Johnson, Mike (1972- )

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      La disputa migratoria amenaza el legado de Biden en política exterior

      by

      El debate sobre la inmigración en Estados Unidos está salpicando otras áreas de la agenda del presidente, en particular la guerra en Ucrania.El creciente número de personas que cruzan a Estados Unidos desde México ha sido una vulnerabilidad política para el presidente Joe Biden durante los últimos tres años porque, poco a poco, ha socavado su índice de aprobación y lo ha expuesto a ataques políticos.No obstante, ahora, la crisis amenaza con afectar el apoyo de Estados Unidos a la guerra en Ucrania, lo que pone en riesgo el eje de la política exterior de Biden.Tras reunirse con Biden en la Casa Blanca el miércoles, el presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Mike Johnson, insistió en que la Cámara Baja, de mayoría republicana, no aprobaría la legislación para enviar ayuda a Ucrania, a menos que los demócratas aceptaran restricciones nuevas y amplias en la frontera de Estados Unidos con México.Incluso si ambos bandos llegan a algún tipo de acuerdo, muchos republicanos, en especial en la Cámara Baja, estarían poco dispuestos a concederle una victoria a Biden en un año electoral en un tema que les ha dado poderosos motivos para criticar a la Casa Blanca. El asunto también se ubica en el centro de la candidatura del posible rival de Biden en el otoño, el expresidente Donald Trump.Esta situación muestra cómo el debate sobre migración en Estados Unidos ya no solo se trata de la frontera. El tema se está filtrando a otras secciones de la agenda de Biden y cobra cada vez más influencia porque los republicanos lo utilizan para bloquear las principales prioridades del presidente en materia de política exterior.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      With Deal Close on Border and Ukraine, Republican Rifts Threaten to Kill Both

      by

      A divided G.O.P. coalesced behind a bit of legislative extortion: No Ukraine aid without a border crackdown. Now they are split over how large a price to demand, imperiling both initiatives.Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican and staunch conservative, this week trumpeted the immigration compromise he has been negotiating with Senate Democrats and White House officials as one shaping up to be “by far, the most conservative border security bill in four decades.”Speaker Mike Johnson, in contrast, sent out a fund-raising message on Friday denouncing the forthcoming deal as a Democratic con. “My answer is NO. Absolutely NOT,” his message said, adding, “This is the hill I’ll die on.”The Republican disconnect explains why, with an elusive bipartisan bargain on immigration seemingly as close as it has been in years on Capitol Hill, the prospects for enactment are grim. It is also why hopes for breaking the logjam over sending more U.S. aid to Ukraine are likely to be dashed by hard-line House Republicans.The situation encapsulates the divide cleaving the Republican Party. On one side are the right-wing MAGA allies of former President Donald J. Trump, an America First isolationist who instituted draconian immigration policies while in office. On the other is a dwindling group of more mainstream traditionalists who believe the United States should play an assertive role defending democracy on the world stage.The two wings coalesced last fall around a bit of legislative extortion: They would only agree to President Biden’s request to send about $60 billion more to Ukraine for its fight against Russian aggression if he agreed to their demands to clamp down on migration at the United States border with Mexico. But now, they are at odds about how large of a price to demand.Hard-right House Republicans, who are far more dug in against aid to Ukraine, have argued that the bipartisan border compromise brokered by their counterparts in the Senate is unacceptable. And they bluntly say they do not want to give Mr. Biden the opportunity in an election year to claim credit for cracking down on unauthorized immigration.Instead, with Mr. Trump agitating against the deal from the campaign trail, they are demanding a return to more severe immigration policies that he imposed, which stand no chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate. Those include a revival of the Remain in Mexico policy, under which migrants seeking to enter the United States were blocked and made to stay elsewhere while they waited to appear in immigration court to plead their cases.While Senate G.O.P. leaders have touted the emerging agreement as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a breakthrough on the border, hard-right House members have dismissed it as the work of establishment Republicans out of touch with the G.O.P. base.“Let’s talk about Mitch McConnell — he has a 6 percent approval rating,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said of the Senate minority leader. “He wouldn’t be the one to be listening to, making deals on the border.”She said that after Mr. Trump’s decisive win in the Iowa caucuses, “It’s time for all Republicans, Senate and the House, to get behind his policies.”As for the proposed aid to Ukraine, Ms. Greene is threatening to oust Mr. Johnson from the speakership if he brings it to the floor.“My red line is Ukraine,” she said, expressing confidence that the speaker would heed her threat. “I’m making it very clear to him. We will not see it on the House floor — that is my expectation.”House Republicans have opposed sending money to Ukraine without a deal on immigration.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThe situation is particularly fraught for Mr. Johnson, the novice House speaker whose own sympathies lie with the far right but who is facing immense institutional pressures — from Mr. Biden, Democrats in Congress and his fellow Republicans in the Senate — to embrace a deal pairing border policy changes with aid to Ukraine.Mr. Johnson has positioned himself as a Trump loyalist, quickly endorsing the former president after winning the gavel, and said that he has spoken regularly to the former president about the Senate immigration deal and everything else. After infuriating hard-right Republicans on Thursday by pushing through a short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown, the speaker has little incentive to enrage them again and defy the wishes of Mr. Trump, who has disparaged the Senate compromise.“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media this week.Democrats already have agreed to substantial concessions in the talks, including making it more difficult for migrants to claim asylum; expanding detention and expulsion authorities; and shutting down the intake of migrants when attempted crossings reach a level that would overwhelm detention facilities — around 5,000 migrants a day.But far-right Republicans have dismissed the compromise out of hand, saying the changes would still allow many immigrants to enter the country each year without authorization.Election-year politics is playing a big role. Representative Bob Good, Republican of Virginia and the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said passing the Senate bill would give “political cover” to Mr. Biden for his failures at the border.“Democrats want to look like they care about the border, then run out the clock so Biden wins re-election,” Mr. Good said. “It would be terrible for the country to give political cover to the facilitators of the border invasion.”Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, said that while Mr. Johnson broke with the right on federal spending because he feared a government shutdown, “I think on the immigration issue, there’s more unity.”Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Senate Republican, warned that the immigration compromise was a “unique opportunity” that would not be available to Republicans next year, even if they were to win majorities in both chambers of Congress and win back the White House.“The Democrats will not give us anything close to this if we have to get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate in a Republican majority,” he said.Speaker Mike Johnson has positioned himself as a Trump loyalist. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMany mainstream House Republicans believe that Mr. Johnson would be making a terrible mistake if he heeded the advice of the most far-right voices and refused to embrace an immigration deal. They argue that doing so would squander an opportunity to win important policy changes and the political boost that would come with showing that Republicans can govern.“Big city mayors are talking about the same thing that Texas conservatives are talking about,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, a close ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Take the moment, man. Take the policy win, bank it, and go back for more. That is always the goal.”But for some Republicans, taking the policy win is less important than continuing to have a political issue to rail against in an election year.“It’s worse than doing nothing to give political cover for a sham border security bill that does nothing to actually secure the border,” Mr. Good said.Mr. Burchett, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, rolled his eyes when asked about Mr. McHenry’s entreaties not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.“McHenry’s leaving,” he said of the congressman, who has announced he will not run for re-election next year. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      How Biden’s Immigration Fight Threatens His Biggest Foreign Policy Win

      by

      The debate over immigration in the United States is spilling over into other parts of President Biden’s agenda, particularly the war in Ukraine.The soaring number of people crossing into the United States from Mexico has been a political vulnerability for President Biden for the past three years, chipping away at his approval rating and opening him up to political attacks.But now, the crisis is threatening to upend America’s support for the war in Ukraine, throwing the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy into jeopardy.After a meeting with Mr. Biden at the White House on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that the Republican-led House would not pass legislation to send aid to Ukraine unless Democrats agreed to sweeping new restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.And even if the two sides do come to some sort of agreement, many Republicans, especially in the House, would be loath to give an election-year win to Mr. Biden on an issue that has given them a powerful line of criticism toward the White House. The issue is also at the center of the candidacy of Mr. Biden’s likely opponent this fall, former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Ukraine Faces Critical Tests as It Duels With Russia for Stamina

      by

      With Western support for Kyiv softening and Congress holding up urgently needed aid, Vladimir Putin’s bet on outlasting Ukraine and its allies is looking stronger.Ukraine faces dwindling reserves of ammunition, personnel and Western support. The counteroffensive it launched six months ago has failed. Moscow, once awash in recriminations over a disastrous invasion, is celebrating its capacity to sustain a drawn-out war.The war in Ukraine has reached a critical moment, as months of brutal fighting have left Moscow more confident and Kyiv unsure of its prospects.The dynamic was palpable last week, as Vladimir V. Putin casually announced plans to run for six more years as president of Russia, swilling champagne and bragging about the increasing competence of Russia’s military. He declared that Ukraine had no future, given its reliance on external help.That air of self-assurance contrasted with the sense of urgency in this week’s trip to Washington by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who pressed Congress to pass a stalled spending bill that includes $50 billion more in security aid for Ukraine.Speaking at the White House alongside Mr. Zelensky, President Biden said lawmakers’ failure to approve the package would “give Putin the greatest Christmas gift they could possibly give him.”But Mr. Zelensky’s pleas fell flat, at least for now, with congressional Republicans, who are insisting that additional aid to Ukraine can come only with a clampdown on migration at the United States’ southern border. After meeting with Mr. Zelensky, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, said his skepticism had not changed.The messages from Moscow and Washington illustrated the growing pressure on Ukraine as it shifts to a defensive posture and braces for a harsh winter of Russian strikes and energy shortages. Kyiv is struggling to maintain support from its most important backer, the United States, a nation now preoccupied with a different war, in Gaza, and the 2024 presidential campaign.Looming over Kyiv’s prospects is the possible return to office in 2025 of former President Donald J. Trump, a longstanding Ukraine detractor and praiser of Mr. Putin who was impeached in 2019 for withholding military aid and pressuring Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden and other Democrats.Almost 22 months into the war, polls broadly have found waning United States support for continued funding of Ukraine, particularly among Republicans. A recent Pew Research Center survey found just under half of Americans believe the United States was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine or should be providing more.Ukrainian soldiers firing at Russian positions in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine last month.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesMr. Johnson said money for Ukraine required more oversight of spending, and “a transformative change” in security at the U.S. border with Mexico. “Thus far, we’ve gotten neither,” he said.But the White House still has time to try to work out an agreement that includes border security, and Mr. Zelensky said he remained optimistic about bipartisan support for Ukraine, adding, “It’s very important that by the end of this year we can send a very strong signal of our unity to the aggressor.”A rupture in U.S. funding would risk proving Mr. Putin correct in his longstanding conviction that he can exhaust Western resolve in global politics and conflicts. Though his government bungled the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has regrouped, in part because Mr. Putin was willing to accept enormous casualties.“Putin, soon after the initial offensive didn’t produce the results that Russia had hoped, settled in for a long war and estimated that Russia at the end of the day would have the biggest stamina, the longest staying power, in this fight,” said Hanna Notte, an expert on Russian foreign and security policy at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.Russia has adapted, pumping up its domestic production of ammunition and weaponry, and importing critical matériel from Iran and North Korea, all with the goal of sustaining a long war, Ms. Notte said.“I think there was sort of a dismissiveness, ‘Let the Russians get together with these pariahs, with these global outcasts, and good luck to them,’” Ms. Notte said.But that support has been meaningful for Moscow on the battlefield, she said, particularly with Iran helping Russia enhance its domestic drone production. Ukraine, meanwhile, is struggling to obtain a sufficient flow of ammunition and weaponry from the West, where nations aren’t operating on a wartime footing and face significant production bottlenecks.Ukrainian troops gathered to test-fire their German-made Leopard tanks before moving toward the front line in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine last week.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesDespite his advantages in numbers and weaponry, Mr. Putin also faces limitations, and military analysts say Russia is in no position to make another run at the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, or other major cities.Russia lost huge numbers of personnel in its offensive maneuvers in the past year, and won little territory apart from the city of Bakhmut. With Mr. Zelensky ordering his troops to build defensive fortifications along the front, Russia may continue to suffer heavy losses without gaining much in return.Facing continued signs of displeasure with last year’s mobilization, the Kremlin appears loath to do another forced call-up before the Russian presidential election in March, if at all.“What we have seen in this war is the defense usually has significant advantages,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.Still, Ukraine, reliant on the West for weaponry and funding, faces short-term pressures that Russia does not. Kyiv’s allies don’t have the ammunition and equipment to arm another counteroffensive, making a major new campaign unlikely for most of 2024, according to analysts and former U.S. officials.The United States is by far Ukraine’s most important backer, accounting for about half of its donated weaponry and a quarter of its foreign aid funding. The congressional fight, bogged down in a partisan dispute about border security, has unnerved many Ukrainians.“Today, Ukrainians are beginning to suspect that the U.S. wants to force us to lay down our arms and conclude a shameful truce,” Yuriy Makarov, a political commentator for Ukrainsky Tyzhden, a Ukrainian magazine, said in an interview. “That the Ukrainians practically destroyed the professional army of Russia, which until recently was the main enemy of the United States, does not seem to be taken into account.”Hanna Yarotska, second from left, and her husband, Vasyl, left, mourn at the coffin of their son Yaroslav Yarotskyi, 25, a fallen Ukrainian soldier, at the cemetery in Boryspil, Ukraine, last month.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe failure of this year’s counteroffensive has exacerbated political friction in Ukraine, most notably between Mr. Zelensky and the military chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. A month after Mr. Zelensky publicly chastised the commander for saying the war had reached an impasse, the two have yet to appear together in public.There are signs Russia intends to be more aggressive through the winter. After weeks of focusing attacks on the city of Avdiivka, Russia over the weekend began a general offensive along the eastern front, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, told Ukrainian news media.The fighting favors Russia’s greater access to artillery ammunition. Earlier this year, the NATO general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, estimated that Ukraine fired 4,000 to 7,000 artillery shells a day, while Russia fired 20,000.The United States has provided more than two million 155-millimeter artillery shells and brokered deliveries from other nations. But stocks in Western militaries, which had not anticipated fighting a major artillery war, are dwindling.Ukraine also needs ammunition for air defenses, lest Russia’s volleys of exploding drones and cruise and ballistic missiles break through the air-defense blanket over the capital and key infrastructure.Ukrainian soldiers grabbing their rifles after firing an artillery shell at a Russian position near Borova-Svatove in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region last week.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesThe United States and its allies have provided a dozen or so types of air defenses, sophisticated NATO systems that have allowed businesses to open and cities to resume mostly normal rhythms of work and sleep. But as Russia fires thousands of cheap, Iranian-made Shahed drones, Ukraine’s air-defense ammunition is being exhausted.A tipping point looms if Russian missiles can reliably penetrate gaps, hitting military targets like airfields and blowing up electrical and heating infrastructure to dampen economic activity with blackouts, deepening Ukraine’s reliance on Western aid.“They can keep doing it as long as needed,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former Ukrainian minister of economy, said of the Russian assaults. Over time, diminishing political backing for Ukraine in the West provides an incentive to keep whittling away at Kyiv’s arsenal, he said. “If they feel Ukraine will lose support, they will try harder.”Ukraine also faces challenges from the attrition of its personnel.Kyiv does not announce mobilization targets or casualties, but a former battalion commander, Yevhen Dykyi, has estimated that Ukraine will need to enlist 20,000 soldiers a month through next year to sustain its army, both replacing the dead and wounded, and allowing rotations.“Unfortunately,” he said, “with all the military tricks and technologies, some things cannot be compensated for by anything but sheer numbers.”A memorial for Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv last month.Mauricio Lima for The New York Times More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      McCarthy Eyes Exit From House After Speakership Loss

      by

      The California Republican is still angry at his ouster and has struggled to acclimate. His colleagues expect him to retire, but he has taken his time deciding.At an emotional evening news conference immediately after he was removed as speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy gave an inconclusive answer about whether he would remain in Congress.“I’ll look at that,” he said then.Over the past two months, Mr. McCarthy has given the life of a rank-and-file member a hard look and discovered it to be a painful existence after having been at the pinnacle of his party in the House for more than a decade.These days, Mr. McCarthy, famous for his preternaturally sunny California disposition, has been hard to cheer up. He no longer attends the conference meetings he used to preside over, and at times has struggled to contain his anger at the Republicans who deposed him. (He denied the accusation from one of them, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, that he elbowed him in the kidney in a basement hallway of the Capitol.)He has also struggled to make peace with the idea that it’s time to go, even as California’s Dec. 8 filing deadline to run for re-election draws near and his colleagues expect him to leave.“When you spend two decades building something, it’s difficult to end that chapter,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of Mr. McCarthy’s closest friends in Congress. “His life has been building the Republican majority and attaining the third-highest office in the land. It is difficult for any mortal to deal with an abrupt end and determine his next chapter.”But the current chapter has grown increasingly untenable for him.As he has made his way around the Capitol contemplating his options for the future and cycling through various stages of grief over his merciless political downfall, Mr. McCarthy has retained small perks from his old life that serve mostly as painful reminders of all that has been taken away.He still has the kind of security detail furnished to the person second in line to the presidency, but he has been removed from the speaker’s suite of offices in the middle of the Capitol that serve as the building’s power center. He has participated in high-profile engagements, such as a recent speech to the Oxford Union and an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit, but those were booked before his ouster.Many colleagues still consider him a skillful convener of people with institutional knowledge about the workings of a Republican majority he helped build. But his inexperienced successor, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has not sought him out for any advice on managing the fractious Republican conference. And Mr. McCarthy has had to watch from the sidelines as Mr. Johnson has made some of the same choices that led to his own downfall — such as working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown — and, at least so far, paid little price.Mr. McCarthy has labored to acclimate.“After any stressful situation, it takes a while for the body to normalize,” Mr. McHenry said of the former speaker. “And when you talk about the extremes of political ambition, which is required to attain the speakership, it is even more dramatic to wring those chemicals out of your body to return to being a normal human.”On Instagram, where Mr. McCarthy recently shared pictures of his dogs hanging out in his Bakersfield, Calif., district office, many of the people commenting on the picture chimed in to remind him that despite his handle, “@SpeakerMcCarthy,” he was the speaker no more. (The title is technically his for life.)House Republicans are beginning to move past Mr. McCarthy’s removal as they navigate business with Mr. Johnson at the helm. But Mr. McCarthy has not finished processing his defenestration. He is someone who has never enjoyed being alone, and an emptier schedule leaves more time to spend in one’s own head.As unpleasant as it may be to hang around Congress in his diminished state, Mr. McCarthy has been forthright about the difficulty of deciding whether to leave politics, and when.“I just went through losing, so you go through different stages,” Mr. McCarthy said in a brief interview after his DealBook appearance on Wednesday in New York City. “I have to know that when I go, that there’s a place for me, and what am I going to do, and is that best?”Mr. McCarthy booked a speaking engagement at the DealBook summit while he was still speaker. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMr. McCarthy said he was taking his time in making a decision about whether to leave Congress, in part because he did not want to make a hasty decision he might come to regret.“I have to know that if I decided that wasn’t for me and I leave, I don’t want a year from now to think ‘Aw, I regret — I shouldn’t have left,’” he said. “So if I take a little longer than most people normally, that’s just what I’m going through.”Some center-leaning Republicans are pressing him to stay.“You have a lot of members who haven’t been here that long,” said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside organization allied with the congressional caucus of the same name. “You need some senior statesmen to teach the members how the process works, and he’s one of the last ones left.”Ms. Chamberlain added, “On a personal level, I can completely understand if he decides to leave. On an institutional level, it would be a shame to lose him.”If Mr. McCarthy were to exit Congress right away, it would also shrink the already-slim Republican majority, which went from four to three seats with the expulsion on Friday of Representative George Santos of New York. (As Mr. Johnson presided over the vote to oust Mr. Santos, Mr. McCarthy did not show up to register a position.)Still, it is highly unusual for a former speaker to choose to stick around. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has broken with tradition and embraced her emeritus status, describing herself as “emancipated” from the pressures of her old job.In September, the 83-year-old San Francisco Democrat surprised some of her colleagues by announcing she would run for another term. But Ms. Pelosi is at the end of a career that made history — she was the first woman to hold the post of speaker — and was able to leave her post, which she held for a cumulative eight years, on her own terms. The new generation of Democratic leaders in the House treats her with reverence and continues to solicit her advice on big decisions.In contrast, the awkward position of Mr. McCarthy, 58, who held the top job for little more than eight months and made history as the first speaker ever ousted, has been all too clearly on display.Ever since January, when Mr. McCarthy agreed to rule changes to appease the hard right in order to win the gavel, he and his allies had anticipated that his speakership could end exactly the way it finally did. But that has not left him feeling any less bitter about it.Though Mr. McCarthy denied intentionally shoving Mr. Burchett, he responded angrily to the accusation.“If I hit somebody, they would know it,” he told reporters, his voice rising with irritation. “If I kidney punched someone, they would be on the ground.”He has gone on television to scold Mr. Burchett and the other colleagues who brought him down, and pushed the Republican conference to exact some retribution against them even though there appears to be little appetite to do so.“I don’t believe the conference will ever heal if there’s no consequences for the action,” Mr. McCarthy told CNN in a recent interview. He also said that Mr. Burchett and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also voted to oust him, “care a lot about press, not about policy.”Despite his inner turmoil and painful power detox, Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that he aims to use his remaining time, influence and campaign money to help his party keep control of the House. That may also serve a rejuvenating purpose for him if he chooses to intervene in congressional races to try to defeat the Republican members who voted to oust him and bolster the candidacies of those aligned with him.“I may not be speaker,” he said during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “But I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Republicans win.”Robert Jimison More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      McCarthy Claimed Trump Was ‘Not Eating’ After Leaving Office, Cheney Says

      by

      In a new memoir, Liz Cheney wrote that Kevin McCarthy justified his trip to Mar-a-Lago by saying the former president was depressed after losing re-election.Former President Donald J. Trump was “really depressed” in the days after losing re-election and leaving office in January 2021, so much so that he was “not eating.”At least that is what Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney in trying to explain why he had traveled to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, an act of solidarity that many have identified as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability.Mr. McCarthy, the California congressman who was then the House Republican leader, had condemned Mr. Trump for fueling the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol and even suggested that he resign, only to turn around and effectively absolve the former president by embracing him again. In her new book, Ms. Cheney, perhaps the country’s most vocal anti-Trump Republican, reports that Mr. McCarthy justified the Jan. 28 visit as an act of compassion for a beaten ally.Ms. Cheney wrote that she was so shocked when she first saw the photograph of Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump standing side by side with grins on their faces that she thought it was a fake. “Not even Kevin McCarthy could be this craven, I thought,” she wrote. “I was wrong.” She went to see Mr. McCarthy to confront him about rehabilitating the twice-impeached former president who had just tried to overturn an election he lost.“Mar-a-Lago?” she asked Mr. McCarthy, according to the book. “What the hell?”He tried to downplay the meeting, saying he had already been in Florida when Mr. Trump’s staff called. “They’re really worried,” Mr. McCarthy said by her account. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”“What?” she recalled replying. “You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?”“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” Mr. McCarthy said.Ms. Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its publication on Tuesday, offers a scathing assessment of not only Mr. McCarthy but an array of Republicans who in her view subordinated their integrity to curry favor with Mr. Trump. Her account of his subjugation of the party presents a tapestry of hypocrisy, with inside-the-room scenes of Republicans privately scorning “the Orange Jesus,” as one wryly called him, while publicly doing his bidding.Ms. Cheney with Kevin McCarthy a few weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe much-anticipated memoir arrives on bookshelves even as Mr. Trump is in a commanding position to win next year’s Republican presidential nomination. Ms. Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress and led the House Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking member of her party, has assailed him as a budding autocrat in more visceral terms than most of his challengers for the nomination.The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a conservative star in her own right who was once on track to become House speaker, Ms. Cheney ultimately paid a price for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her service as vice chair of the House committee that investigated his role in instigating the Jan. 6 attack. She lost her leadership position and eventually her seat in a Republican primary last year. But she has vowed to do whatever she can to keep Mr. Trump from returning to the Oval Office.Indeed, she subtitled her book “A Memoir and a Warning” to make the point that Mr. Trump represents a clear and present danger to America if he is on the ballot next November. “We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic,” she wrote. “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.”A re-elected Mr. Trump, she said, would face few checks on his power. “Step by step, Donald Trump would tear down the other structures that restrain an American president,” she wrote. “The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves,” she added, “is purely wishful thinking by people who prefer to look the other way.”Asked for comment on Wednesday, Mr. Trump, who has openly called for “termination” of the Constitution to immediately remove President Biden from office and reinstall himself without waiting for another election, did not directly address any of Ms. Cheney’s specific assertions but simply dismissed her as a disgruntled critic.“Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said by email. “These are nothing more than completely fabricated stories because President Trump is the clear front-runner to be the Republican nominee and the strongest candidate to beat Crooked Joe Biden.”Likewise, Mr. McCarthy did not deny anything in the book, copies of which have also been obtained by CNN and The Guardian. His office released a statement saying, “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now apparently it’s also McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”In Ms. Cheney’s telling, Mr. Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election even as he told the public that he had not — and she cited no less than Mr. McCarthy as a witness. Just two days after the November election, she said, Mr. McCarthy told her he had spoken to Mr. Trump. “He knows it’s over,” she quoted him saying. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.”That could in theory make Mr. McCarthy an important witness in the federal or state criminal cases against Mr. Trump, refuting any defense by the former president’s lawyers that he was acting on good-faith belief that fraud had stolen the election from him.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership after Mr. McCarthy’s support for Mr. Trump failed to save him from a right-wing rebellion.Mr. Johnson took the lead in trying to corral support for Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He sent an email to all House Republicans telling them that he had spoken with the president, who expected them to sign onto a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Mr. Johnson wrote.Also depicted as a Trump acolyte is Representative Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who in recent weeks vaulted from the backbench to the speakership.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMs. Cheney took that as a veiled threat and said she was surprised about Mr. Johnson, whom she had thought of as a friend. “He appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit,” she wrote. “When I confronted him with the flaws in his legal argument, Johnson would often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”At first, Mr. McCarthy agreed with her that the pro-Trump brief went too far and told her he would not sign it because it would interfere with the power of states to run their own elections. “It federalizes too much,” he told her. But a day later, his name was added to the brief after all.Mr. Johnson did not back down even after the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the case, sending Ms. Cheney a Fox News poll showing that 77 percent of Trump voters and 68 percent of Republicans believed the election had been stolen. “These numbers are big,” Mr. Johnson said, “and something we have to contend with as we thread the needle on messaging.”Ms. Cheney noted that Mr. Trump’s supporters believed the election was stolen because Republicans like Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Johnson were echoing his lies.Other Republicans were willing to toss aside traditions, norms and constitutional processes in the name of satisfying Mr. Trump’s desire to stay in power. When one Republican said during a meeting that they should not claim the election was rigged when there was no evidence, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies, said, “The only thing that matters is winning.”Likewise, she assailed Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, for seeking to set aside the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 while a commission investigated election results that had already been recounted and certified. “It was one of the worst cases of abandonment of duty for personal ambition I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Ms. Cheney wrote.In some cases, she found that Republicans stayed loyal to Mr. Trump out of outright fear. One colleague told her he was worried about the safety of his wife and baby if he spoke out.Behind the scenes, though, other Republicans cheered her on. After she was one of only 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, former President George W. Bush sent her a note. “Liz, Courage is in short supply these days,” he wrote. “Thank you for yours. You showed strong leadership and I’m not surprised. Lead on. 43.”Her vocal criticism of Mr. Trump grated on other Republicans, highlighting what she called their “cowardice” in the face of the former president. When she contradicted Mr. McCarthy on Mr. Trump’s future role in the party during a joint news conference, Mr. McCarthy complained to her privately afterward.“You’re killing me, Liz,” he said.“Kevin, this is about the Constitution,” she replied. “Think of what Trump did. Think how appalled any of our previous Republican leaders would be about this. How would Reagan have reacted to this? How would Bush have reacted? Think of my dad.”Mr. McCarthy dismissed that line of thinking. “This isn’t their party anymore,” he said.On that, she wrote, she had to agree. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Should Biden Bow Out, as David Axelrod Urged?

      by

      More from our inbox:Mike Johnson’s LamentSkip the Drive-Through, for the Sake of the Environment and Mental HealthThe Threat to New Orleans Drinking Water Jonathan Ernst/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “The Axe Is Sharp,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Nov. 19):While reading Ms. Dowd’s column on whether President Biden should run for a second term, I was struck by a historical parallel. Like Mr. Biden, President Lyndon B. Johnson had served a deeply charismatic president and used his extensive senatorial experience to seal that president’s vision with legislation.But facing health concerns and declining popularity because of the Vietnam War, as well as surprisingly strong opposition by Robert F. Kennedy, Johnson decided that his moment had passed.As David Axelrod has noted, it is time to consider allowing other Democratic leaders to step forward. Mr. Biden has served the nation honorably for longer than most Americans have been alive, guiding the country through dark times and leaving a clear legislative mark.For his swan song, he can try to hold on to power until he is 86. Or he can choose to guide the nation peacefully through the turbulence of the coming electoral storm — not from the campaign trail, but as a steady presence in the Oval Office. I can think of no higher service.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Mike Johnson’s Rise to Speaker Cements Far-Right Takeover of GOP

      by

      After their party was decimated in the 2008 elections, mainstream Republican leaders believed they could harness rising far-right populist forces. Instead, they were overrun by them.The roots of the Republican crackup this fall that paralyzed the House, fueled the unexpected rise of Speaker Mike Johnson and now threatens to force a government shutdown crisis early next year lie in a fateful choice the party made more than a decade ago that has come back to haunt its leaders.In early 2009, congressional Republicans were staring down a long exile in the political wilderness. Barack Obama was about to assume the presidency, and Democrats were within reach of a filibuster-proof, 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and the largest House majority in more than 20 years after the economic crisis of 2008.But Republicans saw a glimmer of hope in the energized far-right populist movement that emerged out of a backlash to Mr. Obama — the first Black president — and his party’s aggressive economic and social agenda, which included a federal health care plan. Republicans seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist leanings and vehemently anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.“We benefited from the anger that was generated against the one-way legislation of the Obama years,” said Eric Cantor, the former House leader from Virginia who became the No. 2 Republican after the 2010 midterm elections catapulted the party back into the majority. “It was my way or the highway.”Mr. Cantor and his fairly conventional leadership team of anti-tax, pro-business Republicans set out to harness that rage to achieve their party’s longstanding aims. But instead, the movement consumed them.Within four years, Mr. Cantor was knocked out in a shocking primary upset by a Tea Party-backed candidate who had campaigned as an anti-immigration hard-liner bent on toppling the political establishment. It was a sign of what was to come for more mainstream Republicans.“We decided the anger was going to be about fiscal discipline and transforming Medicare into a defined contribution program,” Mr. Cantor said recently. “But it turned out it was really just anger — anger toward Washington — and it wasn’t so policy-based.”The forces that toppled Mr. Cantor — and three successive Republican speakers — reached their inexorable conclusion last month with the election of Mr. Johnson as speaker, cementing a far-right takeover that began in those first months after Mr. Obama took office.Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and House majority leader, was defeated in a 2015 primary by David Brat, a member of the Tea Party.Gabriella Demczuk/The New York TimesMr. Johnson, who identifies as an archconservative, is the natural heir to the political tumult that began with the Tea Party before evolving into Trumpism. It is now embodied in its purest form by the Freedom Caucus, the uncompromising group of conservatives who have tied up the House with their demands for steep spending cuts. And the situation won’t get any easier when Congress returns from its Thanksgiving respite to confront its unsettled spending issues and what to do about assistance to Israel and Ukraine.The ranks of more traditional Republicans have been significantly thinned after the far right turned on them in successive election cycles. They have been driven out of Congress in frustration or knocked out in primaries, which have become the decisive contests in the nation’s heavily gerrymandered House districts.“They thought they could control it,” Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who has studied the House’s far-right progression, said of G.O.P. leaders. “But once you agree essentially that Democrats are satanic, there is no room in the party for someone who says we need to compromise with Democrats to accomplish what we need to get done.”The result, Mr. Podhorzer said, is a Republican majority that his research shows across various data points to be more extreme, more evangelical Christian and less experienced in governing than in the past. Those characteristics have been evident as House Republicans have spent much of the year in chaos.“It isn’t that they are really clever at how they crash the institution,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “They just don’t know how to drive.”From the start, members who were more rooted in the traditional G.O.P., which had managed to win back the House majority in 1994 after 40 years, struggled to mesh with the Tea Party movement, which was driven to upend the status quo. Many top Republicans had voted for the bank bailout of 2008, a disqualifying capital crime in the eyes of the far-right activists.Leading congressional Republicans were leery of the Tea Party’s thinly veiled racism, illustrated by insulting references to Mr. Obama and the questioning of his birthplace, though they said they saw the activists as mainly motivated by an anti-tax, anti-government fervor.Traditional Republicans appeared at Tea Party rallies where they were barely tolerated, while the far-right Representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa, then outliers in the party, were the stars. They tried to mollify activists with tough talk on taxes and beating back the Obama agenda, but saw mixed results.The Republican National Committee also sought to align itself with the Tea Party, encouraging angry voters to send virtual tea bags to Congress in a 2009 Tax Day protest. Tea Party activists rebuked the national party, saying it hadn’t earned the right to the tea bag message.But the Tea Party paid huge electoral benefits to the House G.O.P. in 2010, as it swept out Democrats and swept in scores of relatively unknown far-right conservatives, some of whom would scorn their own leaders as much as the Democrats. The steady march to the modern House Republican Conference had begun.“It truly was bottom up,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who was then the spokesman for the R.N.C. “Then how do you have control over that? When you have that big a win, you are going to have people who just aren’t on your radar screen, but if they were, you would have tried to prevent them from winning their primary.”In the Senate, the Tea Party was having a different effect. Far-right conservatives such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware managed to prevail in their primaries, only to lose in the general election. That cost Senate Republicans a chance to win a majority in that chamber. The extreme right has had less influence in the Senate than the House ever since.Speaker John A. Boehner resigned in 2015 amid opposition from hard-line conservatives.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe ramifications of the far-right bargain for congressional Republicans quickly became clear. Mr. Cantor was defeated in 2014, and Speaker John A. Boehner, dogged by hard-line conservatives he branded “knuckleheads,” resigned in 2015. In 2018, Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor and the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012, had his fill of clashes with President Donald J. Trump — who aligned himself with the Tea Party in its early days — and chose not to run for re-election.Then Representative Kevin McCarthy — the last of a trio called the “Young Guns,” with Mr. Cantor and Mr. Ryan, that once seemed to be the future of the party — fell from the speakership in October. That ended the reign of House Republican speakers who had tried unsuccessfully to weaponize the ultraconservatives in their ranks while holding them at arm’s length.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster cleared the way for Mr. Johnson, who was chosen only after House Republicans rejected more established leaders, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who would have easily ascended in the previous era.Despite his unquestioned conservative bona fides, Mr. Johnson is already encountering difficulties in managing the most extreme element within his ranks.Last week, Freedom Caucus members blocked a spending measure in protest of Mr. Johnson’s decision to team with Democrats to push through a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.The move underscored the far-right’s antipathy to compromise and the dominance it now enjoys in the House, and raised the prospect that Mr. Johnson could face another rebellion if he strays again. More