It didn’t take long. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told a room of wealthy Republican donors over the weekend that he intends to rein in insurgents and remove them from committees, Punchbowl reported. ”
The speaker took just six minutes to completely unpack the 2012 Republican’s political views, from support for unwinnable foreign wars and border surrender to warrantless spying and anti-Semitism fiascos. It only took a month. It took him just a few weeks before he began to think he had power comparable to the 2012 Republican leaders. But does John Beyner, with his Bible, have any bite under his bark? The answer is almost certainly no.
The centre-left coalition Mr Johnson cobbled together will not survive the new year.
Johnson knows he can’t kick members off committees mid-session. That would require a vote in the chamber, but in any case the revolt against him was too great, with 55 Republicans in Congress, a record high. vote against Just last month, about the “partisan procedural vote” on war spending in Ukraine. A majority of Republicans joined the “no” camp in the second half.
Or he could simply refuse to reassign committee positions in the next Congress to members who continue to block him, using his influence on the steering committee to make that happen. right. If he tried, he would face a more widespread and popular uprising than that sparked by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
Finally (and most likely), Johnson could wait until the week after the November election. At that time, House Republicans could meet and vote on the rules they should follow internally for the next Congress. If this happens, he could write that any Republican lawmaker who votes against a “partisan procedural vote” in the new Congress would be automatically stripped of their committee assignments.
There are usually about 100 Republican senators who do what the speaker says in every respect, so if the speaker pushes for this change, it will pass. He is also likely to rescind the single-vote motion to resign that blocked him from serving as chairman and ended his predecessor’s chairmanship.
He can win the fight against conference rules, but he can’t make them stick. That’s because he will have to run for speaker again at the start of the new parliament in January. And then his enemies will capture him (and his allies will desert him).
Even if Republicans were to expand their majority, it would fall short of the 30 votes that former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and others once commanded. The reality of the redrawn Congressional map means Republicans could add 10 seats to the November quorum. This means the incoming speaker has little room to anger his colleagues in January’s leadership election.
The centre-left coalition Mr Johnson cobbled together will not survive the new year, and the war hawks and big spenders he is close to will rush to the ramparts to help him when he really needs it. You’ll also notice that there isn’t one. give him the crown again.
Anyone who wants to be a speaker, including Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana), Elise Stefanik (R-Minn.), Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and many others, can attend the caucus. It is necessary to negotiate with That’s where conservatives, like House Democrats at the time, will demand concessions in caucus rules. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is the first to make the motion to resign.
“You need a margin of at least 10 seats to effectively kick people out and not have any repercussions,” one senior conservative and veteran of the Boehner-Johnson fight told Blaze News. Tight partisan margins make this reality a “permanent feature of the House going forward,” the staffer explained.
Leaders may want that. Moderate and liberal Republicans may want that. Some people in a potential Trump administration no doubt also want a peaceful House. Johnson simply can’t make it happen. He is almost certain that he will not even be able to retain the Speakership in the next Congress.
It’s been 10 years since Mr. Boehner’s infamous crackdown on conservative Republicans helped found the Freedom Caucus. Vayner knew his city and tried to use his knowledge to crush the rebellion. He threatened fundraisers to remove recalcitrant members, stripped them of their House meal tickets, and infamously targeted committee seats.
In the end, one of the committee chairs loyal to Mr. Beyner was nearly kicked out of the committee he was trying to suppress, and Mr. Beyner himself ended up retiring to Florida. “He did enough to piss them off, but not enough to change their behavior,” one lawmaker recalled.
And Mike Johnson is no John Boehner.
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In other news
Trump trial derailed
It was a whirlwind day in court (sorry) when former porn actress and now Trump critic Stormy Daniels took the stand Tuesday in Donald Trump’s hush money trial.
Prosecutors successfully pushed Daniels to tell graphic, sordid details about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The judge, who is usually very respectful of Democratic prosecutors’ offices, reprimanded both Daniels and her prosecutors for her testimony.
Trump’s lawyers asked for a mistrial over “highly biased” testimony that unfairly swayed the jury against him. Are you wondering what the sex positions Daniels and Trump may have engaged in during their one-night stand 18 years ago have to do with the 2016 allegations of falsifying business records? You may be wondering.
But, of course, the judge did not request a mistrial, and the defense tried to undermine Daniels’ credibility during cross-examination.
There will be no trial on Wednesday, so the case was scheduled to continue Thursday at 9:30 a.m.
Campus collapse
This week, MIT will officially end its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Pledge and will no longer force it on future employees.
“We can create an inclusive environment in many ways,” says Principal Sally Kornbluth. stated in a statement“But forced speech violates freedom of expression and does not work.”
That it took so many years for such an obvious point to emerge does not speak well of the state of elite education, but in other areas the news is murkier. Further south, school leaders at Columbia University in New York canceled graduation ceremonies in anticipation of continued riots.
Meanwhile, Ivy League students continue to assert their presence, including misspelling the word “Palestine” in graffiti at the entrance to the hall they occupied.Former rapper Macklemore made a chilling recording of him song I support them no matter what their goals are. In it, he argues that forcing the Chinese Communist Party to sell TikTok would undermine freedom.
Meanwhile, UNC-Chapel Hill’s leadership fighting with The university also has its own radical professors, one of whom is threatening to withhold student grades until the university lifts the suspensions of student members of the mob. It’s amazing that it took this long. At this point, it’s past time to clean the house of the “teacher” who made this all possible in the first place.
blaze news original: Mob Rule — The most disgusting behavior of pro-Hamas campus protesters was caught on video.
Fire starts: “Signal’s Katherine Maher Problem” city journal.
A good rule for paranoid people to remember is: If it’s a widely used “encrypted” messaging service or phone, it’s safe to assume that government intelligence agencies were involved in its creation. Paranoid or not, this is a good rule of thumb, and it’s likely to be true in Signal. In City Journal, Christopher Rufo reports:
Let’s start with the original story. The technology behind Signal, which operates as a non-profit foundation, was initially funded in part by his $3 million grant from the government-backed Open Technology Fund (OTF), which was spun off from Radio Free Asia. It was covered. It was established as an anti-communist information service during the Cold War. OTF-funded signals “encrypted mobile communication tools” to “Internet Freedom Defenders Around the World.”
Some insiders claim that OTF’s ties to the U.S. intelligence community are deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but requested anonymity said that over time, “this project was actually a State Department-related effort that was designed to use open source Internet projects created by the hacker community as a tool. “What we had planned became more and more obvious as time went on,” he told me. “For America’s foreign policy goals” – “including empowering activists” [and] It is a political party that opposes the government that America does not like. ” Whatever the merits of such efforts, this allegation, if true, suggests involvement in government signaling and should be scrutinized more closely.
Another potential problem is the current president of the Signal Foundation, Katherine Maher. started her career as a U.S.-backed regime change operative;For example, during the Arab Spring, Maher Ran Digital Communications Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute A primarily government-funded organization that works in conjunction with American foreign policy campaigns. Mr. Maher developed relationships with online dissidents and used American technology to advance the interests of U.S.-backed color revolutions abroad.
You can read more at City Journal.
