Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), the fourth House Republican to be nominated for the speakership this month, secured the necessary 217 votes to be elected to the post on Wednesday afternoon, ending weeks of uncertainty within the caucus.
In a Wednesday afternoon election against Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), whom Democrats unanimously rallied behind, Johnson garnered 220 votes compared to his competitor’s 209 votes.
The Republican speaker nominee became the fourth contestant in the running against Jeffries hours after Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) dropped his bid Tuesday afternoon. House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.), the two previous nominees for the presiding-officer role, also failed to secure enough support from their party.
Since Representative Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) was removed from the speakership over three weeks ago, the GOP conference repeatedly struggled to unite behind a candidate that could meet or surpass the 217-vote threshold. There are only 221 Republicans in the lower chamber, meaning each candidate couldn’t afford to lose more than four votes. Johnson only lost one.
And that one wasn’t against him, it was because Rep. Derrick Van Orden was absent.
Compared to some, Johnson is pretty low profile, and I didn’t already have a tag for him. He has a 90% Heritage Action rating, which isn’t too bad (though he did vote for the debt limit raise this year). Johnson is also a Trump supporter, which no doubt will irk National Review to no end. At 51, he’s relatively young for a speaker (though Paul Ryan was 45).
Kevin McCarthy has been ousted as speaker of the House of Representatives, becoming the first leader in the history of the lower chamber of Congress to be removed from the position.
In a dramatic 216-210 vote on Tuesday afternoon, the House endorsed a “motion to vacate” to in effect fire McCarthy from the speakership. Eight Republicans voted against their party leader and sided with 208 Democrats, sealing his removal from the post.
The unprecedented vote sets the stage for an election to select a new speaker — though McCarthy has not ruled out putting forward his name to be reselected for the top job.
The historic vote underscores the sharp divides in the Republican party and threatens to usher in a new era of dysfunction in Washington. The House cannot carry out legislative business until a new speaker is elected.
Republicans haven’t had a first-rate speaker since Newt Gingrich stepped down. McCarthy was an improvement on Paul Ryan and Dennis Hastert, but probably not as good as John Boehner. Majority Leader Steve Scalise would theoretically be next in line, followed by Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer, but line of succession doesn’t always hold water in a speaker fight.
Scalise is, of course, the guy who literally took a bullet for being a Republican. Stefanik has been labeled an up-and-comer for many years now, but I mostly know her from the numerous begagrams that show up in my email. Emmer and Palmer have relatively low profiles compared to the other two. Heritage Action (grains of salt apply) ranks them Palmer 98%, Stefanik 84%, Scalise and Emmer 82%.
Matt Gaetz will not be the next speaker, and whoever gets the job will probably be just as unpopular among conservative activists as McCarthy was.
Fallout from the House speaker’s race, Biden busted for mishandling classified files, more blue state teachers raping their students, Cadillac’s EV breaks into double digit sales, and the Imelda Marcos disco musical! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Kevin McCarthy finally wins Speaker of the House race on 15th vote after offering concessions to the House Freedom Caucus.
How is McCarthy doing? Early signs are encouraging. “The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) used Thursday morning’s press briefing to criticize the Department of Justice’s handling of the issue.
“They knew this happened to President Biden before the election, but they kept it secret from the American public,” McCarthy told a scrum of reporters on Capitol Hill.
Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Will Fletcher reported 470 sexual complaints against Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022.
“The report details students being abused, groped, groomed, assaulted and threatened by school officials.
“One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.”
The teachers’ union in Chicago, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, so praised by Joe Biden, has done nothing and said nothing about it so far as I can tell, and I did look, focusing instead on promoting critical race theory into the school system. Left unsaid is that the union ensures that firing any of these teachers involved in this activity is virtually impossible. Chicago’s public schools’s firing rate of bad teachers owing to their union membership, as of a few years ago, is 0.1%.
What’s vivid here amid all this widespread predatory behavior from the teaching classes, which like Harvey Weinstein, are prolific campaign donors to Democrats, is that the low outrage factor stands in sharp contrast to the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic Church, which was ordered by courts to pay billions in reparations to the victims, has seen its leaders publicly apologize for the abuses, and has many programs now to prevent child abuse by perverts in authority. This activity was evil and inexcusable and rightly punished.
As for the more widescale abuse now seen in Chicago’s public schools, along with comparable scandals in the Los Angeles public school system, and other bad cases in New York and other blue cities, well, crickets. The perversion has gotten out of control in Chicago and the story barely makes the national news.
How Biden’s inflation is destroying family budgets:
The reality of the inflation report for American families – year-over-year real wages have been negative for 21 straight months. pic.twitter.com/1Bh4DNqZBF
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm accessory that enables a semi-automatic gun to shoot at an increased rate of fire.
In a 13-3 decision, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), acting under “tremendous” public pressure, short-circuited the legislative process by approving a rule to define bump stocks as “machineguns,” which are illegal to possess. The court said ATF did not have the authority from Congress to do so.
This is what a real pro-natalist policy looks like: “Hungary addresses falling birthrates by exempting moms under 30 from income tax for life.” More:
Hungary has taken several measures in recent years to encourage its citizens to have more children, including three years of paid parental leave and state-funded daycare.
The country previously suspended income tax for moms with four or more children, but this new policy specifically encourages women to have children sooner, which in the long run means a higher likelihood of having more children overall.
Israel hit Syria again, and I heard just about nothing about it. Ukraine has really pushed Syria out of the headlines.
Speaking of Ukraine, Russia has largely captured the salt mining town of Soledar, though at a high cost in man. And good luck checking those hundreds of miles of salt tunnels for partisans…
“Tesla plans Houston-area expansion with large new industrial site in Brookshire…Little is known about Tesla’s plans, but the Fortune 500 company signed a lease late last year for about 1.03 million square feet at 111 Empire West, part of the 300-acre Empire West Business Park in Brookshire.” A bold move, considering how radically car sales have dived this year.
Other EVs update: “GM delivers record Cadillac Lyriq deliveries in Q4 – 12 per month.”
“David Byrne, Fatboy Slim Disco Musical ‘Here Lies Love’ Sets Broadway Debut. The musical, which has had a long journey to Broadway, centers on the life of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.” They say the mirror ball shine bright on Broadway… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
If Democrats believed that Robert Mueller would provide them with additional ammunition for an impeachment inquiry, they made an extraordinary miscalculation. Not only was Mueller often flustered and unprepared to talk about his own report—we now have wonder to what extent he was even involved in the day-to-day work of the investigation—but he was needlessly evasive. In the end, he seriously undermined the central case for impeachment of President Donald Trump.
The often-distracted Mueller didn’t seem to know much about anything. The very first Republican to question him, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Doug Collins, forced Mueller to correct his own opening statement. In it, the former FBI director had asserted that the independent counsel “did not address collusion, which is not a legal term.”
For just how out-of-it Mueller appeared, well, take a look:
Michael Goodwin of the New York Post suggests Mueller’s appearance should end any impeachment talk.
Among his talents, Donald Trump has a special gift for driving his detractors so crazy that they do really stupid stuff. The decision by Democrats to force Robert Mueller to testify before Congress is Exhibit A.
Bumblin’ Bob was a train wreck of epic proportions. The fallout is immediate, starting with this: Impeachment is no longer an option.
It had a slim chance before Wednesday’s painful slog and no chance after it.
Goodwin is overly optimistic, as random blue checkmark celebrities are still calling for Trump’s impeachment on Twitter.
It’s been said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. But what happens if the first time was farce?
Today a farce of a farce played out in the House, with Robert Mueller testifying on his report. What made Democrats decide that this hearing was the way to finally get Trump is unclear, but whatever their reasons, it certainly didn’t play out to their advantage. It’s like that scene in a horror movie where somebody fires shot after shot at the monster, all to no effect, only to finally throw the gun at them in desperation. Now imagine that the gun is actually made of soft cheese.
Robert Mueller is that gun.
A highlight is when Mueller said he didn’t know what Fusion GPS was. That’s like saying “I wrote a book on the modern NFL, but I’ve never heard of this ‘Tom Brady’ person you keep referring to.”
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH): “When you talk about the firm that produced the Steele [dossier], the name of the firm that produced that was Fusion GPS. Is that correct?”
How can Fusion Gps and Steele dossier be outside of Mueller’s “purview” entirely? They provided many of the allegations he spent all that time investigating. He could totally answer those questions that go to his report. #MuellerHearing
Wait, what? Mueller was confused about who and what Fusion GPS is and does? This is a total, complete, apocalyptic disaster for the conspiracy-theory Democrats. This is imploding on them. Hilarious. #MuellerHearings
Mueller either has severe & concerning memory loss or he knows less about what happened in 2016 than we do. How the hell does he not know who Fusion GPS is? They’re a central player in the attempt to takedown @realDonaldTrump. They’re named in his report! pic.twitter.com/TI2qqOZ25v
Republicans are discrediting Mueller to the point that Dems will start saying the only reason collusion wasn’t found is that Mueller was incompetent. #MuellerHearings
Steube: When did you learn Christopher Steele's dossier allegations were false and unverified? Mueller: Not going to answer that. Steube: When did you learn the FISA application on Carter Page used Steele's false information? Mueller: Not going to answer that.
In fact, he comes across as completely out of it, a figurehead to protect those who were actually running the probe. That so many Clinton allies were running the probe without real oversight from Mueller (or any skepticism from the media) is suddenly difficult to ignore. https://t.co/Zf2ot6zhMm
Democrats made a huge mistake. Today’s #MuellerHearing is a campaign highlight video for Trump. Proof there was no collusion, proof Mueller let off Democrats who committed actual crimes.
No single individual has done more to corroborate Trump's charges of a Democrat-led witch hunt than Mueller, who showed today he had no day-to-day oversight of his own investigation, no knowledge of his employees' backgrounds, and no understanding of basic claims in his report.
The more this hearing goes on, the more it becomes painfully clear that not only did Bob Mueller not write his own report—he was barely involved or in control of it at all.
You know who was? His team of Democrats.
This was a resistance-driven partisan witch hunt all along.
Mueller: I uh, if I wrote it in the report I will take your word for it, but I can't speculate whether I made the calculation to the truth of uh uh that. I am not going to talk about the uh uh thing you said. What was the question?
There was a last-minute surprise from Mueller, a request to have a wet nurse present and sitting next to him during the hearings. The wet nurse is one Aaron Zebley, who you might remember was the attorney for the Hillary Clinton IT guy who set up the illegal basement server and smashed up Hillary’s Blackberry phones. Why was this guy on Mueller’s team since it seems like he has some very real conflicts of interest? Nevermind. Anyway, it’s unclear what Zebley’s role will be. I heard he will not be sworn in/ testify before Judiciary, but he will before Intelligence. I guess we will find out because the Democrats don’t want to spoil the movie for you.
The real reason Zebley is there is because Mueller didn’t have much to do with the report. His role was one of a celebrity endorser, like Bob Dole endorsing Viagra. The real authors were the same corrupt bureaucrats who have been using the government’s power and authority to terrorize and surveil their political enemies and rack up other targets to amass career-boosting Scooby snacks. Mueller also doesn’t seem like he’s in good shape, I half expect to find him drinking out of some congressman’s fish tank during the hearing break.
A smattering of Democrats (including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren) are making brave noises that Mueller’s testimony “justifies” impeachment (never mind that the House tabled an impeachment motion just last week), but the consensus on both sides is that this hearing was a disaster for them.
All four members of the Squad (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) voted against tabling. Others voting to continue impeachment proceedings were Democratic Presidential candidate Seth Moulton (so much for those moderate credentials), former candidate Eric Swalwell, and Julian Castro’s brother Joaquin.
Voting to table was every single Republican, Republican-turned-Independent Justin Amash (who many commenters had assumed was a yes vote on impeachment), Democratic Presidential candidate Tim Ryan, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even Adam Schiff.
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard didn’t vote on the motion, the only Democrat to skip voting entirely.
Having so many Democrats vote against impeachment is a big blow to Democratic Presidential candidate Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC:
On Thursday, Steyer announced that he is launching a new political action committee to turn up the heat on key Democrats by going behind their backs and into their districts with a pro-impeachment TV and advertising blitz. According to Politico, Steyer’s top targets include three of the most powerful Democrats in the House: Oversight Chairman Elijah Cumming[sic], Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, and Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal. Other potential targets include Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and even Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Kevin Mack, Steyer’s lead strategist, told Politico that the goal isn’t to put money behind primary challengers—at least not yet. But the group has virtually unlimited money to spend on staff, ads, and volunteers. “Why does Steny Hoyer get a pass, why does Jim Clyburn get a pass?” Mack said. “They’re all hiding behind the Mueller report.”
Despite that threat, Cummings, Neal, Clyburn and Hoyer all voted against impeachment. (As per House tradition, Speaker Pelosi did not cast a vote.)
The vote was a victory for Pelosi, who proved she can still hold together a Democratic majority in the face of demands from more radical members. And it might give pause to impeachment pandering from other presidential contenders. If impeachment isn’t a winning issue for a majority of House Democrats, is it really a winning issue in the Democratic Primary?
Remember how 16 House Democrats all said it was time for new leadership and swore up and down that they wouldn’t be voting to restore Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s chair?
One of Pelosi’s rumored rivals was Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, the former Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman.
Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) endorsed Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for Speaker in the next Congress in a surprise move Tuesday, abandoning the idea of challenging her.
Fudge, who huddled with Pelosi in the Capitol on Friday, said Pelosi has offered to restore a defunct subcommittee on elections, and to make Fudge the chairwoman.
Those 16 remaining anti-Pelosi votes make up a whopping 6% of the Democratic caucus. The truth is that if every one of them stuck to their pledge to dump Pelosi, she still has enough votes to be elected speaker without them. There’s lots of talk of Democrats who made anti-Pelosi noises during their campaigns, but we all know how much that’s worth.
Their rebellion is essentially over before the voting starts.
The Anti-Pelosi faction did manage to hold out slightly longer than the 45 minutes Sultan Khalid bin Barghash managed to resist the British in the Anglo-Zanzibar war of August 27, 1896…
By why would they be mean to poor little her? Well, except for the tiny fact that she wants to primary fellow Democrat House incumbents who aren’t hard enough left for her:
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday threw her weight behind a new national campaign to mount primaries against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts.
The incoming star congresswoman from New York again put the Democratic establishment on notice that she and activist groups on the left aren’t content with a Democratic-controlled House: They are determined to move the party to the left.
“Long story short, I need you to run for office,” Ocasio-Cortez said Saturday on a video conference call hosted by Justice Democrats, as the group launched a campaign dubbed “#OurTime.” Justice Democrats supported Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign against powerful Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.).
“All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “That’s really what we need to do to save this country. That’s just what it is.”
The incoming congresswoman’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, was blunter.
“We need new leaders, period,” he said on the call. “We gotta primary folks.”
Gee, I can’t imagine why here fellow Democrats are not welcoming her with open arms!
The group said they want Democratic members of Congress to be representative of their diverse communities and support liberal policies like Medicare for all, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, implementing a “Green New Deal,” and rejecting corporate PAC donations. On the campaign trail, Ocasio-Cortez talked about forming a “corporate-free caucus” as a means to push for reform. That type of group, if it forms, could turn out to be the left’s counterpart to the Freedom Caucus, which pushed Republican leadership to the right.
Tiny problem there: The Freedom Caucus didn’t make its name by primarying ideological opponents within the party. That sounds more like what the Senate Conservative Fund or various Tea Party groups did, with limited success.
It also ignores the fact that Democrats accomplished their 2006 takeover of the House by running conservatives and moderates in red states and swing districts. Thanks to the hard left turn under Obama, almost all those Democrats have been defeated in subsequent Republican wave elections.
Maybe Congressional Democrats, faced with the keenness of Social justice Warrior demands to gore their own oxen, might do something about the victimhood identity politics cancer that has metastasized across their party. Unfortunately, I suspect they simply lack the balls to openly defy Miss Flavor-of-the-Month…
“Recent rulings from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals are a major contributing factor in the sharp rise in the number of family units and unaccompanied minors that have made the trek from Central America to the United States’ southwest border in the last few months, according to Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Since 2000, law enforcement officials have investigated no fewer than 32 Philadelphia Democrats. The allegations seem to get more debasing — more Robin Hood-in-reverse — every year. Seth Williams, the sitting district attorney, was indicted in March for allegedly stealing from his own mother and seeking thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes in exchange for making people’s legal problems go away. Chaka Fattah, the former 11-term Congressman, was sentenced in December to a decade in prison for using cash from taxpayers and a charity to pay back an illegal campaign loan. Leslie Acosta, the ex-state rep, pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiring to commit money laundering.
Those are only the biggest and baddest examples of graft in the past year. The city’s traffic court was abolished altogether after nine judges were charged with ticket fixing in 2013. (Seven were later convicted on various charges.) In 2014, five state lawmakers — nearly a quarter of Philadelphia’s Harrisburg delegation — were accused of taking petty bribes; four have been convicted, some of lesser charges. The avalanche of indictments has left Philadelphians wondering whether their elected officials run for office to help anyone other than themselves.
It is the common practice of Social Justice Warriors to infiltrate organizations and hobbies in which they have little to no interest — videogames, comic books, sports, science-fiction awards organizations, all academic fields, etc. — for the sole purpose of seizing “key nodes and critical infrastructure,” as Diversity and Comics notes (echoing US military doctrine), in order to turn non-political pastimes into never-ending propaganda echo chambers — or destroy them outright, if they cannot be made to serve the regressive left’s propaganda mission.
They’re deadly parasites for any organization that allows them to crawl inside their bodies.
But these organizations let them in — hell, they actively seek them out — just so that social justice blogs and websites like The Mary Sue or Buzzfeed will give them the Social Justice Warrior Stamp of Approval.
Trouble is, as Marvel Comics is finding out, Social Justice Warriors are not consumers of any of these products, and will not buy them even if they have been converted into full Social Justice Warrior propaganda outfits.
These organizations are being infiltrated by Social Justice Warriors not because Social Justice Warriors like them or the cultural products they produce, but because Social Justice Warriors know that non- Social Justice Warriors enjoy these products, and thus these cultural artifacts must be seized and repurposed to serve leftist indoctrination ends or simply destroyed.
If they cannot be remade to be useful indoctrination centers, then they must be destroyed, so that, at least, non-Social Justice Warriors will have one less enjoyable thing in their lives, and may be forced to seek Social Justice Warrior-controlled entertainments as an alternative.
“Reclusive Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss — one of the Democrats’ biggest and most secretive donors — is currently under investigation for a 2011 sexual assault, as originally reported in a handwritten complaint by his former employee Jacqueline Long.”
Herzog has awakened from “woke,” as it were, because she found herself attacked by her progressive comrades for Thoughtcrime. She has disagreed with transgender activists and defended Aziz Ansari, among other examples of her political incorrectness. Independent thinking by members of official victim groups — women, racial minorities, homosexuals — is dangerous to the Left because dissent undermines the identity-politics illusion of solidarity against the white heterosexual males who allegedly oppress everyone else. In the 21st century, belief in the pervasive evil of heterosexual white men has become the organizing principle of the Democrat Party, its raison d’être. To suggest to a Democrat in 2018 that perhaps this fathomless contempt for white males is misguided, or that not every member of an official victim group is suffering from oppression, is to commit a sort of political heresy, like denying the existence of witchcraft in 17th-century Salem.
Democrats have become vendors of ethnic outrage, gender resentment and economic envy, with no other commodity to provide voters in the political marketplace. Because everyone inside the cult of social justice is fanatically devoted to this zero-sum-game mentality, there is a constant competition among Democrats to strike a “more progressive than thou” posture and, as Professor Reynolds says, “when sanctimony is your only coin, people will try to accumulate it.” Sooner or later, however, intelligent people wise up to the hustle. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, many who had cast their lot with the party of victimhood may realize how badly they have been hoodwinked and bamboozled.
Is it bad that I read the word “Seattle lesbian” and, even before I saw the picture, instantly thought “flannel”?
David Brooks wants new Americans because Original Recipe Americans, with our disgusting epidemic of improperly creased trousers, disappoint him so.
Do the Democrats know this speech is being televised?? They keep making faces when he talks about low unemployment, wages up, and the flag? They don’t realize Americans are watching them?? #StateOfTheUnion
It’s a “got nothing” day, so enjoy this short video of Rep. Steve Scalise (Republican-Louisiana) returning to the House floor three months after being shot by a crazed Democrat.
He gets a long standing ovation from the entire House. For once, no one took a knee…
