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      House still without speaker as Republicans fail yet again to unify

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      After three weeks of the House having no speaker and mere hours after Tom Emmer of Minnesota won the nomination, the House still did not have a speaker on Tuesday when Emmer dropped out after just hours.Again, Republicans have failed to unify after the historic removal of Kevin McCarthy.Ahead of the Tuesday vote, seven House Republicans had launched speakership bids: Emmer, Jack Bergman of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Austin Scott of Georgia and Pete Sessions of Texas. Two other declared candidates, Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania and Gary Palmer of Alabama, announced before the Tuesday vote that they would withdraw from the race.Sessions, Bergman, Scott and Hern were eliminated after the first four ballots, while Donalds dropped out following the fourth round of voting. On the fifth and final ballot, Emmer and Johnson were the only two candidates, and Emmer pulled off the win, becoming the conference’s third speaker nominee in three weeks.The final vote was 117 to 97, underscoring the significant challenge that Emmer faced in attempting to unify his deeply divided conference. An internal roll call vote taken after Emmer won the nomination indicated that more than 20 Republicans intended to oppose him on the floor, members told reporters. Although Emmer tried to allay those members’ concerns, he was unable to sway enough of his detractors to advance to a floor vote.Of the declared candidates, Emmer was arguably the best known within the conference, because of his position in House leadership. But Emmer has shown an occasional willingness to clash with Donald Trump, which raised issues with some of his House colleagues. For example, Emmer is one of just two speaker candidates, along with Scott, who voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election despite the former president’s false claims of widespread fraud in battleground states. However, Emmer also signed an amicus brief urging the US supreme court to invalidate the election results of four key swing states, which would have voided Biden’s victory in the presidential race.Emmer’s mixed record on election denial was not enough to assuage the concerns of Trump, who urged House Republicans to oppose the speaker nominee on Tuesday. Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump warned that a vote for Emmer would be “a tragic mistake”.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump said. “Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them.”Emmer’s nomination came four days after Jim Jordan of Ohio abandoned his speakership bid due to entrenched opposition among more moderate Republicans.The House has now been without a speaker for three weeks, since McCarthy’s ouster earlier this month. Because of Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House, any speaker candidate can only afford four defections within the party and still secure the 217 votes needed to win the gavel.As the House remains at a standstill, the chamber is unable to advance any legislation. Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass a supplemental funding package providing aid to Ukraine and Israel, but the House cannot consider such a bill until a new speaker is elected.Despite the high stakes, House Republicans have been unable to unify around a single candidate. Following McCarthy’s removal, the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, won the conference’s speaker nomination, but he dropped out days later amid fierce backlash from hard-right lawmakers. Jordan then won Republicans’ speaker nomination, but he was forced to withdraw after three failed floor votes.“Chaos and dysfunction continue to be the order of the day in the House Republican majority,” the House Democratic caucus chair, Pete Aguilar of California, said Tuesday. “The American people and our allies abroad can’t afford any more delays. Every day of this Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] madness is another day of not sending aid to Israel and Ukraine, not taking meaningful steps to fund our government and not making sure that we’re looking out for working families across this country.”In a potentially grim sign for Republicans’ hopes of quickly reaching a resolution to the deadlock, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus has demanded that members remain in Washington DC until a new speaker is elected, jeopardizing the chamber’s planned recess starting next week.“We must proceed with all possible speed and determination,” the caucus said in a statement released on Monday. “Intentional and unnecessary delays must end. It serves only the lobbyists of the swamp and defenders of the status quo to continue to drag out this process.” More

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      Virginia Democrats defend Susanna Gibson after sex-livestream revelation

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      Democrats in Virginia are defending their candidate for a competitive statehouse seat against “desperate” efforts by Republicans to exploit her appearances on an adult porn website.The state’s Republican party has admitted it sent out several thousand “explicit” flyers to voters in House district 57 containing still images reportedly of Democrat Susanna Gibson engaged in livestreamed sex acts with her husband.The nurse practitioner and first-time candidate denounced as “gutter politics” the publication of a report last month that the couple had performed on the pornographic website Chaturbate in exchange for electronic “tips”. Videos of their encounters were archived last year, according to a Washington Post report, although it is unclear when they were shot.The mailings, marked “Warning: explicit material enclosed” and “Do not open if you are under the age of 18”, also contain censored quotes from Gibson, according to Richmond’s NBC12 news channel.A statement from her campaign denounced both the messaging and timing of the mailings, barely two weeks before election day in her closely contested race with the Republican David Owen.“David Owen and the Virginia GOP are trying to distract voters from their extreme agenda to ban abortion, defund schools and allow violent criminals to access weapons of war,” it said.“Voters are tired of these desperate attacks, and they will not be fooled by them. Nothing will ever deter her commitment to our community.”The seat could prove crucial in Republicans’ efforts to secure a majority in both houses of the commonwealth’s general assembly, and embrace the extremist policies of Virginia’s Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, who favors a 15-week abortion ban.Currently, Democrats hold a narrow advantage in the state senate. Republicans recaptured a slim advantage in the house of delegates in 2021.The Virginia Democratic party’s house caucus issued its own defense of Gibson, questioning Republicans’ motives.“The Maga [Make America Great Again] Republicans can’t help themselves from showing their true colors. This is a desperate attempt to distract and deflect from how many of their candidates are on the record wanting to ban abortion,” it said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Let’s not forget, David Owen is the same guy who was caught on camera saying he wanted to change the makeup of the general assembly to institute said ban. The VA GOP can’t be trusted and this continues to make that clear.”Owen’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, NBC12 said.Rich Anderson, the chair of the Virginia Republican party, told the outlet: “Gibson’s campaign has falsely alleged that the videos of her publicly engaging in sexual activity on publicly accessible pornography websites were ‘leaked’ by Republicans. In reality, the opposite is true.“The mail piece corrects her false statements using already published mainstream media news accounts and Gibson’s own public words as documented via her videos.”Youngkin told the station he had not seen the mailers, but felt Gibson should be held accountable. “This candidate’s personal life is something that that candidate needs to explain to people, and the Democratic party needs to have an opinion on this,” he said. More

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      Kevin McCarthy dismissed Liz Cheney warning before January 6, book says

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      When Liz Cheney warned fellow Republicans five days before January 6 of a “dark day” to come if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, the then House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, swiftly slapped her down.“After Liz spoke,” the former Wyoming representative’s fellow anti-Trumper Adam Kinzinger writes in a new book, “McCarthy immediately told everyone who was listening, ‘I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference. She speaks for herself.’”Five days after Cheney delivered her warning on a Republican conference call, Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s win.McCarthy’s statement, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.Kinzinger details McCarthy’s “notably juvenile” intervention – and even what he says were two physical blows delivered to him by McCarthy – in Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, which will be published in the US this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack, and acquitted a second time when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. When the dust cleared from the January 6 attack, McCarthy was among 147 House and Senate Republicans who still voted to object to results in key states.Like Cheney, Kinzinger, from Illinois, sat on the House January 6 committee, then left office. Unlike Cheney, who was beaten by a Trump ally, Kinzinger chose to retire.Cheney has maintained a high profile, warning of the threat Trump poses as he leads polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion) and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, and refusing to rule out a presidential run of her own.Kinzinger has founded Country First, an organisation meant to combat Republican extremism, and become a political commentator. In his book, he says he responded to McCarthy on the 1 January 2021 conference call by issuing his own warning about the potential for violence on 6 January and “calling on McCarthy to say he wouldn’t join the group opposing the electoral college states.“He replied by coming on the line to say, ‘OK, Adam. Operator, who’s up next?’”Such a “rude and dismissive tone”, Kinzinger says, “was typical of [McCarthy’s] style, which was notably juvenile”.McCarthy briefly blamed Trump for January 6, swiftly reversed course, stayed close to the former president and became speaker of the House, only to lose the role after less than a year, in the face of a Trumpist rebellion.Kinzinger accuses McCarthy, from California, of behaving less like a party leader than “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”. And while characterising McCarthy’s dismissal of Cheney’s warning about January 6 as “a little dig”, Kinzinger also details two physical digs he says he took from McCarthy himself.“I went from being one of the boys he treated with big smiles and pats on the back to outcast as soon as I started speaking the truth about the president who would be king,” Kinzinger writes.McCarthy “responded by trying to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”Kinzinger is not above robust language of his own. Describing Trump’s Senate trial over the Capitol attack, the former congressman bemoans the decision of the Republican leader in that chamber, Mitch McConnell, to vote to acquit because Trump had left office – then deliver a speech excoriating Trump nonetheless.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger writes, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.” More

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      Jim Jordan’s dizzying fall bodes an even more broken Republican party to come | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Jim Jordan’s march to seize the Capitol began as a beer hall putsch but veered into Sesame Street. Vote after vote, he has missed the sagacity of the Count, the puppet Dracula who teaches children the number of the day. Former speaker Nancy Pelosi wryly remarked that the Republicans should “take a lesson in mathematics and learning how to count”.After the second round, Jordan threw in the towel from his stool in the corner: no más! He endorsed instead extending the tenure and power of Patrick McHenry, the speaker pro tempore, until someone could figure something else out. But Jim Jordan the consensus builder was a short-lived phenomenon. The spirit of violence swirled around him.The House Republicans held a closed conference to deliberate. The ghostly Kevin McCarthy, the late speaker, stood to create order, though it was unclear what that order would be or what authority he invoked. Matt Gaetz, his assassin, rose to answer him. “Sit down!” McCarthy shouted. Foul oaths flew back and forth. “If you don’t sit down, I’ll put you down,” Representative Mike Bost told Gaetz. Gaetz gestured for him to come and fight. But the one who suffered a TKO was McHenry.Once again, Jordan had neglected to count. His followers did not follow him. “It’s the biggest F U to Republican voters I’ve ever seen,” said Jordan’s rabid advocate Representative Jim Banks. Another backer, Representative Scott Perry, Jordan’s successor as chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a fellow co-conspirator in the January 6th plot, rejected the McHenry gambit out of hand. “I’m going to stay with Mr Jordan to the end,” he declared. The collapse came quickly, with McHenry declining the honor. “If there is some goal to subvert the House rules to give me powers without a formal vote, I will not accept it,” he said, as he too proclaimed his allegiance to Jordan while politely sideswiping him.Outside the paralyzed House, a gaggle of Never Trump, anti-Jordan Republicans conjectured about performing a magic trick. Would Senator Mitt Romney take the speakership? He had announced he was not running for re-election; he could sit in the Senate at the same time he presided over the House. But then there was the book about him by McKay Coppins of the Atlantic in which, in a final act of belated truth-telling, Romney flayed each and every Republican leader. And, anyway, why would he accept the nomination to preside in hell? What about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Would the former California governor, flogging his guide to life lessons, be willing to lift the dead weights of the House? The other possibilities for a deus ex machina were even less plausible. These scenarios were more fanciful than casting during the actors’ strike.The Democratic House leaders, who have a ringside seat to the Republican chaos, have long believed that Gaetz was always Jordan’s cat’s paw. After credulous pundits blamed the unity of the Democrats for the shambles of the Republicans, even attributing it to “identity politics”, the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, offered the glimmer of a “bipartisan” coalition whenever breakaway Republicans would be willing to deal practically. But until the dawning of the Age of Aquarius the Democrats can do little but watch the Republicans’ crash landings. Aid for Israel? Ukraine? Border security? The world crisis is secondary to the petty vindictiveness of Republican strife.From the start, Jordan’s campaign counted on coercion. The Fox News host Sean Hannity made calls to recalcitrant members demanding to know why they were not in lockstep behind Jordan and urged his viewers to send angry messages to change hearts and minds. Steve Bannon, on his War Room podcast, instructed his listeners to target the office of Representative Steve Womack, who had not fallen into line. Gaetz, a guest on Bannon’s program, excitedly announced that one notable holdout, Representative Mike D Rogers, had joined the “Jordan train”.“It seems as though Congressman Rogers has been sufficiently encouraged,” boasted Gaetz about the efficacy of the threats. But this whip operation had its limits. When Representative Don Bacon voted for McCarthy, not Jordan, on the second ballot, the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade blurted on-air: “Dumbass!” We insult, you decide.After the McHenry debacle, Jordan leaped back in the ring. His Roberto Durán moment had passed. The threats were ratcheted up. Bacon’s wife was inundated with menacing phone calls and texts. “You’re going to be fucking molested!” said one voicemail. More than half a dozen members received death threats – “credible death threats”, said Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. “One thing I cannot stomach, or support, is a bully.”Robocalls incited Republicans in their districts to call members, falsely claiming they were supporting Jeffries. Representative Carlos A Gimenez personally confronted Jordan. “I told him, ‘I don’t really take well to threats. I really don’t,’” he said. “Robocalls – they’re not free. So somebody is actually funding this. And then he told me that he wasn’t behind it and he’s asked people to stop. But if you’ve asked people to stop it, why aren’t they listening to you?”Another target, Representative John Rutherford, was skeptical of Jordan’s denial. “I think he’s absolutely responsible for it,” he said.Jordan’s reliance on threats disclosed his tried and true methods and their shortcoming. Since he has been in the House, he has not enacted a single piece of legislation. His raw rightwing partisanship has been unashamed, unapologetic and undisguised. McCarthy, who was genuinely shocked at the January 6th assault on the Capitol, reduced himself afterward to a beggar in the palace of Trump. Jordan was in the planning meetings of the coup all along. It was the logical trajectory of his political arc from his earliest days.Jordan entered into the Ohio house in 1995 as the youngest member of the self-described “Caveman Caucus” that warred against moderate Republican governors as though they were socialists. His feud with the Republican speaker John Boehner of his home state, which ultimately resulted in Boehner’s quitting in sheer exasperation, stemmed from Jordan’s contempt. Boehner’s view of him as a “legislative terrorist” was not the result of a newfound discovery about Jordan in Washington, but an insight he had already gained from his antagonism in Ohio. Boehner opposed him when he sought election to the state senate in 2000.Jordan’s concentrated malice, stripped of the jacket of respectability, has a purity that the older Republicans with their penchant for the occasional compromise and a drink lack. “Politics has never been a place for sissies,” Jordan told an Ohio sports journal more than a decade ago, when he was asked if politics had gotten nastier.Elected to the House in 2006, he anticipated the Tea Party, which he subsumed as the natural successor to the “Caveman Caucus” but turbocharged with Koch brothers’ money. Jordan’s formation of the Freedom Caucus in 2015 was his new synthesis inside the House of the Tea Party, dark money and intimidation. He was waiting for Trump before Trump ever appeared on the horizon.After the Republicans won the House in 2022 by a slim margin, Jordan became chairman of the judiciary committee, although, despite graduating from the Capital University Law School of Columbus, Ohio, he curiously never passed the bar or practiced law. He created the Orwellian-named select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government essentially to harass the prosecutions of Donald Trump. When he demanded that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, turn over her evidence in the fake electors case in Georgia, she replied: “A charitable explanation of your correspondence is that you are ignorant of the United States and Georgia constitutions and codes.”Throughout his entire career Jordan himself has been under a cloud. Before he ever thought of running for the Ohio legislature, he was a star wrestler, recruited by his coach at the University of Wisconsin to be his assistant at the Ohio State University. The team doctor, Richard Strauss, whose locker was next to Jordan’s, near the showers, sexually abused a documented 177 students, according to the school’s official report, and OSU wound up paying more than $60m in settlements to about 300 people in all, while 200 suits are still pending.Jordan has adamantly denied any knowledge of Strauss’s crimes. Yet one of the wrestlers claimed he pleaded with him not to confirm the stories: “Jim Jordan called me crying, crying … begging me, crying for half an hour. That’s the kind of cover-ups going on here.” If it were to be shown that Jordan had even an inkling of the extraordinary sexual abuse his political career would be ended. “Politics has never been a place for sissies.” But the bully is often the coward.Before the vote it was known in certain political circles in Washington two major journalistic investigations into Jordan’s role in the wrestling scandal were being conducted. An HBO documentary produced by George Clooney and directed by Eva Orner (my colleague in the Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side) is far along in production. Throughout the speakership balloting a Washington Post story that had been filed as Jordan announced his candidacy was anxiously awaited. That investigation was at last published the day after Jordan dropped out. The Post would report that eight former wrestlers “had clear recollections of team members protesting Strauss’s conduct either directly to Jordan or within Jordan’s range of hearing. All considered it inconceivable that Jordan did not know about Strauss’s disturbing behaviors.”Jordan’s grasp for the speakership was his bid finally to have it all. He would no longer be a man on the side or behind the curtain. He would walk over the bodies of McCarthy and Steve Scalise to turn the whole House into a giant weaponization subcommittee. But loyalty to him could not deliver the votes. Threats of violence to his adversaries escalated. His strong-arm tactics backfired. The intimidation offended and failed to force submission. Twice defeated, his inability to accept the humiliation he has inflicted on himself compelled him to humiliate himself a third time. He could not win in an open ballot and did strikingly worse in a closed one, losing among Republicans by a margin of 86 to 112. Matt Gaetz screamed to the heavens at Jordan’s martyrdom: “The most popular Republican in Congress was just knifed in an anonymous vote in a secret closed-door meeting in the basement of the Capitol.”The difference between the 147 Republicans who voted against certification of Joe Biden’s election on the fateful night of January 6 and those same members who finally voted to reject Jordan is the mathematical measurement of the intimidation factor and its decline.Jordan’s abysmal failure has left the House Republicans to search for an inoffensive no-name alternative who by definition would lack the influence to move the party beyond its damage – “insurmountable” damage, said the ghost of Kevin McCarthy. “I’m concerned about where we go from here.” Several no-names threw in their hats. McCarthy endorsed the Republican whip, next in line, Tom Emmer. Bannon instantly dubbed him a “Trump hater”, parading his expertise on hatred, and Trump slammed him for not supporting the January 6 coup.No matter which Republican now accedes to the speakership that minor figure would not be able to maintain the discipline that Jeffries does among Democrats. Only when a majority of the whole House is allowed to bring a bill to the floor will regular order be restored. That would mean that a portion of the Republicans would ally with the Democrats as a majority to move most bills. Until then, the Hastert Rule, imposed by Republicans in the late 1990s, requiring a majority of the majority, in other words, a minority, will continue to serve the interests of extremist factions.“Politics,” wrote Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents, “is the systematic organization of hatreds.” Within the Republican party, that clever aphorism was turned into a strategy – the southern strategy, using race and resentment to realign the parties, a scheme laid out for the Nixon White House by the brilliant political analyst Kevin Phillips, who died this month.Jim Jordan rose in the party shaped by Nixon and has gone farther and farther right since, well to the right of the Nixonian or even Reaganite party. What Jordan encountered of the old Republican party, he attempted to extirpate. His constant battle to destroy its remnants was the foundation of his career, antedating Trump by a decade, at last coming close to a central place of power with Trump’s ascent. Jordan’s fight for the speakership is the “systematic organization of hatreds” in a new key. It is a war fought within the Republican party, of Republicans against Republicans, a Hobbesian struggle fit for a champion wrestler, but that has ended with his ferocious movements exhausting him and leaving him pinned to the mat.The Jordan flop is hardly the last match. It is not a singular or isolated event. The speakership battle is a function of the Trump candidacy. While Trump hurtles to the Republican nomination, campaigning courtroom by courtroom, gag order by gag order, Jordan’s collapse is an augury of an even more broken party to come, of the collision of planets.
      Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      Republicans fail to find consensus for US House speaker at candidate forum

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      Republicans, whose party infighting has stymied the US House of Representatives for three weeks, tried on Monday to find consensus on a new speaker to lead the chamber and address funding needs for Israel, Ukraine and the federal government.Nine speaker candidates, including No 3 House Republican Tom Emmer, made their pitches to fellow Republicans at a closed-door forum, and answered questions about how they would handle the job, which has become a flashpoint for factional strife between rightwing hardliners and more mainstream Republicans.The field quickly dropped to eight when one of the candidates, Dan Meuser, used his presentation to announce he was withdrawing. He told reporters it was time for the party to get its act together.“People are angry, people are frustrated, people are blaming us for the dysfunction, and they are kind of right. So we need to respond. We need to get this done,” Meuser said.The House has been rudderless since 3 October, when former speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted. Infighting later derailed leadership bids by two would-be successors: No 2 House Republican Steve Scalise and prominent conservative Jim Jordan.After Monday’s candidate forum, Republicans are due to meet at 9am ET on Tuesday to begin choosing a nominee behind closed-doors through a series of secret ballots.Monday night, Representative Matt Gaetz told CNN he thinks the House GOP “might” have a speaker Tuesday night. “We had some great candidates in there. And we’ll go from this current group down to our designee and I hope it’s a productive endeavor,” the Florida Republican said leaving the GOP’s candidate forum.McCarthy has endorsed Emmer, stressing his experience in working to marshal party votes on major legislation since January, when Republicans became the majority party. But Emmer could face an uphill battle if hardliners oppose him.The leadership vacuum of the past three weeks has stymied congressional action, as Congress faces a 17 November deadline to avoid a government shutdown by extending federal agency funding, and a request from President Joe Biden to approve military aid for Israel and Ukraine.House Republicans are concerned that none of the declared speaker candidates will be able to get the requisite 217 votes on the House floor needed to claim the speaker’s gavel.Michael McCaul, the House foreign affairs committee chair, told CNN: “It’s going to be very difficult, but we have to get there.”Any candidate nominated by the party conference can afford to lose no more than four Republicans when the full House votes. Meanwhile, the conference is split over spending cuts, Ukraine funding and other hot-button issues.Jordan tried and failed three times to win a floor vote in the House. He had been endorsed by the former president Donald Trump, who is a clear favorite to win the party’s nomination to run again as president in 2024.Democrats, who backed their own House leader Hakeem Jeffries for the speaker position, described Jordan as a dangerous extremist and opponents inside his own party were angered by a pressure campaign from his supporters that resulted in death threats.Six of the eight new candidates for speaker – Jack Bergman, Byron Donalds, Kevin Hern, Mike Johnson, Gary Palmer and Pete Sessions – voted to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss to President Joe Biden on the day that Trump supporters assaulted Congress on 6 January 2021.The two remaining candidates, Emmer and Austin Scott, did not vote to block the certification of the election results.House Republicans have been embroiled in chaos all year. McCarthy needed an agonizing 15 votes to win the speaker’s gavel in January, and along the way had to make concessions that enabled a single member to force a vote for his removal.That happened this month when eight Republicans forced him out after he passed legislation with Democratic support that averted a partial government shutdown.Investors say the tumult has contributed to market turbulence and Biden has urged Republicans to sort out their problems. More

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      House speaker hopeful Tom Emmer spoke to Trump to ease tensions as race to replace McCarthy drags into third week – as it happened

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      Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican who is seen as a frontrunner in the race for speaker of the House, spoke with Donald Trump over the weekend, Punchbowl News reports:As the party’s whip, Emmer is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, but Politico reports that since announcing his candidacy, he’s been attacked as disloyal to Donald Trump – even though he repeatedly voted for Jim Jordan, the failed speaker candidate who won the former president’s endorsement for the job.Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon referred to Emmer as a “Trump Hater,” while Boris Epshteyn, a current aide to the former president, attacked him for not endorsing his presidential campaign.“If somebody is so out of step with where the Republican electorate is, where the MAGA movement is, how can they even be in the conversation?”, Epshteyn said.After days of dysfunction and bickering that culminated in rightwing lawmaker Jim Jordan abandoning his bid to become speaker of the House despite winning the GOP’s nomination for the post, the party is again gearing up to elect a new leader in Congress’s lower chamber. This time, Republicans have nine candidates to sort through, and we’ll get an indication of who they are leaning towards this evening, when the party holds a forum for the aspirants.Here’s a rundown of what we learned today about the race:
      Tom Emmer, who is considered a frontrunner for the post, reportedly spoke over the weekend with Donald Trump. The former president’s advisers have criticized the Minnesota lawmaker as not sufficiently loyal, which could pose a problem to his bid for speaker. Fellow candidates Kevin Hern and Pete Sessions also said they got on the phone with Trump.
      Trump seemed to indicate he thought only Jesus Christ could win enough votes to become speaker of the House.
      Hern, who leads the large and influential Republican Study Committee, delivered his pitch to become speaker along with McDonald’s hamburgers.
      The rightwing House Freedom Caucus said lawmakers should not leave Washington DC until a new speaker is appointed. Some of their members were behind the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair.
      Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator who last month was indicted for accepting bribes in return for political favors, has pleaded not guilty to a new charge of acting as an unregistered agent of the Egyptian government, the Associated Press reports.Menendez made the plea during a New York City court appearance, after which he departed without answering shouted questions:Here’s more on the latest charges:More Republican House speaker aspirants say they’ve spoken to Donald Trump ahead of this evening’s candidate forum.This includes the chair of the influential Republican Study Committee Kevin Hern, CNN reports:As well as Texas lawmaker Pete Sessions, who voted for objecting to Arizona and Pennsylvania’s results in the 2020 election:Donald Trump has been campaigning in New Hampshire today, where he was asked about the race for speaker of the House.It’s a little unclear, but appears to say that only Jesus Christ could manage to win election in the fractured chamber. See his comments for yourself:Progressive senator Bernie Sanders has come out against the Biden administration’s request for a funding package aimed at providing Ukraine and Israel with military assistance: Sanders is an independent who caucuses with the chamber’s Democratic majority, and it’s unclear what impact his opposition will have on the fate of the package. The Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell said he was partial to the request, meaning it may receive bipartisan support in that chamber.Its prospects in the House are less clear. Besides the fact that the chamber has no speaker and cannot pass legislation, a growing number of Republicans there have said they do not support further aid to Ukraine.Oklahoma congressman Kevin Hern just said in the corridors of the House that he hopes the Republican conference will be able to pick a nominee that they can coalesce around for speaker tomorrow night.The House is far into record breaking territory on its 20th day without a speaker while Congress is in session.Hern told CNN that he favors a roll call vote of GOP-ers behind closed doors – in hopes of having a nominee that the conference can unite behind sufficiently to have that person elected as speaker after the decision goes to a vote of the full House floor.The Biden administration wants to see safe passage for people out of Gaza ahead of a potential ground invasion by Israel, particularly for US citizens, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said moments ago at the regular briefing in the west wing, Reuters reports.
      We still want to see safe passage out and particularly for the several hundred American citizens that we know are in Gaza and want to leave,” Kirby said.
      Kirby said the US agrees with the Israeli government that “the top priority has to be going after Hamas.”
      There is no daylight there,” between Israel’s and the US position, Kirby said.
      We are on Israel’s side, here.”
      Kirby said that the US has sent some military advisers to Israel to advise the Israelis.Our global blog on the Israel-Gaza crisis can be read here.The White House is keeping information very tight on what it’s doing to try to speed the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Pressure has intensified on Israel to negotiate the release of more than 200 people, including chiefly Israelis but also some Americans and other foreigners, taken by Palestinian militants after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7.Meanwhile, Kirby said it would “certainly be helpful” if House Republicans could produce a speaker for the chamber. This a day after Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said he endorsed Joe Biden’s $106bn aid proposal to Israel and Ukraine, which won’t get anywhere while the House is paralyzed.After days of dysfunction and bickering that culminated in rightwing lawmaker Jim Jordan abandoning his bid to become speaker of the House despite having the GOP’s nomination for the post, the party is again gearing up to elect a new leader in Congress’s lower chamber. This time, Republicans have nine candidates to sort through, and we’ll get an indication of who they are leaning towards this evening, when the party holds a forum for the aspirants.Here’s a rundown of what we’ve learned today about the race:
      Tom Emmer, who is considered a frontrunner for the post, reportedly spoke over the weekend with Donald Trump. The former president’s advisers have criticized the Minnesota lawmaker as not sufficiently loyal, which could pose a problem to his bid for speaker.
      Kevin Hern, who leads the large and influential Republican Study Committee, delivered his pitch to become speaker along with McDonald’s hamburgers.
      The rightwing House Freedom Caucus said lawmakers should not leave Washington DC until a new speaker is appointed. Some of their members were behind the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair.
      Tom Emmer, the Minnesota Republican who is seen as a frontrunner in the race for speaker of the House, spoke with Donald Trump over the weekend, Punchbowl News reports:As the party’s whip, Emmer is the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House, but Politico reports that since announcing his candidacy, he’s been attacked as disloyal to Donald Trump – even though he repeatedly voted for Jim Jordan, the failed speaker candidate who won the former president’s endorsement for the job.Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon referred to Emmer as a “Trump Hater,” while Boris Epshteyn, a current aide to the former president, attacked him for not endorsing his presidential campaign.“If somebody is so out of step with where the Republican electorate is, where the MAGA movement is, how can they even be in the conversation?”, Epshteyn said.Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician to Barack Obama and Donald Trump who is now a Republican congressman, endorsed Byron Donald’s candidacy for speaker.Here’s the Texas lawmaker’s announcement:Speaker candidate Kevin Hern is the chair of the Republican Study Committee, the largest ideological caucus in the House, which is geared towards advancing conservative policy goals.Below is the “Dear Colleague” letter he sent out to announce his candidacy for the chamber’s top job. The Oklahoman is also a former McDonald’s franchise owner, and sent the letter to Republican lawmakers along with the chain’s signature burgers:While the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell is partial to Joe Biden’s request for a joint Ukraine-Israel aid package, speaker candidate Dan Meuser told CNN he opposes it.He’s just one man, and faces a crowded field of eight others to win the gavel, but is unlikely to be alone in his views. Here’s what he had to say: More

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      The California town that could hold the key to control of the House in 2024

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      When customers come in for a cut and a conversation at Miguel Navarro’s barbershop, there’s one topic they raise more than any other: gas prices.A gallon of regular goes for about $5 in Delano, a farming town in California’s Central Valley where in 1965, grape pickers staged a historic strike over bad pay and working conditions that led to the creation of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, led by Cesar Chavez. Today, everyone in the city who can afford to do so drives, which means feeling the pain of California’s pump prices, the highest in the nation.“You kind of think about it twice before you go out,” said Navarro as he cut a customer’s hair in his eponymous barbershop on Delano’s Main Street. His shop sits among a strip of tax preparers, taquerias and leather goods stores, in an area that also happens to be some of the most fiercely contested political territory in the nation.The city of nearly 51,000 is in the middle of a California congressional district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans, Joe Biden won overwhelming support in 2020, but despite its apparent blue lean, voters have repeatedly sent the Republican David Valadao to be their voice in the House of Representatives over the past decade.Next year, Democrats hope to change that as part of their campaign to seize back control of Congress’s lower chamber, which hinges on flipping 18 districts won by Biden in 2020 that are represented by Republicans like Valadao, a dairy farmer who is one of just two Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump and managed to keep their seats.That battle, which will play out alongside Biden’s re-election campaign and Senate Democrats’ defense of their small majority in the chamber, may well be the easiest for the party to win in 2024.Though the numbers appear to favor Democrats in California’s 22nd congressional district, several hurdles stand between the party and victory. Nearly a year and a month before the general election, the down-ballot races that are crucial to deciding the balance of power in Washington DC are far from the minds of many in Delano.“People here are just living day by day, and if you do not remind them about elections, they might not remember,” said Susana Ortiz, an undocumented grape picker who lives in Delano and has campaigned for Rudy Salas, Valadao’s unsuccessful Democratic opponent in last year’s election.Democrats must gain five seats to win a majority in the House, and Valadao’s district – encompassing dozens of farming communities and half of Bakersfield, California’s ninth most-populous city – is one of 33 targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2024.Beyond campaigning, Democrats are expected to benefit from a supreme court decision that has forced Alabama, and potentially Louisiana, to redraw its congressional map. The party also has a good shot of gaining a seat in New York City’s Long Island suburbs, where voters are reeling after discovering their Republican congressman George Santos is a fabulist who is now facing federal charges.The GOP has its own redistricting advantages, particularly in North Carolina, where new congressional maps could knock at least three Democrats out of their seats. The National Republican Congressional Committee is targeting Democratic lawmakers in 37 seats, five of whom represent districts that voted for Trump three years ago.“I think the House is going to come down to redistricting fights, candidate recruitment and, probably, most importantly, the top of the ticket and what that does to down-ballot races,” said David Wasserman, an election analyst who focuses on the chamber at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.No race has a dynamic quite like the contest to unseat Valadao, whose spokesperson declined to comment. The 46-year-old won election to the California state assembly in 2010, and then to the US House two years later. Valadao defeated successive Democratic challengers in the years that followed, until TJ Cox ousted him in a close election in 2018, a historically good year for the party.Valadao triumphed over Cox two years later. The January 6 attack on the Capitol occurred just as he was to take his seat in the House, and a week after that, Valadao joined nine other Republicans and all Democrats to vote for impeaching Trump.“Based on the facts before me, I have to go with my gut and vote my conscience. I voted to impeach President Trump. His inciting rhetoric was un-American, abhorrent and absolutely an impeachable offense,” Valadao said at the time. The decision ignited a firestorm among Republicans in his Central Valley district.“It was ugly, man. I mean, it was really, really, really ugly,” said James Henderson, a former GOP party chair in Tulare, one of the three counties that make up Valadao’s district. Donors threatened to withhold their funds, but Henderson said arguments that Valadao was uniquely able to hold the vulnerable seat, and crucial to representing the county’s agriculture interests, prevailed.“The alternative is, if you lose this seat, you lose this seat forever,” Henderson said. It was nonetheless close: styling himself as a Trump-aligned conservative, Chris Mathys, a former city councilman in the Central Valley city of Fresno, challenged Valadao in the primary, and came within 1,220 votes of beating him.Mathys was assisted by the House Majority Pac, which was linked to the then Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi and spent $127,000 on television advertisements boosting his candidacy and attacking Valadao, according to the analytic firm AdImpact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was one of many instances across the country in which Democratic groups channeled dollars to rightwing Republicans in their primaries, betting that they would be easier to defeat in the general election. Valadao would go on to triumph over state assemblyman Salas, and make an unlikely return to the House.Valadao’s re-election fight is shaping up to be a repeat of what he faced the year prior. Mathys is running again, and has once more put Valadao’s vote against the former president at the center of his campaign. Trump is the current frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, and California Republicans will vote in primaries for both races on the same ballot.“The big issue, clearly, is the impeachment issue. It looms very large. People remember like it was yesterday,” Mathys told the Guardian in an interview. “With President Trump being on the ballot, it’s going to even resonate stronger, because he’ll be on the same ballot that we’re on.”CJ Warnke, the communications director for the House Majority Pac, said the committee would “do whatever it takes” to defeat Valadao and Mathys, but did not say whether that would include another round of television advertisements supporting the latter.Salas is also challenging Valadao again, and another Democrat, the state senator Melissa Hurtado, is in the primary. Salas believes that next year will be when Valadao falls, due to the presidential election driving up turnout in the majority Latino district.“The fight is making sure that people actually get out to the polls, vote, or that they turn in their vote-by-mail ballots,” Salas said in an interview. “That’s what we fell victim to last year and something that we’re hoping to get correct going into 2024.”Then there is the ongoing mess in the House, which could have direct effects on Valadao. He’s referred to Kevin McCarthy, who represents a neighboring district, as a “friend”, and opposed removing him as speaker. Valadao three times voted to elect the Republican Jim Jordan as his replacement, unsuccessfully, but also supports giving the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, the job’s full powers.Jordan is a rightwing firebrand, and an advocate of Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Wasserman said Valadao’s support for him could undercut the reputation he has built for himself as an “independent-minded farmer”, while the downfall of his ally McCarthy may affect Valadao’s ability to benefit from his fundraising.Delano has a reputation as a pivotal community in Valadao’s district, and winning over its voters may come down to money and messaging.A member of the UFW, Ortiz has for several years campaigned for Salas in the spare time she has when she’s not picking grapes for minimum wage. She knocks on doors in Delano’s sprawling neighborhoods, believing Salas is the kind of politician who can bring solutions for undocumented people like herself: she has not seen her father in Mexico since leaving the country 18 years ago, and her oldest son is also undocumented but, for now, protected from deportation by the legally shaky Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) policy.Among the voters who open their doors for her, disillusionment is high, and there’s one phrase Ortiz hears repeatedly: “I don’t even vote because after, they do not help you.”Meanwhile, as an independent, Navarro, the barber, said he would probably vote for Trump next year, as he had in the past, citing his hope the former president would bring, among other things, lower gas prices.“I think we were a little bit more peaceful with him,” Navarro said. But he’s not sure whom to support for Congress, and would probably go for whichever candidate he hears from the most: “We’re meant to vote for whoever has more to offer.” More

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      Trump is ‘single most dangerous threat’ to the US, warns Republican Liz Cheney

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      Donald Trump is “the single most dangerous threat” the US faces as he seeks a return to the Oval Office, according to Liz Cheney, the moderate Republican whose opposition to her party leader’s presidency had cost her a congressional seat she held for six years.“He cannot be the next president because if he is, all of the things that he attempted to do but was stopped from doing by responsible people … he will do,” Cheney – the daughter of former congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney – said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “There will be no guardrails. And everyone has been left warned.”Cheney’s fiery remarks come as the former president fights more than 90 criminal charges for subversion of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden, retention of government secrets after his presidency, and hush-money payments to the porn actor Stormy Daniels. He is also grappling with civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a rape allegation deemed “substantially true” by a judge.Though his popularity with the general public is low, he maintains substantial polling leads in the race to clinch the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.If Cheney’s remarks on Sunday are any indication, it is an advantage she can hardly fathom after serving as the vice-chair of the US House committee which investigated the deadly Capitol attack staged by his supporters on 6 January 2021. Cheney and her colleagues recommended that the justice department file criminal charges against Trump in connection with the Capitol uprising before the four indictments obtained against him since March.“After January 6 … there can be no question that he will unravel the institutions of our democracy,” Cheney said, alluding to Trump supporters’ desperate but unsuccessful attack to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 race. “So we are facing a moment in American politics where we have to set aside partisanship, and we have to make sure that people who believe in the constitution are willing to come together to prevent him from ever again setting foot anywhere near the Oval Office.”The House Capitol attack committee’s recommendation was one of Cheney’s last congressional acts before she left office in January. She lost her bid to be re-elected to a Wyoming’s sole House seat she had held since 2017 after Trump successfully supported Harriet Hageman’s run against her in a Republican primary.Hageman subsequently won a runoff election and succeeded Cheney as their district’s House representative.Additionally, Cheney on Sunday suggested to both State of the Union and CBS’s Face the Nation that she was mulling joining the crowded field of presidential hopefuls signing up to challenge Biden in 2024.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe also remarked to Face the Nation that it should not be shocking for anyone to see Republicans struggle to appoint a replacement for Kevin McCarthy after far-right members of his party engineered his unprecedented removal as House speaker on 3 October.After all, McCarthy and the first two House Republicans who unsuccessfully launched bids to succeed him – Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan – all objected to certifying Trump’s 2020 defeat.“So it’s not a surprise that we are where we are,” Cheney said. “But it’s a disgrace, and it’s an embarrassment.” More