House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) marked his seventh month in office on Saturday.A lame-duck speaker hampered by conservative criticism, office dysfunction and a shadow race to find his replacement before he leaves.
Staff turnover happens, and it often comes in waves. The start of a new year sees a lot of staff turnover as team members look for a fresh start. The spring brings with it staff who decide to hang in there for another six months before quitting. The end of summer sees staff turnover as Capitol Hill residents spread their bets before voters judge their job performance on Election Day.
Still, four senior resignations in two days is a terrible situation. That’s exactly what Johnson found himself in last week when Brittan Specht, Jason Jaworski and Preston Hill announced they were joining a Washington lobbying firm. Later that same day, reports broke that Raj Shah, a former communications director for the Trump administration, was also leaving.
“This is evidence that they know he will not be speaker at the end of the year.”
It’s no secret that Johnson made big changes to his own staff. There hadn’t been a major shakeup since Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Speakers Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and later Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) largely kept their predecessors’ staffs intact. Johnson chose to assemble a mostly new staff, an early sign of hope for conservatives hoping for a change of direction in Republican leadership.
Those who remain are Specht, Jaworsk and Hill, all reportedly on term-only terms to help with the transition, but one can’t leave the happy ship, and it’s no secret that discontent is simmering in a speaker’s office marred by inexperience.
“You’re seeing some of the heavyweights with political experience leaving,” one longtime senator aide and observer told The Blaze News. “It’s the professionals who are leaving. Maybe no one was listening to them. It’s also evidence that they know he won’t be speaker at the end of the year.”
Republican criticism has often focused on Johnson’s chief of staff, Hayden Haines, who was Johnson’s chief of staff before Johnson’s surprise election victory and is considered by many to be incompetent as a top congressional staffer. Meanwhile, Johnson’s policy director, Dan Ziegler, has reportedly struggled to predict the other side in negotiations between the “four corners” of Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. This inexperience is simply exhausting for staffers who can make more money for fewer hours elsewhere, multiple Republicans told The Blaze News.
“Having experienced policy staffers like Specht, Hill and Jaworski was a critical asset to a team relatively new to leadership,” one former Republican leadership staffer explained to The Blaze News. “Their absence is a major loss to the team.”
And that level of professionalism is not easy to find with public funding: “There are very few people operating at that policy level within the congressional system that we can afford to hire,” explained a senior House conservative aide.
But Johnson’s weaknesses aren’t limited to staff defections. Rep. Steve Scalise, the majority leader from Louisiana, has taken the lead in reporting on the GOP reconciliation agenda to conservative advocacy groups such as the Republican Study Committee and the Conservative Action Project, effectively launching a shadow race for the top spot.
“He’s basically on a publicity tour,” a Conservative Action Project breakfast attendee told The Blaze News.
It’s an aggressive strategy, made credible by Johnson’s policy talent exodus. The questions for Scalise are, first, whether he can actually seize power, and second, whether Republican nominee Donald Trump can get what he really wants out of this negotiation. Scalise will essentially be shadowboxing with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who doesn’t like to share information.
Scalise’s success aside, Mike Johnson’s future is bleak. That’s not a criticism, it’s a reality.
Blaze News: The liberal media is desperately trying to undermine Justice Alito and link him to the Bud Light boycott.
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In other news
Senators target McKinsey & Company for committing treason
After submitting their reports to China, Rubio and Hawley are targeting the global advisory network. Controlling the War
Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) I sent a letter The firm on Wednesday called on its partners at McKinsey Global Management to come clean about their dealings with China and halt any future transactions.
The company denied a Financial Times report in February linking it to a report that said the Chinese military could defeat the U.S. The Urban China Initiative, the think tank that produced the report, said: Co-founder It was created by McKinsey, shared McKinsey’s Beijing address and was hosted on a McKinsey domain.
According to the report, the report was compiled based on McKinsey research, questions about the initiative were directed to McKinsey’s China office, the report’s foreword was written by McKinsey’s China head Laura Wetzel, who reportedly delivered the report personally to then-Premier Li Keqiang, the second-highest ranking official in the Chinese government, before his retirement.
McKinsey has deep ties to the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the Director of National Intelligence, according to a November 2023 report obtained by The Blaze News.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has paid McKinsey approximately $450 million since 2008. The firm earned these revenues while fulfilling 90 prime contracts and 15 subcontracts for the department. The firm has also received at least $17 million from the FBI and undisclosed amounts from the CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The firm’s DOD projects focus on the F-35 fighter jet program, missile defense systems, and advanced microelectronics. McKinsey still has contracts with the DOD.
McKinsey works for dozens of Chinese state-owned enterprises, which reportedly account for 30% of the firm’s total business in China. These state-owned enterprise clients include some of the most influential and controversial companies, such as COSCO Shipping, whose maritime fleet has allegedly helped the Chinese navy expand overseas, and China Communications Construction and China Unicom, which have allegedly helped build artificial islands to support dubious territorial claims in the South China Sea.
“Your company’s inability to be honest about its dealings with China disqualifies it from doing business with the U.S. government in the future,” the two Republicans wrote. “Your company has sought to undermine the U.S. government economically and militarily at the behest of our primary geopolitical adversary.”
Financial Times: McKinsey-led think tank advises China on policies that stoking tensions with the US
Fires: Tablet: “What Nelly Saw”
The Free Press’s Nellie Bowles’ new book, “The Morning After the Revolution: Reporting from the Wrong Side of History” was panned by the usual committee members. The New York Times Book Review accused her of the egregious crime of not wanting homeless vagrants to take over city parks. The New Yorker and the Washington Post were incensed that she criticized this grand new experiment. So what exactly went wrong? Tablet reports what this liberal renegade actually saw.
Wokeness in the early 2020s has a sombre allure precisely because it was (and still is?) a patchwork rather than a coherent ideology. In this respect it is similar, but more like, liberalism, conservatism, and a few other isms. Wokeness began as a neo-Puritan exercise in self-examination toward the spiritual renewal of enlightened “white people” in the wake of Floyd’s murder. This project merged with a patrol of speech engineered by an academic elite who carried a plethora of new rhetoric with them. When the pandemic hit, protesters threw themselves into the surveillance state and power, because social change can only be dictated from above.
But wokeism quickly added the other side: armed liberation zones in West Coast cities run by violent, male youths who weren’t bothered by the color of their skin (mostly super pale, since this was the Pacific Northwest) but ran rampant like bite-sized made men wielding AKs. These anarchist spaces didn’t last long, and people got killed. So wokeism pivoted to more gentle forms of self-expression, like queering yourself in creative ways, even if you were pure vanilla. (Bowles is referring to the speech given by Michaela Kennedy Cuomo, daughter of Andrew Cuomo, when she came out as “demisexual,” meaning she only wanted sex with men.) (She’s emotionally attached.) Somewhere in there was a stroke of genius from a middle-aged white woman, Tema Okun, who said that black kids, and probably white kids too, shouldn’t try to get the right answers in school, that objectivity is a harmful whiteness. Oh, and there was also ending prison sentences for theft, destroying public monuments and paintings of “white men,” helping drug addicts get high, and other interesting stuff.
Puritanism and libertarianism were strange bedfellows, as was the somewhat deranged Murray Rothbard. The woke movement. In the 1960s, Rothbard had called for the abolition of the police because vigilantes would do a much better job in a free market. But the new woke libertarianism was dressed up in a utopian social welfare guise, which made it even more confusing. Cops would not be replaced by armed gangsters, but by social welfare professionals. They would eradicate all crime, because humans are inherently good and only do bad things because of social oppression. But there was still room for healthy mayhem, as long as it was left-wing violence directed at the police and others deemed “fascist.”
Over time, the puritanical aspects of wokeism faded, and the impulse to shame white people was replaced by a fad for transhumanist sexuality, coupled with praise for noble “cultural bodies” that remained non-white. (Bowles quotes a professor on the radio who claims that “rape did not exist among indigenous peoples before contact with white people.”) For now, at least, it’s over with the decidedly non-white Hamas paying tribute to the noble hang gliders who bravely resist the white Jews they are burning and raping.
