her about the vice presidency, she answers. “I would be honored to serve in a Trump administration,” she says. “But I am very conscious there’s a long time between now and then, and there’s a lot of work that House Republicans have to do.” After all, she’s still in office. He—despite the best election-subversion efforts of his team and allies (Stefanik included)—was voted out. She has hitched her wagon to his train, but, at least in this moment in time, her political future could be much brighter than his. 

    Stefanik was 14 years old when she was excused from class—at the Albany Academy for Girls, a private institution in upstate New York—to attend a 1998 campaign event for former US senator Alfonse D’Amato, who was facing off against now Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer. “I support the Republican view, especially his,” a braces-donning Stefanik told the Times Union’s James M. Odato. She added of D’Amato: “He supports all of New York State, not just downstate.” The résumé Stefanik built up in the following decades suggests running for office was likely always part of the plan, even though she says it wasn’t. She went to Harvard, worked on the Domestic Policy Council in the George W. Bush White House, and then went to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, where she helped craft platforms and prepped Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, for his vice presidential debate against Biden. 

    After Romney lost, then RNC chair Reince Priebus appointed Stefanik to the task force developing the infamous 2012 “autopsy.” Tim Miller, a Republican political operative who worked on the report alongside her, says Stefanik was like “the point person on a group project in college.” The autopsy concluded that the Republican Party needed to be inclusive of communities of color, women, and young voters. When Stefanik ran for New York’s 21st district to replace incumbent Democrat Bill Owens, who did not seek reelection, she largely embraced the findings of the report she had helped craft. “I don’t remember any point in which [Stefanik] pushed back on the substance of the content,” Miller, who served as Jeb Bush’s communications director in 2016, reflects. Stefanik, after all, was the “human embodiment of the autopsy.” 

    At 30 years old, she became the youngest woman elected to Congress; a Glamour profile heralded her as “the youngest woman to ever break into the old boys’ club of Congress.” She was seen as something of a Ryan protégé; he had been a prominent supporter of her campaign. Then, Trump arrived on the scene. 

    In 2016, Stefanik voted for former Ohio governor John Kasich in the Republican presidential primary. (“Going into 2016, that was my first reelection and the first presidential [election] while I was a sitting member of Congress,” she tells me. “I was very comfortable, leading up, saying, ‘I’m going to support the Republican nominee, and voters will decide who the primary winner is.’ I was proud to vote for President Trump in 2016.”) 

    These days, her public and social media presence is almost indistinguishable from those of the Gaetzes, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, or Lauren Boeberts of the House. Her campaign repeated “great replacement theory” rhetoric, posting that “radical Democrats” were planning a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants; she proudly voted to ban trans athletes from women’s or girls sports at federally supported schools, part of what she called a fight against “Democrats’ radical and Far Left attempt to erase women”; and she has fearmongered over “critical race theory.” But still, there is a Washington, DC, polish to Stefanik, like she’s spent her life being shaped by the political establishment. 

    Abigail Tracy

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  • Inside Biden’s Post-SOTU Victory Lap

    Inside Biden’s Post-SOTU Victory Lap

    President Joe Biden lingered in the halls of Congress last night after his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, possibly even longer than he had the year before, longer than most presidents had ever. Yes, Joe Biden loves these things. 

    As his former press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted, “Thoughts and prayers to the staffers trying to move Joe Biden out of one of his favorite places.” Last night, POTUS shut the place down because he delivered, by most accounts, a SOTU address that skillfully layered political pressure and arguments, painted a picture of his administration’s accomplishments, and, with relish, swung back at the fringe sideshow playing out in the MAGA corner of the room. 

    Eric Lutz, Abigail Tracy, and Chris Smith stopped by an early morning episode of Inside the Hive to break it all down with Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox. 

    Joe Hagan, Emily Jane Fox

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