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      Mike Johnson’s woes continue after exodus of staff in run-up to elections

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      The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is reeling from a sudden staff exodus as he struggles to keep his position and the GOP’s tiny majority in the run-up to November’s elections.In the latest in a spate of resignations, Johnson’s well-connected communications director, Raj Shah, a former White House deputy press secretary under Donald Trump, has confirmed he is leaving, Axios reported. He is expected to depart by the end of the summer.News of his impending departure comes a day after it was announced that three top policy staff members, Brittan Specht, Jason Yaworske and Preston Hill, had quit and would leave by the end of May.All three worked for the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted in an internal party coup last October, but were retained by Johnson when he ascended to the speaker’s chair.The trio were reported to have committed to work for Johnson for six months and deemed valuable because they had served in top-table negotiations over budget and appropriations.Specht was McCarthy’s chief policy director, although Johnson replaced him with Dan Ziegler when he took office. Yaworske was the speaker’s key adviser on appropriations and budget issues, and had input into high-level haggling over spending bills.Hill oversaw House Republican policy on areas like artificial intelligence and on the education and the workforce committee, which has spearheaded high-profile hearings on antisemitism and free speech on university campuses.They are reported to be joining Michael Best Strategies, a lobbying group whose clients include T-Mobile and the confectionary giant Haribo, and whose senior staff include Reince Priebus, Trump’s former chief of staff.The mass departures from Johnson’s nine-member team follow the resignation last week of his office’s head of digital, Anang Mittal, who quit after superiors confronted him about colleague complaints about his work performance and allegedly “unprofessional outbursts”.Johnson’s office confirmed to Axios that a new digital director, Meredith Schellin, was expected to take over.The exit of Shah in particular is seen as a blow. With his White House experience, he was regarded as a link to Trump loyalists as Johnson has struggled to fend off attacks on his speakership from the far right.Johnson recently survived an attempt by the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust him, prevailing over her motion with the help of Democrats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTaylor Greene, an outspoken opponent of aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, accused Johnson of “passing the Democrats’ agenda” after he ushered a multibillion aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through a House vote.Johnson put a brave face on Shah’s departure while paying generous tribute to his contribution.“Because of the unprecedented circumstances under which I became Speaker, I needed an experienced leader with talent and gravitas to build and drive our message,” Johnson told Axios. “I am grateful Raj agreed to step up and serve. He has become a trusted advisor and built an incredible communications team. Raj has fulfilled his commitment to us and I wish him continued success.”The praise echoed a tribute he had earlier paid to the staffers he inherited from McCarthy.“Because the 118th Congress became the first in history to vote to change Speakers midstream, these friends committed to assist us for the first six months of the transition, and through some of the most difficult policy challenges in decades,” he told Punchbowl in an emailed statement. “We are truly happy for them as they now pursue their new opportunities in the private sector, and we know they will be a great success.” More

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      Vince Fong wins Kevin McCarthy’s seat for rest of US House term

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      Vince Fong, backed by Donald Trump, has won a special election to finish the term of the former US House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who also lent his endorsement.Fong, a California state assembly member, defeated fellow Republican and Tulare county sheriff Mike Boudreaux in the 20th congressional district, in the Central Valley farm belt.It was not immediately clear when Fong would be sworn in – that is up to the current House speaker, Mike Johnson. Trump endorsed Fong in February, calling him “a true Republican”.McCarthy last year became the only US House speaker in history voted out of the job, and resigned afterwards.Republicans occupy only 11 of California’s 52 US House seats. With the district once held by McCarthy remaining in their hands, it will give Republicans 12 seats in the state delegation and boost the party’s fragile edge in Congress by a single vote.There are 217 Republicans in the House, 213 Democrats and five vacancies, including McCarthy’s former seat.The special election only covers the time remaining on McCarthy’s term. Fong and Boudreaux will compete again in November for a full two-year term. Boudreaux said he congratulated Fong in a phone call.Fong and Boudreaux have already appeared on two House ballots this year: the 5 March statewide primary for the full House term, and the 19 March primary in the special election to fill out McCarthy’s term.Fong carried 42% of the vote in the March primary. Boudreaux got nearly 26% and the remainder was divided among other candidates. More

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      MTG v AOC: House hearing dissolves into chaos over Republican’s insult

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      The two most famous sets of initials in US politics clashed in a chaotic House hearing on Thursday, as the progressive star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, objected fiercely to an attack on another Democrat by the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MTG.The oversight committee hearing concerned Republican attempts to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt, for refusing to release tapes of interviews between Joe Biden and the special counsel Robert Hur.Things went wrong when MTG made a partisan point, trying to tie Democrats to the judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money case – which, by drawing a number of Republicans to the New York courtroom to support Trump, was responsible for the hearing starting late in the day.In answer to MTG, Jasmine Crockett of Texas said: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland … Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here about AG Garland?”Greene, a conspiracy theorist from Georgia, said: “I don’t think you know what you’re here for … I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”Amid jeers and calls for order, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said: “That’s beneath even you, Miss Greene.”AOC, of New York, demanded MTG’s words be taken down.As defined by the Congressional Research Service, that meant AOC thought MTG had “violated the rules of decorum in the House” and should withdraw her words.“That is absolutely unacceptable,” AOC said. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”MTG said: “Are your feelings hurt?”AOC said: “Move her words down.”MTG said: “Aw.”AOC said: “Oh, girl. Baby girl.”Amid laughter, MTG said: “Oh really?”AOC said: “Don’t even play.”MTG said: “Baby girl? I don’t think so.”AOC said: “We’re gonna move and we’re gonna take your words down.”James Comer, the Republican chair from Kentucky, struggled to impose order, eventually saying: “Miss Greene agrees to strike her words.”AOC said: “I believe she must apologise.”MTG said: “I’m not apologising.”AOC said: “Well then, you’re not retracting your words.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMTG said: “I’m not apologising.”Comer banged his gavel, pleading: “C’mon, guys.”MTG said: “Why don’t you debate me?”As Raskin tried to interject, AOC said: “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”MTG said: “Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence.”Comer cried, “You’re out of order, you’re out of order,” and tried to recognise Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, another pro-Trump extremist. Jeers broke out, Raskin calling: “I move to strike the lady’s words.”“That’s two requests to strike,” AOC said.MTG said: “Oh, they cannot take the words.”Raskin told Comer: “Please get your members under control.”MTG said: “I repeat again for the second time, yes, I’ll strike my words but I’m not apologising. Not apologising!”Extraordinarily enough, that wasn’t the end. Crockett asked Comer: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”Comer said: “A what now? … I have no idea what you just said.”Next to him, Raskin buried his face in his hands.Comer imposed a five-minute recess. When the hearing resumed, Lauren Boebert – the Colorado extremist and theatrical exhibitionist who usually battles for attention with MTG – was of all people the one to offer an apology “to the American people”.“When things get as heated as they have,” Boebert said, “unfortunately, it’s an embarrassment on our body as a whole.” More

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      Biden asserts executive privilege to block release of special counsel interviews

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      Joe Biden asserted executive privilege to stop House Republicans obtaining recordings of his interviews with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s retention of classified information after his time as a senator and as vice-president to Barack Obama.In a letter reported by the New York Times and other outlets on Thursday, the White House counsel, Edward Siskel, told the Republican chairs of the House judiciary and oversight committees: “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal – to chop them up, distort them and use them for partisan political purposes.“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally protected law enforcement materials from the executive branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”The two chairs, Jim Jordan of Ohio (judiciary) and James Comer of Kentucky (oversight), both close allies of Donald Trump, have led Republican efforts to ensnare Biden in damaging investigations including a sputtering impeachment.Biden’s retention of classified information was discovered as Trump, Biden’s opponent in this year’s election, came to face 40 criminal charges on the same issue.Unlike Trump – who faces 48 other criminal charges and has been hit with multimillion-dollar civil penalties – Biden cooperated with the special counsel appointed to investigate the matter.Hur, who was appointed as a US attorney by Trump, cleared Biden of wrongdoing. But Hur caused uproar when in his report he made repeated reference to the 81-year-old president’s age, including saying if he had brought charges, jurors would have seen Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.Hur has defended his work. Republicans have clamoured for access to recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden, particularly after Biden’s own angry claims about what was said were contradicted by transcripts.News organisations have sued to obtain the recordings.In Congress, Republicans threatened to hold the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt after he rejected subpoenas for the recordings and other materials.In a letter to Biden, reported by the Times, Garland said handing over Hur’s interviews “would raise an unacceptable risk” of undermining “similar high-profile criminal investigations – in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important”.The Department of Justice said the decision to withhold the interviews was not made for partisan reasons.Carlos Uriarte, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, told Jordan and Comer: “It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress.”In response, House Republicans cited comments in February in which a Biden spokesperson said the president had “nothing to hide”, and asked: “Why is Biden hiding behind executive privilege now?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionComer said: “It’s a five-alarm fire at the White House … Today’s Hail Mary from the White House changes nothing for our committee.”Jordan told reporters transcripts already handed over were not “sufficient evidence of the state of the president’s memory” and said: “This last-minute invocation does not change the fact that the attorney general has not complied with our subpoena.”Jordan’s House judiciary committee later voted to advance contempt proceedings against Garland. The oversight committee was due to take up the issue.Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said Biden “and his feeble administration have irretrievably politicised the key constitutional tenet of executive privilege, denying it to their political opponents while aggressively trying to use it to run political cover for Crooked Joe”.But Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who sits on the House judiciary committee, told the Times Republicans’ demands were “purely political”.“The only reason they want the recording is to try to use clips for campaign ads, or something along those lines, which obviously doesn’t meet the legislative purpose standard that the supreme court set for congressional oversight.” More

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      Louisiana must use House map with second mostly Black district, US supreme court rules

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      The US supreme court on Wednesday ordered Louisiana to hold congressional elections in 2024 using a House map with a second mostly Black district, despite a lower-court ruling that called the map an illegal racial gerrymander.The order allows the use of a map that has majority Black populations in two of the state’s six congressional districts, potentially boosting Democrats’ chances of gaining control of the closely divided House of Representatives in the 2024 elections.The justices acted on emergency appeals filed by the state’s top Republican elected officials and Black voters who said they needed the high court’s intervention to avoid confusion as the elections approach. About a third of Louisiana is Black.Like much of the south, voting is racially polarized in Alabama so any majority-Black district is likely to favor Democrats. Republicans narrowly control the US House and are fighting for an advantage in every seat.It is the latest development in a long and twisted legal saga over Louisiana’s congressional districts.Louisiana lawmakers were forced to add a second majority-Black district last year after a federal judge said the map they drew violated the Voting Rights Act. The state approved a map, but then non-white voters challenged it in court, saying lawmakers relied too much on race when drawing it. Lower federal courts agreed the map should be struck down, and the state said it should not be required to use the map for this year’s elections.The supreme court’s order on Wednesday halts that argument and means the map with a second majority-Black district will be used for this year’s election. What happens after that is unclear.The supreme court has previously put court decisions handed down near elections on hold, invoking the need to give enough time to voters and elections officials to ensure orderly balloting. “When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote two years ago in a similar case from Alabama. The court has never set a firm deadline for how close is too close.The court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all said they would not have granted the request to intervene. Only Jackson explained her reasoning.“There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out from the November election,” she wrote in a brief dissent. “We have often denied stays of redistricting orders issued as close or closer to an election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJackson was objecting to what has come to be known as the Purcell principle – a novel idea adopted by the supreme court that they should not intervene in an election dispute when election day is near. The liberal justices and other critics have accused the court of using the principle to benefit Republicans.Louisiana has had two congressional maps blocked by federal courts in the past two years in a swirl of lawsuits that included a previous intervention by the supreme court. More

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      Ex-Capitol officer Harry Dunn loses congressional primary in Maryland

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      Former US Capitol police officer Harry Dunn has lost his congressional primary election in Maryland, after a pro-Israel group spent millions of dollars supporting another Democrat in the crowded race.Dunn, a first-time candidate who gained national attention after publishing a book about his experiences protecting lawmakers during the January 6 insurrection, lost to state senator Sarah Elfreth in Maryland’s third congressional district.When the Associated Press called the race at 10.27pm ET, about two and a half hours after polls closed in Maryland, Elfreth was leading Dunn by 11 points. Their 20 other primary opponents lagged far behind.With the primary over, Elfreth is heavily favored to replace the retiring Democratic congressman John Sarbanes in the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report rates the district, which covers Annapolis and the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore, as “solid Democrat”.Dunn’s defeat concluded a contentious election that ultimately cost several million dollars. Dunn proved himself to be an impressive fundraiser, bringing in $4.6m across the election cycle. Small-dollar donors made up most of Dunn’s fundraising base, as the candidate often boasted, and his team told the Guardian that the average campaign contribution was $21.64.Elfreth raised roughly a third as much money as Dunn, bringing in $1.5m, but her candidacy received substantial outside financial help from the group United Democracy Project (UDP), a Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). UDP spent at least $4.2m supporting Elfreth’s campaign, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.Elfreth’s victory comes one week after UDP notched a major win in Indiana, with the primary loss of former Republican congressman John Hostettler. UDP spent $1.6m in its effort to prevent Hostettler, who was criticized for making comments that were deemed antisemitic, from returning to the House. In March, UDP suffered a defeat in California’s 47th congressional district, where Democrat Dave Min advanced to the general election despite the Super Pac spending $4.6m against him.UDP’s decision to invest in the Maryland primary came as somewhat of a surprise, given that neither Dunn or Elfreth had been especially outspoken about US-Israel relations or the war in Gaza. However, fellow candidate and labor lawyer John Morse, who received the endorsement of senator Bernie Sanders, made his support for a ceasefire in Gaza the focal point of his campaign. (When the primary race was called, Morse had captured just 1% of the vote.)Morse’s candidacy may have motived UDP to get involved in the race. In a statement to HuffPost last month, UDP’s spokesperson acknowledged Dunn’s “support for a strong US-Israel relationship” but suggested concern about other candidates in the primary.“There are some serious anti-Israel candidates in this race, who are not Harry Dunn, and we need to make sure that they don’t make it to Congress,” spokesperson Patrick Dorton said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFaced with an onslaught of UDP spending in support of his biggest rival, Dunn chose to turn the Super Pac’s involvement in the primary into a campaign issue. In a statement to the Guardian last week, Dunn framed the infusion of Super Pac money into the race as a threat to democracy and an insult to the legacy of Sarbanes, who made campaign finance reform one of his top priorities over his nine terms in Congress.“These groups, funded by Republican extremists, are coming after our movement to protect American democracy. Congressman John Sarbanes spent his career trying to get dark money out of politics; now those same dark money groups are trying to buy this seat,” Dunn said. “When I get to Congress, I know who I will work for and I will be accountable to – and it won’t be the dark money donors or the special interest groups.”But that argument was not enough to carry Dunn to victory, and Elfreth now appears poised to win a House seat in November. More

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      Don Bacon Beats Right-Wing Challenger in Nebraska

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      Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a mainstream Republican, on Tuesday easily fended off a primary challenge from a right-wing businessman, advancing to what is expected to be a tight re-election contest in a competitive district won by President Biden in 2020.Mr. Bacon, a fourth-term congressman who has maintained a reputation as an independent voice in a party increasingly dominated by the hard right, won with an overwhelming share of the vote, according to The Associated Press.In recent years, a number of mainstream Republicans in politically competitive districts have been felled in primaries by ultraconservative candidates who went on to drag the party down in the general election.But since he was elected in 2016, Mr. Bacon, a former brigadier general in the Air Force, carved out a niche for himself as one of the only Republicans who could hold the Omaha-based swing seat. Since 2000, voters in the district have backed the winner of the presidential election, except in 2012.That brand came through for him on Tuesday night.His opponent, Dan Frei, a hard-line Republican who secured the endorsement of the state’s Republican Party, had painted Mr. Bacon as a fixture of the Washington establishment and ran on cutting federal spending and an “America First agenda.” Mr. Frei described himself as “a Trumper” but did not ultimately secure an endorsement from the former president.He also lagged far behind Mr. Bacon in fund-raising.Mr. Bacon, 60, has broken repeatedly with his party to support several bipartisan pieces of legislation, including Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, a bill to establish an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and a measure calling for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.He was one of several Republicans in purple districts who pressed Speaker Mike Johnson to allow a foreign aid package including funding for Ukraine to come to a vote on the House floor. “We need to have a Churchill, not a Chamberlain,” Mr. Bacon said at the time.Mr. Frei sought to weaponize Mr. Bacon’s support for aid to Ukraine against him; Mr. Bacon, in turn, received backing from Mark Levin, a prominent right-wing radio host.“I am not into these radical isolationists,” Mr. Levin said. “I don’t side with terrorists against Israel. I don’t side with Russia against Ukraine.”Mr. Bacon also received some backup from the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Republican leaders, which ran advertisements supporting the congressman on the southern border, an issue his opponent had sought to leverage against him.Mr. Bacon won re-election last year by 3 points against Tony Vargas, a state senator, even though Mr. Biden won the district in 2020 by 6 points.He will have a rematch against Mr. Vargas in November. More