Donald J. McCarthy and the Border Crisis: How to Make the Most Out of the Misleading ‘Pelosimatrix’

His aides insisted that he was joking when he mused about trying to hit her with the gavel.

The same week, Mr. McCarthy held a news conference to discuss his plan to oust Nancy Pelosi. Mr. Hammill said it was about average for an incoherent and boring politician like the minority leader, whose only real accomplishment so far is to type up a radical right-wing wish list and send a clear message to the American people.

In response to the accusation that she was blocking Democrats from speaking out about the crisis at the border, Ms. Pelosi said that she didn’t know what he was talking about.

With McCarthy getting the gavel on Friday, the House will soon focus on investigating President Joe Biden, his administration and his family. More challenging for McCarthy and his conference are the looming fights later this year over government spending and the debt ceiling, where McCarthy cut deals on spending during this week’s negotiations likely to be unacceptable both to Democrats and the White House as well as Senate Republicans.

Title 42 allows authorities at the US-Mexico border to turn migrants away if they’re in the country illegally. In fiscal year 2022, amid mass migration in the Western hemisphere, US border encounters topped 2 million, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. More than 1 million were turned away.

Replacing Reply to the Bound on the Use of Impeachment for Political Purposes: A Sign of the Gaetz Inevitability

“We will never use impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”

“I’m very supportive of Ukraine,” McCarthy said. I believe there has to be accountability going forward. … You always need, not a blank check, but make sure the resources are going to where it is needed. And make sure Congress, and the Senate, have the ability to debate it openly.”

While McCarthy made similar comments during a press conference last week, it’s just the latest sign of the lengths to which the House Republican leader is going in an attempt to pacify and win over conservatives who are still on the fence about voting for him for speaker.

McCarthy can only win the speakership if he gets four GOP votes and Gaetz is not going to allow that.

“I think ‘Stay in Mexico’ you have to have right off the bat,” he said, referring to the controversial policy where migrants were forced to remain in Mexico while they wait for their immigration proceedings in the United States.

McCarthy said to help stem the flow of fentanyl across the border, you have to take a very aggressive stance on China to stop the poison from coming and then give the border agents the resources that they need.

After this bruising episode, the House Republicans face even bigger tests: Will they hold America’s credit rating hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling? They will have oversight over the Biden administration. Will they block aid to Ukraine? McCarthy is expected to be able to effectively lead.

The Debt Ceiling Problem: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Senate Appointment after the Pelosi-Pelosi Inequality

“If you’re going to give a person a higher limit, wouldn’t you first say you should change your behavior, so you just don’t keep raising and all the time?” he said. “You shouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna let you keep spending money.’ No household should do that.

White House advisers point to that period as one of self-inflicted turmoil that pushed the US economy to the brink of disaster, citing it as evidence that there should be no negotiation at all. McCarthy voted to raise the debt ceiling when a Republican was in the White House.

McCarthy was adamant that he would not risk a default by using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip. You don’t have to.

To that end, McCarthy has vowed to reinstate freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to her committee assignments, despite being stripped of her assignments by Democrats last year for her inflammatory remarks.

McCarthy said there was no restriction on which committees Greene could serve on. Greene has previously told CNN she wants a seat on the House Oversight Committee, which will play a key role in GOP-led investigations in a majority.

Every other member will have committees that she is going to serve on. As we go through the steering committee members request different committees and we’ll look at it. “She can put through the committees she wants, just like any other member in our conference that gets elected.”

Greene is not the only member who has spouted conspiracy theories or incendiary rhetoric. Most recently, some Republicans have mocked the brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, or peddled fringe conspiracy theories about the incident.

The Freedom Caucus of the United States: Where is the President? Where are we going? Where do we stand, what are we doing, and where do we go?

“The first thing I’ll ask the president to do is not to call half the nation idiots or say things about them because they have a difference of opinion,” he said. I think leadership matters, and I believe it starts with the president. The speaker will be the first one to start.

“I’ve heard from multiple of my constituents who question the wisdom of proceeding forward with that leadership,” Biggs said, adding that there needs to be a “frank conversation” about who they elect for the top job.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said it was a “red line” for her, but not everyone in the Freedom Caucus is united on whether to make that a hard line.

Moderate lawmakers know they can exert the same influence over everything from legislation to investigations, even though hardliners laid out lengthy list of demands for GOP leadership with a slim margin. Moderates hope the speaker’s race will set the tone for their new majority, even though they have accused McCarthy’s conservatives of creating chaos and creating a bad image of them.

Afterward, McCarthy and his allies knew they had a problem. They saw his opposition growing amid anger over McCarthy’s threats and tough talk. So they began to work on a strategy: Take the temperature down and divide the opponents away from Gaetz and provide concessions to far-right members of the conference who want more say in the legislative process.

CNN has yet to project which party will have control of the House of Representatives, though as of Friday morning, CNN has projected that Republicans have 211 seats to Democrats’ 198.

Defending the Never Kevin Movement: Delayed Internal Leadership Elections in Florida and the House of Representatives to the House Speaker’s Confirmation

Norman said the group hopes to formalize a lengthier list of all the rules changes they are seeking. They are also pushing to delay next week’s internal leadership elections, though there is no indication McCarthy plans to do so.

When asked whether McCarthy should get credit for delivering the majority, Norman responded: “The taxpayers that voted the representatives in deserve the credit.”

McCarthy supporters have stated that there is no real alternative, there is only a consensus candidate that has 218 votes in the bag. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican who is against McCarthy, said on Fox News that a new speaker candidate will be elected on the second ballot.

Gaetz said the C team shouldn’t start with a slim majority. “We need to put our star players in a position to shine brightest so that we can attract more people to our policies and ideas.”

The new majority of Republicans in the House may not have a clear leader when they take control on Tuesday, raising the possibility of a floor fight that would delay setting committees or conducting oversight. McCarthy’s supporters are bracing for the worst before the speaker vote, as the conference gathers one last time to make a decision about the speaker.

McConnell has been calling his colleagues over the last several days to shore up his support as his team plans to plow forward with leadership elections on Wednesday. They are going to have a Republican air clearing session on Tuesday.

Indeed, the small group of Republicans known as the “Never Kevin” movement – confident that Biggs could not win a majority of the House – has been trying to recruit a viable alternative, and claim “several” Republicans have privately told them they would be interested in running if McCarthy drops out. Their goal with voting for Biggs is to show that McCarthy is weak on the first ballot, which they hope would inspire other candidates to jump in.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is among those calling for a delay in the Senate leadership election scheduled for Wednesday, saying it “doesn’t make any sense” to have them this week.

Scott said he has received a lot of phone calls from people who want to find out if he will run. Is we still going to win Georgia? I’m not going to take anything off the table.”

Tom Emmer & the GOP: Too Many Big Losses in the House and Too Many Successes at the 2016 Midterm Seiberg Conference

The Republicans have had a disappointing time in the last two elections, and Trump aides and allies have been privately critical of Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer. CNN has not yet projected control of the lower chamber, but Republicans are in a strong position to gain control of the House. The GOP’s House whip position is up for grabs and Emmer is competing against Rep. Jim Banks.

They have been putting out an agenda and measuring the drapes. Nancy Pelosi told CNN they haven’t won it yet. After the election is over, there will be judgements made by party leaders as to how we go forward.

The finger pointing has begun, and those conversations are likely to accelerate as the full House and Senate return to Washington this week.

But others in the party have placed the blame squarely on Trump, whose hand-picked candidates failed in key Senate races that determined control of the Senate. Plus McConnell’s super PAC spent more than any other group in Senate races – while Trump’s group spent a tiny fraction of that – a realty not lost on the Kentucky Republican’s allies.

There is a correlation between the number of big losses and the candidates with the slogan “Make America Great Again”. If fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, I think the party is unlikely to do well.

McConnell and Scott have been at odds all election seasons when it comes to strategy, with McConnell warning about candidate quality and Scott not taking a hands-off approach.

When pressed on whether he would challenge McConnell for the top spot, Scott didn’t rule it out — even though he would have little chance of succeeding.

McCarthy, at least for the moment, has been unmoved. McCarthy said that Biden didn’t understand when he was asked about his potential weakness as speaker.

Sen. Elise Stefanik and the Freedom Caucus: How Congress is trying to lock up support for Trump’s 2020 bid

“Basic political physics says you can’t appease the moderates and HFC all at the same time,” one senior Republican told CNN. If you straddle that fence you need to hope it’s not barbed wire.

A Republican source says that Trump is trying to lock up Republican support for his third bid for the White House and wants to see who GOP lawmakers endorse him. So far, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has been the highest-ranking Republican to officially back Trump’s 2024 bid.

Several members of the Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy in his office Monday as they seek to extract concessions from him in exchange for their speaker votes.

Rep. Bob Good, who said McCarthy faces “an uphill climb” to the speakership, said they’ve asked McCarthy to bring to them his proposal for running the House.

While their main focus has been on rules that would empower individual members and weaken the speaker, that’s not their only issue.

He wants the place to change dramatically, to reflect on the people and to acknowledge how broken it is. It is incumbent upon anyone wanting to lead to lay out their vision and how they would change their portion of it.

But hard-right Republicans seized the opportunity to extract promises — and in some cases apologies — from their would-be leaders. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana asked if he would investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi if Mr. McCarthy were to take over the leadership of the House.

“No, I’m not going to get into speculation,” Scalise told CNN. “Obviously, our focus is on getting it resolved by January 3. And there’s a lot of conversations that everybody has been having, Kevin, surely, with the members who have expressed concerns.”

The congressman apologized and said that he should have waited until he had more facts to say, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

What do the Midterms have to Tell Us about the Electoral Commission? The Story of Jim-Andre Jordan, Tom Cole, and Andy McCarthy

— One interpretation of the midterms was that voters – exhausted by the turbulence of the Trump years and a once-in-a-century pandemic – gave a cry for stability and calm and were therefore not willing to hand all the power available in November back to Republicans. (While they fell short of a red wave in the House, the GOP failed to win back the Senate and Democrats grew their majority). The scenes in the House on Tuesday weren’t what voters had in mind.

Representative Tom Cole from Oklahoma said that it was going to be a narrow one. “It makes it really critical that you’ve got somebody with superb political skills. There is somebody that knows everything about this conference.

McCarthy is going to go through multiple votes for speaker for the first time in a century. A GOP source tells CNN that they are going to war.

“Teams win. There are fractured teams that lose, and that is according to the co-chairman of the Main Street Caucus. “We can’t let a handful hold the conference hostage.”

One senior Republican said that if McCarthy fails in his bid for the leadership position, he could hurt his ability to get votes by making moves to run. Yet the same source predicted that Scalise would have an easier time winning over the right-wing of the conference given that he is seen as more ideological than McCarthy.

Others feel that the congressman didn’t push for more support for McCarthy or insist on sticking with him no matter how long it takes. Some Republicans say that if he ever gets the chance to be speaker, that will hurt him.

At one point, Ohio firebrand Rep. Jim Jordan, a hero of the right, stood to nominate McCarthy for speaker, only for 19 of the rejectionists to vote that he should have the top job that he insists he doesn’t want. (Jordan is more interested in lacerating Biden’s appointees as chair of the Judiciary Committee).

“I will vote for Andy for speaker, subject to what we’re discussing,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican after leaving a meeting in McCarthy’s office on Wednesday. He later added: “All this is positive. We’re having good change, regardless of what happens. And you’ll see more of it.”

A new group of Republican hardliners on Thursday laid out a number of conditions for their vote, but they did not explicitly threaten to vote against McCarthy if their demands aren’t met.

McCarthy also pledged to allow more members of the Freedom Caucus to serve on the Rules Committee and to hold votes for bills that were priorities for the holdouts, including on border security and term limits.

One member told CNN that they were concerned about McCarthy restoring the motion to leave the speaker’s chair. The tool was constantly wielded over former Speaker John Boehner’s head before he eventually resigned, and most Republicans are concerned that it would hamper their ability to effectively govern.

“I think that’s one of the reasons that we didn’t see a red wave … the idea that people are sick and tired of the noise, and they’re sick and tired of the fighting,” Rep. David Joyce, an Ohio Republican, said of the impact of a January 3 floor fight. “And I know I get that wherever I go in my district is, ‘why can’t you guys just get things done?’”

The conservative cabal of 20 or so representatives – most of them election-denying Trump loyalists – withheld their votes for McCarthy over repeated rounds of voting, extracting major concessions from the Republican representative that whittled away at the institutional power of the speakership.

But sources also admitted that the new proposals, even if accepted, would not win over all the holdouts McCarthy needs. The continuing brouhaha raises a deeper question about why the GOP leader can’t get it done. Any incoming speaker who has proven so incapable of getting his coalition in line will be perennially at risk of being swept out of office.

Some Republicans have approached Henry Cuellar, a moderate Democrat who is from Texas, to learn more about the idea.

Joyce said some members contacted him about possibly running, but he dismissed it. “At the end of the day, Kevin’s going to be the new speaker.”

New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the next House Democratic leader, said, “there are no behind-the-scenes conversations” that he has had with Republicans to put up an alternative candidate. If McCarthy could not get the votes, his caucus would help to decide the next speaker.

Jeffries told CNN that Democrats are in the process of organizing the conference. The Republicans are in the process of organizing a conference. Let’s see what happens on January 3.”

Some of the potentially consensus picks include retiring congressmen who voted for impeachment of Donald Trump and co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.

It would take agreement from all Democrats and the help of five Republicans. Upton said he has no plans to be in Washington that day, telling CNN: “I’ll be skiing.”

Westerman is a Republican from Arkansas, where minority Democrats joined forces with a small group of Republicans to decide the speaker of the legislature. Westerman privately made this case to his colleagues at a closed-door meeting this week.

Westerman and the GOP in the dark: The attack on the House Intelligence Committee, the investigation of the Capitol, and the challenge of Rep. Scott Perry

“I’m concerned about January 3 getting here and us not being able to form a Congress and organize committees and getting delayed in pushing the policy objectives that we want to push,” Westerman said.

The discussion about changing House rules is good for the party. He said he was not excited about destructive movement.

Mr. McCarthy has not shared his plan with his leadership team because they think it’s a display of paranoia. Instead, he has been spotted in recent days around the Capitol and the Republican National Committee headquarters nearby with Jeff Miller, a Republican lobbyist who is among his closest confidants.

Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the current Freedom Caucus chairman who was involved in efforts by Mr. Trump to remove the acting attorney general who stood by the results of the 2020 election, has also been involved in the talks. He accused Mr. McCarthy and his allies of leaking details of their talks to reporters.

When Nancy Pelosi was short of votes she quietly picked off defectors to win the speaker’s gavel. Ms. Pelosi, renowned for her ability to arm-twist and coax, won seven votes by agreeing to limit her tenure, picked up another eight by promising to implement rules aimed at fostering more bipartisan legislating, and won over her sole would-be challenger by creating a subcommittee chairmanship for her.

The California Republican has already made a series of pledges in an effort to appease the right flank of his party. He traveled to the southern border and called on Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings. He promised Ms. Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments for making a series of violent and conspiratorial social media posts before she was elected, a plum spot on the Oversight Committee.

He will hold public hearings to scrutinize the security breakdowns that happened during the attack at the Capitol. He has been meeting with ultra conservatives to get them to vote for him. And on Monday night, he publicly encouraged his members to vote against the lame-duck spending bill to fund the government.

Republicans won control of the House through democratic means. But their far smaller-than-expected majority is offering extra leverage to the kind of pro-Trump extremists many voters appeared to reject in last year’s midterms.

The California Republican is fighting a rearguard battle against members who want to make it easier to eject a sitting speaker and he’s appeasing ex-President Donald Trump’s extremism and that of acolytes like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to save a narrow political power base propping up his dream of running the House.

Charlie Dent wrote that the role of Speaker was weakened because of the reported concessions he made during the political shakedown. … It begs the question: Is surrendering your way to victory really winning? And when will this appeasement ever end, considering it only makes this extremist faction more powerful?”

Can Greene be facetious? When Kevin McCarthy was angry about Fuentes, and when he told CNN, he didn’t apologize for his actions

This is one reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to fund the government for a full year – a bipartisan framework agreement for which was announced Tuesday night – or for just a few months is so critical since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new speaker next month.

Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday about Greene’s latest inflammatory comments, McCarthy shrugged them off: “Oh, I think she said she was being facetious,” the possible future speaker answered. The attitude was consistent with his attempts to rewrite the history of the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, when he briefly said Trump bore responsibility.

The same dynamic was at play when McCarthy declined to directly criticize the ex-president for meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a dinner also featuring Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, who has recently made a string of antisemitic remarks. In a histrionic performance at the White House after meeting Biden and other congressional leaders last month, the House Republican leader falsely claimed that Trump had condemned Fuentes four times, when he hadn’t done so once.

CNN reported that at the White House meeting, McCarthy indicated that he would be open to a large bill. But while Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell worked on such a measure Tuesday and declared it “broadly appealing,” McCarthy told his members that he was a “Hell no” on the measure.

The split not only augurs likely future tensions between Republicans in the House and McConnell, it raises the possibility that it will become politically more difficult for some Republican senators to vote for a spending deal now – especially as conservative media has taken up McCarthy’s line.

According to multiple people involved in the discussions, some GOP members have contemplated expelling the anti-Kevin McCarthy group from their committees in an effort to put an end to their rebellion.

The dynamic offers a preview of the tensions between the moderate and MAGA wings that are likely to spill over next year with a razor-thin House majority. Part of what’s fueling the divide: House Republicans who identify as either centrist or part of the GOP’s so-called governing wing feel validated following a midterm cycle in which many extremists candidates failed.

Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, said people should not double down on failed policies and failed candidates. “There’s a reason the midterms were the way that they were: people who are left of center, right of center were the most successful.”

GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the handful of Republican lawmakers to come out in firm opposition to McCarthy as speaker, also acknowledged the reality of a narrowly divided House.

“We are in a community of common fate,” he told CNN. “We have to acknowledge that the ship isn’t going anywhere if five people won’t row in that direction. It is true on impeachment, on the speakership vote, on the budget, and on policy choices.

“Some of the questions that remain unanswered is what other deals are going to be cut, you know, what guarantees, what concessions are going to be made?” Womack asked. We have to be careful not to give a lot of that leverage away.

The House Freedom Caucus is Getting Started: A Conversation with Burchett and Corresponding Sen. Blake Moore at the White House

In a Wednesday conference-wide meeting, the latest of the series ahead of the new Congress, McCarthy held a forum to let his members continue debating potential rules changes and other concessions, even though there is still no resolution on the controversial motion to vacate the chair.

The Republicans regrouped for the first time since the heated Tuesday meeting. McCarthy made a conference call, which could be more easily managed, instead of having an in-person session. McCarthy told his conference that a deal had yet to be finalized but that progress had been made. He made a point of thanking Roy for his role.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans are out there having conversations and talking about different points of view,” GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida told CNN.

During the high-stakes negotiations, members from different groups have had time to play with one another. Burchett hosted a Christmas party in his office this week, where all corners of Capitol Hill came together, including some anti-McCarthy lawmakers. Burchett rode the skateboard of the Gaetz wife amid the fountain and “charcuterie plate” made out of Cheez Whiz and Ritz crackers.

The various sides all agree on most things, and there is no need to worry about a tense year, according to Rep. Blake Moore, who identifies himself as part of the governing wing.

Moore told CNN that there is not an enormous amount of drama. I talked to members of the House Freedom Caucus about what we agree on. And it’s an enormous amount.”

If the Republican leader cannot demonstrate progress when the House meets for yet another vote on the speaker on Thursday, he will be in deep trouble. It was discovered that McCarthy had made further concessions, after staving off the roll call vote on Wednesday evening.

“Remember, this is a presidential year, so you only have so many months to really get out there and govern,” McCarthy said. You want to get going. Every day you lose, if you lose a quarter, you don’t start strong. So you don’t get new, stronger candidates. You can’t get more resources to give those candidates the message.

McCarthy’s dire warning comes as the five GOP members – Gaetz, Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana – have warned they may vote as a bloc on January 3, meaning they’ll all vote the same way.

A lot of those people are against Kevin. I think almost every one of them are very much inclined toward Trump, and me toward them. I have to tell them, because you are playing a dangerous game. You could be in a lot of bad situations. The example I use is the one that has Paul Ryan as the speaker. Is that what I’m saying? It could be a doomsday scenario.”

Speaker Paul Ryan was subjected to a rejectionist wing of the party on simple matters of governance. Funding the government, preventing default on the full faith and credit of the United States, providing emergency relief to states and communities ravaged by natural disasters, and reauthorizing essential programs all became dramatic, high stakes fights.

Biden has spoken with McCarthy twice in the months since the election. They’ve met once, with the other top congressional leaders. Their exchanges have mostly been played out over the course of the years, in the forms of the press, aides and on the internet.

The House will be stuck immobile until the standoff is resolved. If the fight continues much longer, it is feared that McCarthy might not be able to pull off his gamble for speaker.

The editorial board claimed that the Republicans were the only gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

“This is a lot of unfinished business this year that they would have to take care of next year and I know from having been over there, that wouldn’t be easy, especially when you’ have a narrow majority.”

“We’re enduring the silly season of a campaign. After you get elected, that is over. He said that the silliness is still visible because he is running for Speaker of the House.

The Devil Is in the Details: What people will not move on to vote on House Republican Referendum No. 135 (January 3rd)

The threshold that is required for a floor vote on ousting the sitting speaker has been given a concession by House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in private conversations this week.

The five-person threshold is still too high according to some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics.

Some moderates within the party are willing to compromise on a 50 person threshold if it means that a five-person threshold is too low.

All of this will be a major topic of discussion during a crucial conference call on Friday afternoon that McCarthy scheduled with the various ideological caucuses in the House GOP, just four days ahead of the January 3 speaker’s vote.

Norman said that the devil is in the details. Writing and sealed with social media posts, the details of the referendum are what people will not move on to vote.

The Dean Obeidallah Show can be heard on the radio every day. Follow him on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

George Santos, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a Democrat Trying to Make Sense of the Media. The Case against McCarthy and the Science of the Holocaust

The House majority is facing a distraction from George Santos, the New York congressman who lied about his education and job history to get elected. The freshman Republican from New York told CNN that he cannot talk about what the Republicans ought to be doing when they are talking about George Santos.

Santos also claimed that his grandparents fled the horrors of the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium — only to have this version of his family background contradicted by a review of genealogy records. Santos’ campaign did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

Adding to the firestorm are recent developments that federal and state authorities have launched criminal investigations into Santos over his finances and fabrications. When he first ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2020, Santos reported he had no assets, yet somehow he was able to lend his 2022 campaign $700,000.

With no criticism from McCarthy, Santos will be sworn in as a member of Congress on Tuesday. This is today’s GOP on display. Even if it is gravely bad for the republic, it is a party that stands for nothing other than gaining power at any cost.

McCarthy played up accusations by Fox Business that the FBI worked to suppress news stories that hurt Democrats, and he also criticized the Biden administration’s border policy.

One source said the McCarthy world was worried about looking weak and like he was bleeding support, and that’s why they wanted to reverse the narrative.

After the California Republican offered a number of key concessions to win over his critics, four days before the speaker vote, he tried to sell them on his speakership bid.

But now with just one day to go, a group of at least nine Republicans have made clear that they’re still not sold – despite McCarthy’s warning and even after he gave in to some of their most ardent demands, which he outlined during a Sunday evening conference call.

We are preparing for a fight. Not the way we want to start out in our new majority, but you can’t really negotiate against the position of ‘give us everything we ask for and we won’t guarantee anything in return,’” Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, a member of the centrist-leaning Republican Governance Group, told CNN.

Kevin got a lot of credit from me. He’s brought everyone in and worked really hard to figure out a way forward. This place should be run better. There is a belief that some people are negotiating in bad faith.

McCarthy worked with supporters and critics to find consensus on changes to the rules designed to win over holdouts during the week leading up to Christmas.

Kevin McCarthy (D-Cheshire) vows to keep the House afloat for the next four legislative term, but he can’t

He can only lose four votes in the House, so far at least five Republicans have pledged to oppose him, with nearly a dozen other GOP legislators saying they are still not there.

Lawmakers worked over the weekend to finalize the rules package. Ultimately, McCarthy informed Republicans on the conference-wide call Sunday evening that he agreed to the five-person threshold on the motion to vacate – which he billed as a “compromise.”

McCarthy made one last pitch for speaker by releasing the final rules package later that evening and mailing a letter to his colleauges stating that he would make certain that the GOP’s ideological groups were better represented on committees.

Moderates on Sunday’s call expressed their frustration and said they would only swallow the concession if it would get McCarthy the votes. They worry that some of the hardliners won’t come through in the end because they are not negotiating in good faith.

That group is still pushing for a single member to be able to call for a vote toppling the speaker, which is what it used to be before Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed the rules, and they also want a commitment that leadership won’t play in primaries.

“Thus far, there continue to be missing specific commitments with respect to virtually every component of our entreaties, and thus, no means to measure whether promises are kept or broken,” the letter, obtained by CNN, states.

In another strategic move, McCarthy postponed races for any contested committee chairs until after the speaker vote. He said it was to allow freshman members to have input in the process, but other members believe it was a way to insulate himself from potential criticism from members who end up losing their races.

That century-old moment of dysfunction haunted the House last week as dissident Republicans made Kevin McCarthy scramble for votes through 15 ballots. Some of the people who were against the son of a Bakersfield firefighter felt that he wanted to change the rules to please McCarthy. His excruciating path to eventual victory – culminating in the sight of one Republican lawmaker being restrained after he lunged at another – presages a stormy future for the bitterly divided House majority.

McCarthy’s defenders vowed to him and each other that they wouldn’t let a bunch of members control their conference.

The Freedom Caucus has been divided over McCarthy but they have worked in tandem to play hardball.

The fight over the new House speaker: politics and politics in the last 118th Congress, and how Republicans will respond to the senator’s frustrations

The committee in charge of administrative matters sent a letter last week outlining the practical implications and pitfalls of a drawn-out speaker’s fight. The House Rules package is needed to allow committees to pay staff.

The same memo, which was first reported by Politico and obtained by CNN, also warned that student loan payments for committee staff wouldn’t be disbursed if a rules package isn’t adopted by mid-January.

The fight over the speakership, which began Tuesday on the first day of the 118th Congress, has thrown the new House GOP majority into chaos and undercut the party’s agenda.

Even with the race far from settled, boxes from McCarthy’s office were spotted by CNN being moved into the speaker’s suite last week – a standard protocol, but a sign he’s committed to seeking the job.

“It is a bizarre game of chicken where both sides have ripped the steering wheel off the dashboard and are just going pedal to the metal,” one member said of the ongoing standoff between pro- and anti-McCarthy factions.

The House could go into recess to allow for Republicans to privately meet, but 218 votes would be needed to cause a break in the floor action on Tuesday. Or the House could continue to vote until someone gets to 218 – a scenario that hasn’t happened since 1923 when Frederick Gillet won the speakership on the ninth ballot. A source familiar with the matter said that the chamber has no plans to recess and will continue to vote until McCarthy wins 218 votes.

Kevin McCarthy and the Shadow Candidate of the House GOP Conference – An Interview with Don Moore, Rep. Don Moore and the CNN Investigative Report

“Steve is very supportive,” said Rep. Don Moore, who is also a McCarthy supporter. He has said before that he is supporting McCarthy. Someday he might want to be a speaker. so he’s got to be tactful.”

He told CNN that their focus was to get it resolved by January 3. Kevin has been having a lot of conversations with members who have expressed concerns.

In a private House GOP call on Sunday, Scalise embraced his role as the incoming majority leader by laying out the agenda and the bills that would come to the floor this week – and even referenced McCarthy as the future speaker, according to a source on the call.

The hardliners want to reduce the threshold so that only a single member can call for a vote, something that other House Republicans don’t want to see because it would lead to chaos.

The GOP member said if it becomes clear that McCarthy won’t get their votes, people will become more against rule and operational changes.

A new candidate would emerge on Tuesday as Good promised not to be in a hurry to make a bad decision. He declined to specify the member and also declined to comment about Scalise.

“I’ll resist for a few more hours what I have resisted for a long time – which is to comment on specific candidates,” Good said. Kevin McCarthy is part of that problem.

The same people who want a more open and transparent GOP conference are getting behind a Shadow Candidate who will ambush Republicans at the begin of the new Congress, according to Rep. Johnson.

In an interview with CNN, Johnson said that members are growing increasingly frustrated with the intransigence of some of the holdouts.

GOP lawmaker said people should not believe it was a noble cause. One shouldn’t believe that this is anything other than self aggrandizement. They are trying to push procedures that aren’t germane to Washington and give themselves more power.

The real show is coming: Rep. Markwayne Mullin meets with Republican Sen.-elect Mick McCarthy in the House of Representatives

Sen.-elect Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican and outgoing House member, met with McCarthy in his office on Monday. Mullin, who has been helping to lobby House members to back McCarthy, said he and others have been encouraging McCarthy with a simple message: “Stay put.”

No matter what the outcome of the vote on the speaker of the House is, Republicans seem to be ready to adopt the hard-edged politics that voters in swing states rejected in the last election.

Editor’s Note: Charlie Dent is a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who was chair of the House Ethics Committee from 2015 until 2017 and chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies from 2015 until 2018. He is a political commentator. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinions on it.

Since then, the only selection that has required more than a single ballot came in 1923, when Republicans holding only a narrow majority comparable to their advantage this year took nine ballots to select their speaker. Then the complication was that a minority of left-leaning progressive Republicans initially resisted conservative incumbent Speaker Frederick Gillett.

The National Republican Party base will close ranks if there isn’t a speaker, since there is no other candidate with his experience and ability, according to a former chair. The majority of the Conference is loyal to him.

“In some ways, win or lose [for McCarthy] it doesn’t matter,” says Leslie Dach, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic-aligned group established to respond to the coming House investigations of the Biden administration. The die on the next two years has been cast by giving these people the power and podium.

Dach believes the House majority will reinforce the GOP’s image and allow them to pursue conservative grievances, like the FBI being “weaponized” against the right.

Dach believes the real show will be the empowerment, extreme MAGA types. “Every day that they are on a committee, every day they are on television, is a bad day for the entire Republican Party.”

Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, notes that the GOP has cumulatively lost enormous ground in those states since Trump took office.

There was only a single Democratic governor in five of the six states where he spoke, says Podhorzer, now chairman of the board of the analyst institute. “In a month, four of the five states will have Democratic governors, 9 of the 10 Senators are Democrats, and three of the state legislative chambers are led by Democrats.” Democrats in the states that aren’t going to vote for MAGA have won since 2016, he says.

“It was two midterms happening at the same time – depending on whether you were in a place where that new bubble of Democratic voters believed they had to come out to beat MAGA again,” Podhorzer argued.

The Scramble for the Speakership: Two Years of Reconciliation in the White House, and the Rise of New Power in the 118th Congress

That’s unlikely to create many problems for Republicans in the places where they are already strong. In the midterm, Republicans, as I’ve written, mostly consolidated their control over red-leaning America, easily holding governorships and state legislatures in many of the states (such as Florida, Texas, Iowa and Tennessee) that pursued the most aggressive conservative agendas over the past two years.

After days of negotiations that exposed deep divisions within the GOP and threw into question their ability to govern effectively in the 118th congress, the scramble for the speakership came. McCarthy’s victory against 20 defectors on Tuesday was a prime example of the success of the strategy McCarthy and his top lieutenants developed to defeat Gaetz’s “Never Kevin” movement.

If anything, McCarthy got weaker with each roll call, even if one senior GOP source told CNN he would never back down and “we’re going to war.” CNN reported that some GOP members are now calling the rebels the chaos caucus or The Taliban 20.

The House is set to convene at noon ET on Wednesday after holding three rounds of votes to elect a speaker on Tuesday. Each time, McCarthy came up short, failing to hit the majority threshold needed to secure the speakership. The House adjourned in the early evening after the vote series lingered on for hours with no resolution.

After McCarthy got six votes from the holdouts, Jim Jordan of Ohio rose to nomination and became a McCarthy ally. Gaetz followed Jordan and nominated the Ohio Republican to run. All 19 Republicans held onto their positions around Jordan, and the result was the same as the first ballot.

But when a red wave never materialized in the November midterms, the razor-thin majority that resulted for Republicans empowered a small band of conservatives – long distrustful of McCarthy – to make demands.

What has unfolded over the last two months is an all-out scramble for the speakership, which has taken the form of strategy sessions with close allies on and off Capitol Hill, intense negotiations over rules changes and non-stop phone calls with members.

Two years after former President Donald Trump left a mess in Washington, Republicans have regained some power.

On a surreal day, the 118th Congress opened with Republicans fighting Republicans, while Democrats – who should have been mourning their lost majority – were joyous at the GOP circus they beheld.

A daylong debacle, in which McCarthy appeared to have no strategy other than a beat-the-head-against-a-brick-wall approach, ended with the House in an absurd limbo. Smartly dressed family members who traveled to Washington to watch their new lawmakers sworn in were bored. The House adjourned and will resume on Wednesday at noon, even though there’s little sign the deadlock will break.

McCarthy told reporters he did not think they would get more productive by continuing on. But he insisted he wouldn’t be dropping out of the race.

He said it was not going to happen, and implied that he could get some members to vote for him if he wanted to lower the threshold.

“Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House isn’t someone who has sold shares of themself for more than a decade to get it,” Matt Gaetz, the hard-right Florida congressman, said on the House floor before nominating Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan for speaker before a second round of voting Tuesday.

Former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state – who voted to impeach Trump, lost a primary to a rival backed by the ex-president, who then went on to lose the general election to a Democrat – told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday the rebels were in it for themselves.

Who do you think are the detractors? The 20 House Republicans who are voting against Mr. McCarthy include some of the chamber’s most hard-right lawmakers. Most denied the results of the 2020 presidential election, and almost all are members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus.

The Democrats see that the Republicans are not fit for power and should be kicked out at the first chance in the next election, thus making political capital out of it. Democratic donors were told in a fundraising email by Jeffries that he watched House Republicans plunge into chaos. “This changes everything for Democrats. We now have the chance to show what we can do.

“We have an agenda and we want to implement that agenda and we can either be the conference who comes together to do that or we can let a select few keep us from being able to do that,” Utah Republican Rep. Blake Moore told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday, arguing that McCarthy had been successful in leading his party back to power in the House.

How does this end? House precedent dictates that members continue to take successive votes until someone secures the majority to prevail. The House is useless until a speaker is chosen. It can’t even swear in its members.

In 2010, Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to win control of the House, but the cost was steep. The fights over raising the debt ceiling had been a staple of congress for a long time. And John Boehner was frustrated by the fact that he had been unable to get much of anything done during his time as speaker.

People thought that Hillary Clinton was unbeatable. McCarthy spoke to Fox News. A select committee and a special committee were put together. How are she doing today? Her numbers are dropping.

The Republicans wanted to find out what happened in the attack on the American Embassy in Libya so that they wouldn’t hurt Clinton. But Clinton, who was secretary of state in the Obama administration, was the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Rise of the GOP: Kevin McCarthy’s Disappearance in the Capitol following the 2011 Midterm Gluino Vote

While Trump’s standing appears to have weakened (there is, of course, still plenty of time for him to turn things around), he has already changed the landscape of American politics. In the vote for the House speaker, we now see that Trump has put the radicalization of the GOP in motion, some Republicans are hellbent on playing by their own rules and getting concessions, even if it comes at the expense of the party and government.

He tried to play a tough guy and threaten the defectors with removal of committee assignments at the eleventh hour. It appears that it had the reverse effect on what he and his allies were intending.

For McCarthy, and for anyone with ambition who also has to make choices about what they believe and what they’re willing to compromise, the question is if that was worth it.

At the end of the day, the job of speaker isn’t supposed to be about one person’s ambition but what they can do to fix the country, and this is happening at a time when people are already cynical about politicians in Washington.

The chaos that continues to surrounds House Republicans has been talked about in Washington, but again this is another example. How can they govern with a four seat majority if they are going through this to pick a leader?

Democratic sources said they would whip against the motion to adjourn, because Voting to adjourn would require 218 votes. Some Republicans would vote against it as well.

The member said the statement by Donald Trump that he supports McCarthy but urged Republicans to back him was meaningless, as it wasn’t expected to move the needle.

Another member warned that after Tuesday, it’s clear that the opposition to McCarthy is personal – meaning there may be little that he can do to turn the tide at this point.

“This changes neither my view of McCarthy nor Trump nor my vote,” Gaetz said in a statement to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, shortly after Trump came to McCarthy’s defense in the Truth Social post.

Gaetz is a long standing ally of the president and his refusal to bow to his desire for a speakership raises more questions about the influence the former president has over Republicans.

Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, spoke to reporters in the Capitol. He said that he was staying until we won.

Republican cheers could be heard when freshman Rep. John Brecheen of Oklahoma flipped. After the roll call, McCarthy had been called by 14 holdouts, including Norman. He was still short of the votes he needed for speaker, but the tide had turned. Only seven McCarthy opponents remained.

In the fourthballot vote, Republicans were unable to break the stalemate, even after former President Donald J. Trump made a direct appeal to them.

The endorsement failed to move a single defector in Mr. McCarthy’s direction. With a fifth vote underway, the leader and his allies were working behind the closed doors to get the votes.

The rightwing Republicans coalesced behind Mr. Jordan, a onetime ally of Mr. McCarthy, who is now allied himself with Mr. McCarthy.

The Republicans in the House made major concessions on Wednesday evening after right wing radicals blocked their bid for power in six humiliating votes.

The idea that a fresh new majority is riding into town to do the American peoples’ business is in tatters. The mess in the new House Tuesday and Wednesday made me think about how easy it was for a group of people to shut down the house.

Cheers that erupted from Republican benches when the vote closed reflected the risible state of the House’s new GOP management, which is unable to perform the only task it currently has – choosing a leader – and is holding up the functioning of the chamber.

“The country or Kevin McCarthy. Adam Kinzinger, a retired GOP lawmaker, said which should have more weight.

A Groundhog Day for the Battle for the Speaker’s Gap: The Case for the Right-Wing Zealots in Congress

On the other side is a band of right-wing zealots, holding their party, the House and the country hostage – some with no clear objective other than to destroy the idea of governance itself. For them, chaos is the point.

As humiliation piled on for the Californian lawmaker, there was a merest hint of hope as the anti-McCarthy block began to splinter.

Several members of the House who want to change the way the House works reported progress in their talks with McCarthy. One of their number, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, predicted he could bring over 10 votes if the talks pan out.

The question is whether another day of pointless voting on Thursday will prompt members to begin to consider whether he should step aside for a more universally trusted colleague – perhaps Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for instance. Many Republicans are complaining that their hopes for quickly wielding power and throttling the Biden administration have been dashed.

While another Groundhog Day in the House didn’t produce a new speaker, it did offer hints on how an endgame in the battle for the speaker’s gavel may develop. It gave an insight into how congress will work in the months to come, and about the new balance of power in Washington.

It should be about the process, but I don’t know if that is the case with the latter. I have no sense of how many are in either camp,” he told CNN.

The Politics of Destruction: The Role of Congress in the House of Representatives and Senate Minority Leaders During the Preterm Referendum

In impassioned floor speeches and interviews, Roy has argued that the House is finally having consequential debates. Under recent Democratic and Republican speakers, normal order and the sequencing of new laws through the committee process and debates on the House floor have been curtailed as severe partisanship and gridlock causes leaders to enforce ruthless party-line discipline.

The problem, however, is that Congress has resorted to omnibus bills in recent years for a reason – it has been so polarized and dysfunctional that the only way to get any bill to the president’s desk is to cram all the spending in together.

“I really think this is democracy in action,” North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “If you are not satisfied with Washington as it is, then you can’t just be satisfied doing the same thing.”

Some Republicans accuse their colleagues of grandstanding and of using the spotlight to raise campaign cash and to drum up appearances on conservative media. It is the latest expression of the anti-government wing of the GOP that seeks to take away the power of government.

This politics of destruction was sent into overdrive by ex-President Donald Trump, with his vows to drain the Washington “swamp.” At the begining of the Trump administration, it was said that the deconstruction of the administrative state was a priority. McCarthy has cozied up to Trump and is often appeased, but there is a problem about how to negotiate with a person who has a main aspiration of chaos.

“I do want to especially thank President Trump. McCarthy said that anyone should doubt his influence because he was with him from the beginning. … So, thank you, President Trump.”

How well did Biden and McCarthy address the chaos in Mar-A-Lago, Kentucky? A rebuke after two years of political exile

It was the kind of social media blast that Republican members used to jump into line for. But no longer. It didn’t appear to change a single vote.

Her rebuke is the latest sign that after two long years of political exile, Trump’s juice isn’t what it used to be. This type of insubordination is unlikely to have gone down well in Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s home.

In Europe or Israel, parliaments can often take weeks or even months to reach a leader or governing majority, whereas in the US House, it can take weeks or even months.

“It’s embarrassing for the country,” President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, as he capitalized on the chaos in an event in Kentucky highlighting bipartisan political leadership over his massive infrastructure package, appearing with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

But even after proposing major concessions to his hardline opponents late Wednesday, it remains unclear if the California Republican will be able to lock in the 218 votes he needs to win the gavel, and patience is wearing thin among lawmakers as the fight drags on.

Roy told GOP leaders that he could get 10 holdouts and that they’d be along for the ride. McCarthy met with freshman members who voted against him.

Sources said the talks between McCarthy allies and holdouts have been the most productive so far. And in one sign of a breakthrough, a McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats – one of the big demands that conservatives had asked for but that McCarthy had resisted until this point.

Texas Rep. Chip Roy, one of the conservatives who has voted against McCarthy’s speakership bid, told GOP leaders that he thinks he can get 10 holdouts to come along if ongoing negotiations pan out, according to GOP sources familiar with the internal discussions, and that there are additional detractors who may be willing to vote “present.”

“There were a whole bunch of members that were involved in this, and there are some folks now that are sitting down and talking about that discussion to see where they want to go with it next,” the Minnesota Republican said.

One moderate Republican told CNN Thursday morning that they aren’t happy about the concessions, though they are willing to have “discussions” about them.

I am willing to discuss if the rules are not in line with my opinion. I think they’re a mistake for the conference. A group of people want a weak speaker with a four-vote majority. The member fears the public will not like what they see of the GOP.

The Day After Michael Fanone: How Kevin McCarthy and the House of Representatives Rejoind about the 2016 Insurrection at the Capitol

On Friday, Biden honored a number of heroes from that day, including Michael Fanone, a former Washington, DC, police officer injured in the riot. “If Republicans can finally agree on a speaker, the same GOP leaders who spread former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election … will take the reins of power in the House,” Fanone wrote for CNN Opinion.

The most violent day of my law enforcement career has not happened in two years but it is the same uprising that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and many others in his party downplay. “The violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol two years ago, almost taking my life, ignored my pleas that I have kids.”

The nation faces a great risk from political violence due to inflammatory speech and a refusal to acknowledge the ongoing spasms of extremism and conspiracy.

Millions of Americans now think the use of force should be justified to restore Trump to the presidency, because politically-motivated attacks are on the increase across the nation. It’s important to reverse this dangerous trend.

The incoming GOP House leadership must condemn political violence and hate speech by members of their own party. And that starts with finally denouncing Trump, who remains to this day the Republican Party’s de facto leader. The incoming Speaker and the House leadership have to demand that members of their own party never again amplify language or take actions that endanger the lives of their peers or law enforcement.

The House chamber sounded like a heckler-filled late night comedy club after Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene yelled “liar” at Biden. New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was seen trying to shush his ruder lawmakers, but he was among those Republicans who voted not to certify Biden’s 2020 election victory over false claims of fraud. And it was McCarthy who embraced ex-President Donald Trump after his baseless claims of a stolen election incited an unprecedented insurrection at the US Capitol. More recently, he appeased untamed elements of his party to squeeze into power last month.

Since then, influential GOP House members have called the January 6 assault a “normal tourist visit.” Some have called for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s execution for treason and shared antisemitic messages on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I had hoped, as many others did, that outrage and horror over the insurrection would encourage Americans to unify around what should be a shared belief – that political violence has no place in our society. It is up to GOP leaders to join other Americans in rejecting such behavior and the disgraced former president whoinspired it.

Many of her allies in the House have promoted a baseless conspiracy theory. In the wake of such outrageous statements, angry protesters are calling for banning books from neighborhood schools and overran story hour at local libraries.

The examples of recent acts of violence that appear to have been instigated by right-wing rhetoric are almost too numerous to name. MAGA rhetoric fueled the attack at the home of former Speaker Pelosi and the vandalization last month – allegedly by anti-LGBTQ activists – of the homes of three New York council members over opposition to drag queen story hour at libraries in the city.

Rep. Matt Gaetz encouraged voters to arm themselves at polls, and armed intimidation did take place as voters cast their ballots. Research has even shown that MAGA Republicans are more likely than others – including GOP moderates – to endorse violence as usually or always justified to advance their political objectives. And after agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Twitter posts threatening the FBI saw a dramatic spike.

Over-the-top rhetoric by GOP lawmakers is troubling enough. Extremist views are all-too-evident in their voting records. The January 6th Commission and the results of the 2020 free and fair election were all voted against by the members of Congress.

For me it was a personal insult, as 21 Republicans voted against me receiving the presidential medal of freedom for my role in defending the Capitol during the insurrection.

I don’t consider myself to be a political person, even though I was known to some people before January 6. I voted for Trump in 2016 because I was turned off by the anti-police rhetoric of the left.

And sure, I dipped my toe into the last election, to oppose a few Trump-inspired candidates who I thought posed a danger to democracy. But I’ve never believed in politicians; I believe in people. I support two groups demanding sanity from our politicians.

I have helped to found a group called Courage for America, so I will be at the event calling for lawmakers to step up the fight against political violence. Courage for America and Common Defense joined forces to call for a renewed effort to combat the kind of right-wing violence that almost ended my life. The Capitol reflects pool where a group of supporters of the right-wing political movement erected a sign two years ago threatening to hang the Vice President in response to the protests surrounding their gathering.

When Byron Donalds is Nominated to be the next President: A Moral Problem for the United Families, the Child, and the Elderly

As a kid growing up, I was always a bit of a troublemaker; law enforcement turned out to be the perfect landing spot for a rambunctious kid without a clear sense of direction. Being a cop and being an investigator taught me how to keep refining my conclusions as I gathered additional information.

At that moment, even though I was surrounded by violent, shouting protesters, all I could see were my kids’ faces: My four daughters are the ones I’m speaking out for.

I would like them to live in a country where officials are accountable to the people they serve. Condemning political violence is not a partisan issue. There is a moral one.

From left, Representatives Bob Good of Virginia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida applauded after Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania nominated Byron Donalds for speaker on Wednesday.

If the California Republican tried to grant Biden authority by using Democrats, it’s possible he would be overthrown, and there’s a chance he’d crash the economy.

Ms. Boebert has also repeatedly gone on television to defend the stance against Mr. McCarthy, even as pressure has mounted from Mr. Trump and conservative allies outside of Congress. And she scoffed on Thursday at the notion Mr. McCarthy’s many concessions would be sufficient to deliver him the votes to become speaker.

Representative Bob Good of Virginia, a self-described “biblical conservative” and former administrator at Liberty University, also made it clear on Thursday that he would never be swayed to Mr. McCarthy’s side.

What if Congress is going to snap? CNN’s Julian Zelizer criticizes the South Carolina Democratic Speaker candidate, Robert Mooney, and Tom McCarthy

Mr. Donalds, like Mr. Roy, pointed to a provision that would allow a single lawmaker to force a snap vote at any time to oust Mr. McCarthy from the speakership as a key priority.

Representative Norman of South Carolina is open to negotiation. When asked if he’d be willing to vote for Mr. McCarthy, he said the devil was in the details.

Several of the lawmakers who have declined to back Mr. McCarthy have not answered questions about what would be needed to convince them to drop their objections, or avoided a grilling from conservative media outlets.

Legislators Mary Miller of Illinois, and Andy Harris of Maryland voted for someone other than Mr. McCarthy.

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is an author and editor of 24 books, including his forthcoming co-edited work, “Myth America: Historians Taking on the Biggest Lie and Legend about Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. There is more opinion on CNN.

Insurrection, Democracy, and Extremism: The Case of Donald Trump after the 2016 Insight on the Second Annual US Capitol Insrection

Over time, the leader who initially welcomed them to the fold becomes more extreme than the one who originally welcomed them. This is what led Boehner to later blast Republicans like Jim Jordan as “legislative terrorists.” He had become the establishment; they were the rebels.

A significant part of Trump’s influence was his nihilistic attitude of political combat. He helped to spur a younger, more extreme cohort to step up and demand power. It seems these conservatives will do almost anything in order to achieve victory and believe that chaos, instability, and hyper-partisanness have a great political value. And now some of these Trump loyalists might be close to concluding that they no longer need him – or at the very least, they no longer need to follow his every move.

On Friday is the second anniversary of the worst attack on democracy in the modern era, he finds out that even that career-enhancement bet isn’t going to win him over to the Trump camp.

In another surreal scene on the Hill this week, one of those Republicans, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has downplayed the insurrection and said rioters would have “won” if she was in charge – is complaining about the extremism of some of her colleagues who oppose McCarthy.

But even in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol, the right-wing media machine and a still-angry base of voters mean there are strong political incentives for disruptor politicians in the ex-president’s image.

But that narrow margin – which will also put the majority in a precarious position on must-pass legislation like funding the government and raising the debt ceiling later on – is the direct result of voters being alienated by the ex-president’s incessant, false claims of 2020 voter fraud and the party failing to deliver the “red wave” many Republicans had predicted.

McCarthy had an unexpected breakthrough Friday afternoon, when he flipped 14 Republicans who had voted against him after months of negotiations over House rules.

This is not chaotic. This is a constitutional republic at work. This is actually a really beautiful thing,” Boebert said. She’s correct in that the messiness unfolding on the floor is based on rules and procedures – the most basic elements of governing that Trump had sought to disrupt with his efforts to overturn the certification of the 2020 Electoral College votes.

Rep. Matt Gaetz and the Revolt Against Mr. McCarthy: A Relativistically Suggested Resolution of the Gaetz Manifesto

Her arguments centered on the reality of the rebels behavior. Many other Republicans feel it’s not clear how concessions will be made by the group around Gaetz, who have vowed to never support McCarthy.

Gaetz told reporters that if McCarthy withdrew from the race, or we created a straitjacket that he was unable to evade, then this was the end of the matter.

The most extreme hardliners will only accept a candidate who shares their no compromise Nihilistic form of politics that makes governing impossible.

In many ways, these demands are the culmination of anti-establishment, anti-government forces first unleashed decades ago by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution. They were also the genesis of the anti-Washington Tea Party movement in the 2000s. Trump then drove out much of the governing wing of the GOP as he effectively worked to bring down the institutions of government and accountability from inside as president.

After 11 consecutive defeats in an election that is now the most long-term contest since 1859, Mr. McCarthy dispatched his emissaries Thursday night to finalize terms with the ultraconservative rebels.

What do they want? The rebellion against Mr. McCarthy is not just about personal animosity, but also an ideological drive. The holdouts want to drastically limit the size, scope and reach of the federal government, and overhaul the way Congress works to make it easier to do so.

Is there an alternative to McCarthy? A big factor in Mr. McCarthy’s favor is that no viable candidate has emerged to challenge him, but Republicans could coalesce around someone else. The most obvious backup is Steve Scalise who is the No. 2 Republican in the House.

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz strode into House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office on Monday night with a list of demands. The chairmanship of the House armed services subcommittee is one of them.

Nearby, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was trying to convince Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana, another McCarthy holdout, to take her cell phone and speak to former President Donald Trump, who was on the line.

The leader of the GOP removed one more detractor, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland. The House voted to adjourn until 10 p.m. ET – providing time both for the two missing McCarthy supporters time to return to Washington and for McCarthy’s allies to turn up the heat on the remaining holdouts.

McCarthy denied Gaetz was offered the subcommittee gavel he had sought earlier in the week in exchange for his vote. McCarthy said that no one gets promised anything.

McCarthy was accused of acting in bad faith by the Florida Republican by asking him for a list of demands.

There was a meeting where McCarthy engaged in heated exchanges with Republican members and where a lawmaker called out the GOP leader for his behavior.

A day of pageantry for the GOP: Donald Trump and the 21st day of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol

At noon, the House gaveled in the 118th Congress, and lawmakers swarmed the House floor, children in tow, for what was supposed to begin a day of pageantry. In a sign of the new Republican rules, the magnetometers installed by outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol were removed from the doors to the House floor.

Trump continued to keep the House drama at arms’ length until Friday, when he made calls to Gaetz and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona while they were on the House floor. After McCarthy won the speakership, Trump congratulated him on his social media site.

The speakership drama extended through the second anniversary of January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol to try to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. Police had their guns drawn at the House chamber door to protect its members, who were later evacuated.

But it wasn’t clear that the meeting would lead to a breakthrough. Gaetz promised that the McCarthy dissenters could hold votes until the cherry blossoms fell off the trees. Boebert said the “boats are burned” when it comes to any future negotiations with McCarthy.

In another sign of a breakthrough, a McCarthy-aligned super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, agreed to not get involved in open primaries in safe seats – one of the demands conservatives had asked for but McCarthy had resisted.

The GOP dissidents were positive. Bishop was walking into a meeting Thursday morning with other GOP hardliners when he said they were making some progress.

The House Speaker’s Night Before Congress: Kevin McCarthy’s Last Succint and Frozen Speech in the House of Deliberations

Lawmakers followed two tracks into the evening: vote after vote on the House floor for speaker, while negotiations were still taking place behind closed doors.

McCarthy and his allies continued to speak with the holdouts, who weren’t in the “never Kevin” camp.

By the early evening Thursday, there was an offer “on paper.” The three of the key negotiators – Emmer, Roy and Donalds – gathered with McCarthy in his ceremonial office after they had a discussion in Emmer’s office about the written agreement. A separate part of the written deal was being discussed in the member’s dining room on the first floor of the Capitol.

One factor complicating the talks was a handful Republicans were expected to leave Washington due to various family issues. Buck left Thursday afternoon for a planned medical procedure. Rep. Wesley Hunt flew back to Texas to be with his wife and newborn, who had to spend some time in the neonatal intensive care unit.

The attacks on the steps of the Capitol occured two years ago on Friday. Just one Republican attended: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

The speaker fight was near an end, and Gaetz and Boebert sat for a interview with Fox and optimistically expressed their optimism for the rules changes the holdouts had won.

Early Saturday morning, following 14 losses and more than 84 hours after the beginning of the 118th Congress, the House clerk finally announced McCarthy was elected House speaker.

Before the chaos over the final vote, McCarthy earlier Friday had sounded an optimistic note that the lengthy fight over the gavel would actually help Republicans. “So this is the great part. Because it took this long, now we’ve learned how to govern,” McCarthy said. We can now get the job done.

The House speaker election was a spectacle that showed the idiocy of the House Republican conference. Mercifully, it ended after four days and 15 ballots.

The easiest way to start business is the House Speaker vote. Judging by how difficult it was for Kevin McCarthy to secure the necessary votes to become speaker, there are plenty of bitter and protracted fights to come.

When Will You Stop Giving Your Way to Victory? The Case for Changing the Face of the House GOP Confinement: The Case of Gaetz and Jeffries

It raises a question – is surrendering your way to victory really winning? And when will this appeasement ever end, considering it only makes this extremist faction more powerful?

Anyone surprised by the dysfunction this week should not have been; the House GOP conference has been growing increasingly dysfunctional over the past 13 years. The chaotic machinations witnessed by the world this week are simply a continuation of the dysfunction that began after the Tea Party swept the House in 2010.

So here we are in 2023. There is a smaller governing majority now that the malcontents are digging in. Actually, there really is no GOP governing majority at all, and the world will learn that soon enough.

A paradigm shift is long overdue. Pragmatic and rational Republican members, who bristled at the concessions McCarthy handed to Gaetz and his ilk, must force a course correction and change the dynamics.

And if there aren’t enough GOP votes for a more reasonable rules package, then it’s time to try something novel – bipartisanship. In this case, rational Republicans should reach across the aisle and work with Democrats to secure enough votes for a rules package that rolls back some of the hardliners’ demands.

The hardliners also secured a promise that a McCarthy-aligned super PAC would not intervene in open, safe seat GOP primaries. More members of Congress will be disinterested in governing if fringe elements are even allowed to be more powerful. These are inexplicable acts of self-destruction.

It’s time to stop feeding the crocodiles. Rational Republicans must stand, fight and resist. Two people are able to play this game. Gaetz stated that he ran out of things he could even dream of in order to get what he wanted from the chaos caucus.

The ability to function is at stake for the House. America’s authoritarian adversaries around the world say that democracy is out of date and unable to meet the needs of its people. It’s time to destroy the extremists who deny the results of free and fair elections and wish to cause havoc on America’s hallowed temple of democracy.

Far more memorable was the speech that followed, delivered by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries before he handed the speaker’s gavel to McCarthy in a display of the peaceful transfer of power.

Paying tribute to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and touting achievements of the previous Congress, Jeffries then turned to the most unforgettable part of his address, the ABCs. He began each line consecutively with the letters from A to Z, passionately defending American values of democracy and compassion over fascism and hate.

Jeffries has consistently lived up to his first name, Hakeem — which translates from Arabic into a “wise” or “learned” person seen as a fountain of deep knowledge. (The lawmaker from New York City is Baptist, but as a Muslim, I wish he were Muslim!) His speech in Saturday’s early hours was the most recent example of his wisdom.

The first black leader of a major party in Congress told the House chamber, that they believe that the country’s diversity is a strength. He also told the Republicans that he was willing to try and find common ground in order to benefit the Americans.

Jeffries brought this passage to a close with the line “zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation,” shortly thereafter ending by vowing Democrats will “always do the right thing by the American people.”

Democrats reject a lot that has come to define Trumpism, such as bigotry and theocracy, and they will always put American values over these things. …”

Jeffries continued with an alphabetical recitation of what Democrats will defend and reject: “quality of life issues over QAnon, reason over racism, substance over slander, triumph over tyranny, understanding over ugliness, voting rights over voter suppression.”

Xenial Over Xenophobia: Reflecting the Two-Year Anniversary of the January 6, 2016 Capitol Attack on the Way of the Speaker of the House

He sent people Googling the definition of one word when he reached the letter X and said, “xenial over xenophobia.” xenial means warm, welcoming, and hospitable.

But fast-forward to the day after the two-year anniversary of the January 6 attack. Minutes after leaving the House, the newly elected speaker paid tribute to Trump.

The man who refused to accept losing the election and who inspired his followers to attack the Capitol was thanked. That is not the way the speaker of the House should be talking.

These words are meaningless since McCarthy flip-flops on important issues such as standing up to Trump and remaining silent over the lies by new GOP Rep. George Silva, whose vote he desperately needed in the speakership battle.

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The horrific scene of Frederick Huntington Gillett, a New England masochist and the father of the NFL quarterback, Paul Rieckhoff,

A New England gentleman was the model of Frederick Huntington Gillett. Educated at Amherst College and Harvard Law School, he glided through 16 terms in the US House. Gillett was so calm and laid back that a reporter joked that the Massachusetts congressman would refuse coffee in the morning “for fear it would keep him awake all day.”

“Even if McCarthy manages to squeak out the leadership, a powerful and vocal contingent of his party has publicly humiliated him and expressed their lack of confidence in his control,” she observed.

The Americans were calm when Hamlin collapsed after tackling the other player. Hamlin was resuscitated at the field and by the end of the week he was talking and moving his arms and legs.

Coy Wire, who played for the Bills and the Atlanta Falcons before becoming a journalist, wrote, “I’m reminded of the brutal nature of the sport I love, feeling the physical pains from my nine seasons in the NFL. A titanium plate and four screws are in my neck. I had multiple concussions, including one in Buffalo where I had no recollection of what happened until I watched the game during film sessions the next day. I remember vividly how scary injuries can be.”

“That’s why, as the horrific scene unfolded on Monday night … and as tears came pouring down players’ faces as they prayed … mental wounds were reopened as haunting memories came flooding back in.”

A few hours before Hamlin’s collapse, Paul Rieckhoff, a former high school and college football player, was watching his two young sons in a game of playground football. “I was talking to another dad who, like me, played college football and has an 8-year-old son (one year older than my oldest). His son is playing full tackle football in the fall for the first time. I can’t see letting my son hit that early. Or maybe ever. I can not.

Jeff Pearlman told the story of Chuck Hughes, the Detroit Lions wide receiver who suffered a fatal heart attack at Tiger Stadium in 1971 and became the only NFL player to die on the field during a game. The game resumed about 10 minutes after Hughes was taken off the field. The times have changed. The Bills-Bengals game was suspended after Hamlin collapsed.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/08/opinions/kevin-mccarthy-chaotic-victory-opinion-column-galant/index.html

The Secret Life of Harry and Meghan (and Prince Harry) in “The Way of Water” (with an excerpt from Yang and Yukawa)

At the start of 2023, Ukraine’s forces struck a vocational school housing Russian troops in the occupied city of Makiivka in the Donetsk region. Russian officials put the number at 89, whereas the Ukrainian military said there were hundreds of casualties. It was the highest death toll since the war began over a year ago.

The much anticipated sequel to the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic”, “Avatar: The Way of Water”, has already earned over $2 billion at the box office, but Jeff Yang was unsure if he would see the second movie until his son convinced him. “Though I’d recalled feeling like the 2009 original was more of a weirdly off-putting immersive experience than an actual motion picture,” Yang wrote, “Cameron’s masterful narrative instincts and intricate worldbuilding overwhelmed my reflexive cynicism…for the first half hour of ‘Way of Water”s epic three-hour running length, anyway.”

“Audiences and critics now and in the future will laud Cameron’s creativity and attention to detail, and they should – but they likely won’t know how much of the franchise’s incredible worldbuilding is simply an act of elaborate collage, snapping together elements pulled from scores of our world’s oldest civilizations, while ascribing them to fantastical cat people rather than resourceful human beings,” Yang wrote.

The title of Prince Harry’s book was “Spare” because people need a spare and heir in the line of succession.

The book is already being called jaw-dropping, but there is an underlying contradiction in the continued saga ofHarry,Meghan and the royal family.

Harry and Meghan quit the family “amid complaints that they preferred a private life as ‘regular people,’ no longer wanting the media attention that came with being royals, including being tabloid fodder. In an excerpt from an upcoming interview, Harry told ITV: ‘I want a family. Not an institution.

“And fodder it is. Among the gossipy allegations Harry lobs at his brother in ‘Spare’ are details of a physical altercation between the two during which William knocked Harry to the floor and left him scratched and bruised, and claims that William and his wife, Kate Middleton, were the ones responsible for encouraging Harry’s controversial Nazi costume in 2005…”

When there are only two brothers, competition between them is more common than ever. “Certainly, most aren’t born into families with set hierarchies that serve to remind them of their exact place. It has been brotherly discord that has inspired countless works of art throughout time. Harry is not special—his is one of the commonest dramas of human nature.”

What will he say to the president and his family about biden, McCarthy and the State of the Debt, and what he wants from the House

“But I will be talking to him,” he added, making clear what officials stress: That he will, as is Biden’s way, work with McCarthy where there are areas of common ground.

One developed his political acumen in the plodding and collegial Senate. The other was in the bare-knuckle House. Both overcame setbacks, doubts and an endless number of obstacles to reach their peak of careers where they are now in a relationship that will determine the next two years.

Even the meeting itself, which White House officials viewed as a traditional sit down at the start of a new Congress and McCarthy calls the opening of talks on the debt limit, has been subject to political wrangling and skirmishes.

“This is the first round of about 20,” one House Democrat told CNN of the months leading up to the June deadline to raise the debt ceiling. “Settle in.”

But he’ll demand a House Republican proposal first – something White House officials are keenly aware would carry significant political value for Democrats and have the potential for splitting the Republican conference.

It is irresponsible that the leader of the free world would say he is not going to negotiate. I hope that’s just staff and not him,” McCarthy said. “I think the most responsible thing to do is that we sit down – we’ve got the time period between now and June – and we find places that we could find savings for the American public.”

McCarthy will be a guest in Biden’s home once more after he invited him to the Naval Observatory for breakfast eight years ago. The California Republican has been thrust into a critical place in Biden’s portfolio after eight years.

McCarthy points to Biden’s negotiation skills and deal making on the debt limit and budget issues as proof that his demands have precedent.

In part, that’s due to the role of the House minority leader at a moment Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, aides said. The Senate required GOP votes for Biden’s major legislative proposals, but it was democrats who were able to move the bills through the chamber.

Senate Minority Leader McConnell is a good friend of the Biden’s and appeared with him at an event celebrating a bipartisan infrastructure law in Kentucky.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/01/politics/joe-biden-kevin-mccarthy-relationship/index.html

Biden and the House Intelligence Committee: Where are we heading? What do White House officials say about the shutdown and the debt limit?

The White House officials felt a level of schadenfreude, but it was not until McCarthy had suffered through a number of failed votes that the officials realized the extent of their confusion.

White House officials, though they went to great lengths not to weigh in on the matter, took the opposite view – one that is reflected in their approach to the debt limit where there are clear questions as to whether McCarthy can secure the votes of 218 Republicans for anything at all.

White House officials insist that it is not a bluff or posturing, as Biden insists, and that he is not talking about anything but a clean increase. They have been closely watching the House GOP legislative proposals to prepare for the long battle ahead.

Former CNN producer and correspondent, Frida Ghitis, is a world affairs columnist. She writes an opinion column for The Washington Post and she is a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN. The current news is reflected in this piece.

With the war in Ukraine growing more tense by the day, and the United States playing a pivotal role in preventing Russia from succeeding in its efforts to win an unprovoked war, one might be excused for thinking the new leadership in the US House of Representatives would restrain its impulses to politicize some of the most sensitive areas of foreign policy. But no such thing is happening.

When Kevin McCarthy decided to exclude the Democrats from the key House Intelligence Committee, it made everyone fear that he would find it difficult to steer a moderate course after having to compromise with the most extreme of the Republican Party.

He had promised that Democrats would be stripped of their committee seats if Republicans were to become the majority.

Democrats got support from some Republicans to remove two Republican congressmen from their committees. But that was because of Rep. Greene’s incendiary and violent statements, such as supporting the execution of prominent Democrats, agreeing with comments calling the 2018 Parkland, Florida, high school shooting a “false flag,” among others. She later backtracked from those comments and said that in 2018 she was “upset about things” and felt she could not trust the government. The House voted to censure and remove Gosar from committees after he posted a video on social media that showed him attacking the president and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a democrat.

Complicating matters for them both, Greene and Gosar, election deniers who have embraced all manner of outlandish conspiracy theories, had used their social media accounts to stoke the flames that resulted in the assault on the US Capitol in the coup attempt of January 6.

The committee had a tradition of bipartisanship, key to fulfilling its functions, until the arrival of Trump and the tensions caused by news that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to try to help him get elected – an issue the committee necessarily had to confront.

It also had to delve into Ukraine’s desperate plea for more American weapons to defend against Russia’s assault. Trump threatened to cut funding from Ukranian if President Zelensky did not order an investigation of Biden, a man he thinks could defeat him in 2020.

These were legitimate topics for the committee to discuss. So much so that he was impeached because of the mismanagement of relations with Ukraine.

Integrity is a word McCarthy should use sparingly, especially in the context of committee assignments. McCarthy has given plum seats to his ally, who made a name for herself initially with her embrace of the deranged ideas of Qanon but later distanced herself from, and has spouted an endless stream of outrageous statements. She distanced herself from the comments as well. But McCarthy is also giving committee assignments (plural!) to the mind-boggling liar – the new congressman, George Santos of New York.

Then, of course, there are the signs of his own brittle integrity. He denounced Trump from the House floor on January 6 and then immediately went to Mar-a-Lago. It calls to mind Groucho Marx and the famous quote, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”

There’s the time he forcefully denied a New York Times report that, in a GOP leadership meeting after the January 6 attack, he said Trump should resign. The Times report, he said, “is totally false and wrong.” But, Lordy, there was a tape with him saying that.

Schiff had dismissed stories surrounding the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the President’s son, as disinformation. The former intelligence committee chief came under scrutiny for paraphrasing the call between Zelensky and Trump. In his letter, the Speaker defended his decision by saying that he had a duty to not leave the country “less safe”.

Schiff, who announced Thursday that he would run for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat in the upper chamber in 2024, is not buying McCarthy’s justifications. “For Kevin McCarthy,” he said, “the cardinal sin appears to be that I led the impeachment of his Master at Mar-a-Lago,” adding, “He will do the former president’s bidding… and this is something the former president wants.”

Because the Intelligence Committee is “select,” the rules allow the speaker to choose or remove members. For other committees, he needs a majority of a House vote. That’s why his efforts to remove Omar – who has made statements many considered antisemitic, some of which she later apologized for – from the Foreign Affairs Committee, were more difficult, though ultimately successful.

Rep. Mitt Romney and the House of Representatives: The Case for Extremism and the Media-Henry Problem of the 2016 White House

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told GOP Rep. George Santos of New York: “You don’t belong here,” according to a member who witnessed the tense exchange in the House of Representatives chamber Tuesday night.

Romney told CNN he criticized Santos for standing in the aisle trying to shake hands with the president and senators because he was under ethics investigation.

“He should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room,” he said, noting that Santos may have responded to his remark but he “didn’t hear.”

“He says he, you know, that he embellished his record. Look, embellishing is saying you got an A when you got an A-,” the senator said. “Lying is saying you graduated from a college that you didn’t even attend and he shouldn’t be in Congress.”

“And they’re gonna go through the process and hopefully get him out. .. If he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there.

After a week in Washington that included the State of the Union address and the GOP response, it is time to ask who on the other side of the line the governor drew.

The GOP used the national television audience to reiterate their support of the hardline “Make America Great Again” base strategy pushed by Trump. But her strategy did not come in isolation. Liberal policies on social, economic and foreign policy are seen by many conservatives as crazy. And Democrats have had their own issues with extremists in recent years, including left-wingers who once called for “defunding the police” – a position that turned into a huge political liability for their party in successive elections.

But Wednesday’s House Oversight hearing showed how politicized the investigations have already become, and raised questions about the underlying question at issue: claims that the FBI forced Twitter to temporarily block users from sharing a New York Post story in 2020 regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop.

While such showdowns allow party leaders to fire up vital base voters and cook up a general stench of scandal that, even if unproven, could harm the Biden administration, they risk highlighting the GOP’s most extreme, media-hungry personalities and alienating moderate voters.

Political normality is something that the beholder takes into account. The country is in the grip of a left-wing cultural purge, and Biden surrendered to a ‘woke mob’ that couldn’t even tell you what a woman is, argued the presidential candidate.

The lessons of the mid-term elections are that voters in swing states rejected far-right extremists when they went to the polls, and it would be foolish for arising star in a party that often rewards far-right candidates to follow suit.

The president once again positioned himself as a bulwark between moderate and extreme conservatives in the country, and he used this tactic to his advantage in the election.

Biden wentaded McCarthy’s followers into acting out on Tuesday after saying Americans didn’t want to see fighting in Congress.

She wasn’t sorry for her poor manners in Biden’s speech, even though she provided Democrats with the exact image they most want to highlight She said she wasn’t a fan of claps for liars. Nancy Pelosi told CNN on Tuesday that the American people have a choice between chaos and stability.

Not every Republican is tolerating the party’s incivility. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney went where McCarthy has failed to go, telling Santos he had no place in the House. LaLota, meanwhile, in his interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, stressed how the New York Republican had become a distraction from the party’s priorities.

There are certain things that Republicans want to governing on and they want to put our economy back on the right track, secure our border and hold the administration accountable.

Given the Biden White House’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Covid-19 pandemic and the border crisis, there is plenty for House Republican chairmen to sink their teeth into. There is no reason why a genuine investigation into Biden’s finances – and those of his son, who is under federal investigation – should not be part of this oversight either.

The House Oversight Chair James Comer warned of a plan to cover up a story that could hurt Biden.

The hearing also appeared to be partially rooted in a misperception that a private company is infringing First Amendment free speech protections if it chooses not to carry certain material on its platform. The supposed case also rested on documents released by the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, which Republicans say prove there was collusion between the company and the FBI. The material does not appear to prove that contention. CNN has reported that the allegations are unsupported and a half-dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, also denied any such directive was given.

Instead, McCarthy opted to give the footage to a friendly conservative media network. Specifically, he opted to give the exclusive to Carlson, who has been one of the most vocal voices in conservative media calling for the footage to be released. Carlson has been a huge McCarthy critic – so this move could help win the speaker some favor with Carlson’s camp as McCarthy tries to hold together both the conservative and moderate wings of his Republican conference.

“I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment,” he told the Times.

Fox News is not hiding from the media: Carlson, the FBI, and the Counting of January 6 adversarial rioters

It’s still a huge risk, and McCarthy and House Republicans could still be held responsible for this in the media. Already, Democrats have been quick to criticize the move by McCarthy, warning that it creates a significant security risk.

McCarthy is hoping that outsourcing this work to the media will be a way to appease his right flank without upsetting his moderates and majority makers.

Carlson has been one of the most prominent promoters of January 6 conspiracy theories. He devoted a lot of time to the false claim that liberals inside the FBI planned to undermine former President Donald Trump. He has conducted sympathetic interviews with some of the rioters who were subsequently charged by the Justice Department.

The chief judge of DC federal court ruled that the public should be allowed to see security footage from the attack after CNN and a dozen other news outlets sued. However, these video releases haven’t been automatic or guaranteed. News outlets can ask for the release of videos after they are played in open court, on a case by case basis.

Except, he’s not giving them to the American people so anyone can see them, or releasing them to all media, at least yet. The speaker is specifically offering access to a conservative TV host who has made no secret of his agenda. Had McCarthy wanted to create that rays of sunlight, he could have uploaded them to the internet or invited other media outlets to view them.

The credibility of Fox News – Carlson’s television home and the apparent destiny of the tapes – has, meanwhile, taken a hit following revelations from text messages and emails in a court filing this week that some of Fox’s biggest stars and executives privately dismissed Trump’s lies about voter fraud after the 2020 election but allowed them to dominate its airwaves. Fox was unwilling to offend a conservative audience that just wanted to believe Trump won the election. CNN has reached out to Fox News, but had not heard a response as of Thursday evening.

The Bounds on Border Security and the Role of Left-Right Correlations in the War on Wall-String Negotiations

In a sign of growing trouble, a border security bill that McCarthy had hoped to pass early in the new Congress is still in limbo after moderates voiced fierce opposition to a three-page draft drawn up by conservative Rep. Chip Roy from Texas. The GOP’s majority in states like New York and California could become problematic if right-wingers are allowed to appeal to the base as they did in the dispute.