House Democrats come hard at GOP in Mayorkas impeachment hearing

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Following a contentious 15-hour debate, the House Homeland Security Committee voted in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to approve the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The vote was strictly on party lines, 18-15, and Democrats used amendments and procedural motions to score plenty of hits against congressional Republicans for being the tools of Donald Trump.

One of those motions included having the clerk read aloud all amendments, including one from Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell that blasted the Republicans for using this impeachment to boost the campaign of Trump, “a narcissistic, hateful liar who was found by a court of law to have raped and defamed at least one woman,” and who is “currently facing 91 criminal charges for a wide variety of alleged offenses, including a felony conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California had fun ridiculing Trump for his brilliant border plans, which have included “alligator moats, bombing northern Mexico, shooting migrants in the legs, and electrifying the fence, and putting spikes on them.”

Committee Democrats didn’t just take on Trump. They were having none of the MAGA nonsense from Republican committee members. Here’s Rep. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island taking on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Magaziner: It’s pretty rich hearing the Rep. Greene express concern about terrorism when she was selling defund the FBI shirts and hats for $30. The leading agency tasked with combatting terrorism.. I’m not going to take any lectures from her on securing the homeland from terror pic.twitter.com/GUqput7zR8
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 31, 2024

“It’s pretty rich hearing the gentlewoman from Georige express her concern about terrorism when she literally was selling ‘defund the FBI’ T-shirts and hats on her website for $30 apiece,” Magaziner said. “The leading law enforcement agency tasked with combating terrorism in this country and keeping people safe, and she wants to defund it,” he continued. “I’m not going to take any lectures from her on securing this homeland from terror.”

Democrats also pointed out Republican actions to stymie Mayorkas, including lawsuits that hamper him from enforcing the law. “When the secretary and the administration has tried to use their limited authority to change policy to limit the number of people coming to the border, to streamline the process, to make it go through ports of entry, Republicans filed lawsuits to stop the administration from doing it,” Rep. Dan Goldman of New York correctly pointed out.

Goldman: The hypocrisy of you sitting here and accusing Mayorkas of failing to enforce the law when you are going to court to prevent him from enforcing the law… pic.twitter.com/YqtEsFsAXk
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 31, 2024

Republicans eventually shut down amendments from Democrats, playing into the Democrats’ hands. Ranking Democratic member Bennie Thompson of Mississippi blasted Republicans in a statement at the end of the night, criticizing them for shutting down debate “of their sham impeachment articles in the dark of night.

“They were either uncomfortable being confronted by the facts or they lacked the stamina to entertain a fulsome debate of a resolution the Committee entertained to buy off Marjorie Taylor Greene and the extreme MAGA Republicans who have taken over the Republican conference,” he said. That is also true—this sham was spearheaded by Greene.

The impeachment resolution is likely to come to the House floor next week, where its passage isn’t assured. There are still at least a few Republicans who have not committed to impeaching a cabinet official over a policy disagreement, and the Republican majority is so tiny that leadership can’t afford much defection. The Democratic conference is as united against the resolution as the committee Democrats are, and the impeachment won’t go anywhere in the Senate.

This isn’t about immigration policy, of course. This is about fighting President Joe Biden on immigration, which is just about the only issue Republicans have working in their favor in this election. Republican lawmakers themselves admit that.

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It is primary season, and Donald Trump seems pretty low energy these days. Kerry and Markos talk about the chances of Trump stumbling through the election season and the need to press our advantage and make gains in the House and Senate. Meanwhile, the right-wing media world is losing its collective minds about Taylor Swift registering younger Americans to vote!

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Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries eggs on Republicans in their civil war

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is having some fun at Republicans’ expense, stirring one of the pots simmering away in their civil war.

The GOP Tax Scam in 2017 obliterated the State and Local Tax deduction and hurt middle class families. House Republicans in New York promised to fix it. They lied.
— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeemjeffries) January 30, 2024

Jeffries is needling the so-called “moderates” in the Republican conference who are taking on leadership in what should be a no-brainer tax bill. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill?

It’s not enough for some of the members of the Biden 17, the group of Republicans in districts that voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. They want their specific, parochial tax break for their constituents—increasing the federal deduction for state and local taxes—to be included in the bill. And they’re threatening to take a page out of the Freedom Caucus playbook and shut the House down if they don’t get it.

SALT FRAY: LaLota suggests unrelated rules could get knocked down and slowing House floor business if they aren’t heard out on SALT for the tax bill. D'Esposito, asked if he’d also consider joining: Absolutely. Perhaps it's time that us rational become the radical.
— Chris Cioffi (@ReporterCioffi) January 30, 2024

“Do it! Do it!” Jeffries seems to be urging them, in a masterful bit of trolling. He’s reinforcing just how vulnerable these members sitting in swing districts are. He’s also poking some fun at just how ineffectual they’ve been in accomplishing anything in the majority.

But Jeffries is also putting just that much more pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has a very, very tenuous hold on the majority right now and absolutely can’t afford to lose any votes on any bills. Another masterful troller—Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern—pointed out that the GOP’s ranks were so thin Monday that Democrats had the majority. "My Republican friends barely—barely—control the House of Representatives,” McGovern ribbed. “In fact, yesterday there were more Democrats voting than Republicans."

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Republicans admit impeaching Mayorkas is all politics

Posted on January 30, 2024 by Joan McCarter

The House Homeland Security committee will vote Tuesday on two impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. House Republicans have been trying to dress up this impeachment—originated by very serious lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—as valid, arguing that Mayorkas “has willfully and systemically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” and pretending it rises to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” threshold for impeachment. At the same time, Republican members are spilling the beans to right-wing media: This is all about the politics.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas admitted it on Fox News. Asked what the point of the exercise is when the Senate is sure not to act on it, he said it’s to ”send a message to the administration.” Watch:

.@RepMcCaul says on Fox News that House Republicans want to impeach Mayorkas to "send a message to the administration." No high crimes. Not even a misdemeanor! Just naked politics -- and they aren't even trying to hide it. pic.twitter.com/rEy2kshU6G
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 29, 2024

Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York told Newsmax the same thing. “This is sending a message to the Biden administration,” Tenney said. “This guy needs to go, and don’t put another person in place to do what Alejandro Mayorkas did.”

Republicans have been admitting this for weeks now, actually. Here’s Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas: “The impeachment process is necessary to send a message to the administration to say [Mayorkas is] not doing his job, and we’re feeling it … And if this is the way that we have to do it, this is the way it has to be done.”

Even Republicans admit this isn’t real and isn’t going anywhere. It’s about politics, and the Biden administration is rising to that challenge. It slapped back in a memo from the Department of Homeland Security, calling the impeachment “just more of the same political games” from Republicans.

“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” the memo adds.

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House GOP wages war with itself, the Senate, and reality

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Joan McCarter

The government-funding can that Congress kicked down the road earlier this month is inexorably rolling toward the new deadlines in early March, and so far, none of the 12 appropriations bills that have to be completed have made it through both the House and the Senate. But that doesn’t seem to be a priority this week, because the House Republican majority is once more at war with itself, the Senate, and reality. The agenda for this week includes fighting over the border policy bill the Senate is preparing, fighting over a tax bill that should be a no-brainer for every member of Congress, and impeaching a cabinet secretary over nothing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is working hard to appease both Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd in the House on the border legislation that a bipartisan group in the Senate has been working on. That’s the immigration policy changes Republicans insisted be included in a national-security supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Now that a deal on immigration—which Republicans have been claiming to be the most important policy issue of the day—is within reach, the House is rejecting it. They would rather have the issue to run on in this election than to actually do something to solve it.

That’s putting Johnson at loggerheads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is pushing hard for some sort of deal in order to salvage assistance to Ukraine—a top priority for the Kentucky senator. Last week, Johnson said the deal is “dead on arrival,” without even seeing legislative language. And the fight has spilled over into the Senate, where hard-line MAGA members—like Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is opposed to Ukraine aid—are lining up against McConnell.

“If you’re going to take a tough vote, you take one but you want to accomplish something. The worst of all possible worlds is you take a vote, you put a lot of political pressure on the House and you don’t get any policy accomplished,” Vance told Politico. The Senate could vote on the legislation as soon as this week.

Back in the House, there’s what should be a no-brainer tax bill on tap. But it’s got both the hard-liners and the moderates up in arms. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill? Republicans are turning on each other along familiar breaklines: MAGA vs. everyone else.

The Freedom Caucus is pushing a lie that the tax credits would go to “illegal foreign nationals.” Of course, that’s not true, and even Americans for Tax Reform, a right-wing lobbying group, is saying so. They point out that anyone receiving the tax credit has to have a Social Security number, and that “There are no ‘anchor baby bonuses’ in this bill as one organization alleged.”

Meanwhile, the so-called “moderates” in the GOP conference—largely a group of New York Republicans representing swing districts—are hopping mad that their No. 1 issue isn’t included in the bill. That’s raising the SALT cap, the limit on federal deductions for state and local taxes. “There is real anger about the process,” one GOP lawmaker in the SALT Caucus told The Hill.

House moderates might unite on the other big issue in the House Homeland Security Committee: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over nothing. Back in November, eight of them originally voted to defuse a motion from Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to impeach Mayorkas by instead sending it to committee. The group argued that if it was going to happen, it needed to happen through the committee process. Now that it has, they’ll probably be on board, never mind that there is absolutely no foundation for the action, and that the Senate will not vote to convict Mayorkas. It seems like this bunch of moderates figure they’ll have better luck getting reelected in their Biden districts on taxes than on bucking MAGA leadership.

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House GOP kicks off a new year of dysfunction with another impeachment

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Tim Miller from “The Next Level” podcast comes on to discuss Iowa, New Hampshire, and the cracks they expose in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

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McConnell considers killing major immigration deal to help Trump

Posted on January 25, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Republicans have the biggest policy win on immigration in decades within their grasp, but Donald Trump is calling the shots now, so the deal is all but dead. In what’s been reported as a Senate Republican meeting Wednesday, leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues he doesn’t “want to do anything to undermine” Trump.

This is the same McConnell who reportedly privately celebrated the fact that “Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us” by impeaching Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The McConnell who, after voting not to convict Trump on said impeachment charges, publicly declared Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the attack on the Capitol that day in his floor speech announcing that he would not vote to impeach Trump. Trump “seemed determined to either overturn the voters' decision or else torch our institutions on the way out,” McConnell said at the time.

"A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name," McConnell added. "These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags and screaming their loyalty to him."

But now McConnell’s apparently declaring his loyalty to Trump, as well, while the Republican civil war fomented by Trump spills over from the House to the Senate. On Wednesday, McConnell reportedly told Republicans they are in a “quandary” over Trump’s opposition to the proposed bill, which would give Republicans big concessions on border policy. He even used Trump’s own words, to show that a big victory is in reach.

“He did a good job of quoting Donald Trump saying in 2018 that we will never get a Democrat to vote for this [border] stuff,” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told CNN. But that wasn’t enough for MAGA politicians, who “want to kill it and run on the issue,” as one Senate Republican source told The Hill. Another GOP senator said after the meeting, “I think the border portion is dead.”

Senate MAGA members held a press conference Wednesday to attack the possible deal and to declare war on McConnell for even considering cooperating on the bill. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas basically called McConnell a traitor to Republicans. “Chuck Schumer’s enemies in Congress are conservatives in the Senate and are House Republican leadership,” Cruz said. “And sadly, Mitch McConnell’s enemies are conservatives in the Senate and House Republican leadership.” And Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said, “The problem is our leader. … Leader McConnell is really the stage manager of this negotiation.”

McConnell isn’t publicly crying uncle, not yet, telling one reporter Thursday that talks are still ongoing, but the writing is definitely on the wall. Trump doesn’t want a border deal, and McConnell doesn’t seem likely to try to defy him, not when it could endanger his own leadership position.

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Live coverage: House GOP’s latest impeachment stunt

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Joan McCarter

The Republican House Homeland Security Committee will kick off the new year in a complete waste of time and energy with its first hearing in its impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The charges are ”failed leadership and his refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress,” and are not real. This is, as New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman told reporters Tuesday, “an embarrassment to the impeachment clause of the Constitution.”

It will not be taken up by the Senate, but will give Republicans on the committee (like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) some camera time. That’s what matters most to them. You can follow along here and on C-SPAN.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:36:43 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Thompson: "This impeachment sham is not about facts. It's not about the law. It's about politics."

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:34:00 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

“You can not impeach a cabinet secretary because you do not like the president’s policies,” Thompson said, saying Republicans are just mad that President Biden is not “taking babies away from their mothers and putting kids in cages” like his predecessor.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:32:34 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Thompson making a good argument—with quotes from border control chiefs—that they need the funding and additional resources that Republicans have refused to provide. “Democrats want to give agents the resources they need to secure the border. Republicans do not.”

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:30:54 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Thompson (that’s Bennie—forgive the typo in previous update) is listing the massive failures of the House GOP in 2023, arguing that this is all a political stunt for them to distract.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:28:25 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Rep. Benny Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the committee, opens. He starts with a recording of Green promising big political donors at a campaign event that he would impeach Mayorkas. This is a “preplanned political stunt,” to “keep that campaign cash coming.”

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:26:19 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Chairman Green justifying this impeachment by insisting that what his calls Mayorkas’ incompetence is grounds, and the constitution doesn’t actually require “high crimes and misdemeanors” to impeach. Expect Democrats to come back hard on that point.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:21:36 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

This is a long, but not exactly explosive, opening statement from Chairman Mark Green. He is showing a snippet from a previous hearing that he says is a smoking gun for Mayorkas lying to Congress which is pretty contorted and also mostly demonstrates that Republicans refused to allow him to actually answer the questions.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:14:15 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Chairman Green now focusing on humanitarian parole which the White House can use to allow immigration, saying that Mayorkas has abused it. This has emerged as a key fight in the Senate’s negotiations on immigration, the hostage Senate Republicans have taken in exchange for their votes on Ukraine aid. This hearing is probably also intended to give the Senate Republicans more (baseless) fodder for their fight.

UPDATE: Wednesday, Jan 10, 2024 · 3:09:17 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Green showing video of news reports from Fox News and other right-wing outlets on “chaos” at the border, in case you were wondering if this was going to be a serious venture.

Senate inches closer to border deal. Will House GOP and Trump kill it?

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Senate negotiators made some progress in talks over the holiday break on a potential border and immigration deal, which was the Senate Republicans’ requirement for agreeing to a vote on President Joe Biden’s Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan supplemental funding package. Over the weekend, the lead Republican in the talks, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, said text could be released soon. The fate of that agreement, however, lies in the hands of his fellow Republicans and their fealty to their de facto leader, Donald Trump.

“Text hopefully this week, to be able to get that out,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “This agreement has to work. Everyone’s counting on this actually working.” Senate leaders were cautiously positive on Monday. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor statement that “it’s been a very promising few days. We have made more progress in the past couple of days on the border than we have in the past few weeks.”

“I was encouraged to see that Senator Lankford and our Democratic colleagues made progress toward an agreement to put meaningful border security policy at the heart of this supplemental,” said Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. “Russia is openly mocking the fickleness of Western support for Ukraine,” he intoned with a shocking lack of irony, since it’s entirely congressional Republicans’ fault that U.S. support to Ukraine is endangered. "The Senate cannot afford to get this wrong," McConnell declared.

As Monday wore on, Lankford tempered his optimism and his revised deadline for delivering text to next week, with a Republican conference on the negotiations hastily scheduled for Wednesday to brief skeptical conservatives, showing the cracks that could make Senate Republicans get this very wrong.

Ukraine aid needs at least 10 Republican senators to support it, and they are skeptical at best right now, both on Ukraine and on the immigration deal Lankford is trying to secure. Last month, Republican senators voted unanimously to keep Ukraine aid from moving to a floor vote over the border issue, and now there is a contingent of Republicans who seem intent on torpedoing Lankford’s efforts.

One of them is McConnell’s previous number two, Sen. John Cornyn, who is taking a hard line in the talks on the president’s authority to provide immigration parole to people who have financial sponsors coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. These immigrants are not crossing at the southern border; they fly into the country. Cornyn and others want to severely restrict, if not end, Biden’s humanitarian parole authority. “We can’t fix asylum and then just have them release people on parole,” Cornyn told The Washington Post. “That would be a disaster politically, and otherwise.”

Other Republican senators like MAGA star J.D. Vance of Ohio are egging the House extremists on in their threats to shut the government down over immigration. “I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Vance told the Post. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.” Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas will reportedly try to force a “no confidence” vote on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in support of the House’s impeachment effort, which won’t advance in the Democratic Senate.

It seems like the most fervent Republican backer of Ukraine, McConnell, is following rather than leading his fellow Republicans at this point, going along with the demands from his hardliners on immigration. That’s a problem for the future of Ukraine, particularly with House Speaker Mike Johnson taking hard line on talks, insisting that the extreme House immigration bill passed last year is a “necessary ingredient” for the deal. He also moved forward with Mayorkas’ impeachment, despite the lack of cause.

When it comes to immigration, Johnson is catering to the Freedom Caucus. That group hasn’t backed off last week’s government shutdown threats over immigration, and are now even more adamant after Johnson’s agreement for a government funding deal with Schumer.

Hanging over all of this is Trump: Republican lawmakers’ fealty to him; his increasingly bombastic, Hitleresque immigration rhetoric; and his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He would likely end all support to Ukraine and hand the country over to Russia if he got back into office.

The specter of Trump hangs over Congress and over Ukraine. There need to be enough Republicans willing to buck Trump for the bleak outlook for Ukraine aid—and thus Ukraine’s future—to improve.

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House GOP’s New Year resolution: Don’t be like us in 2023 but give us more MAGA

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Stung by all those stories about how much they didn’t do last year, House Republicans are looking ahead to 2024 with trepidation and the realization that their razor-thin majority is on the line, The Washington Post reports. They recognize that they need to start governing after last year’s abysmal performance, but at the same time remain loyal to their MAGA roots—and Donald Trump. It’s early days, but it seems clear that they’re not going to succeed in accomplishing both things.

“We have to start governing. … Playing politics with every single issue is not helpful” swing-district Rep. David G. Valadao of California—one of the Biden 17—told the Post for this story. “We need to get to the point where we can start passing legislation and getting something to the president’s desk that actually solves problems for the American people.”

Meanwhile, the first serious order of business for the House to kick off this session is beginning baseless impeachment hearings for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They are also preparing to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress in that all-important Biden impeachment inquiry, seemingly the top priority for House Republicans since every House Republican—including Valadao—voted to move forward with it. That’s not exactly governing.

It doesn’t help the cause of governing, of passing legislation and getting bills signed into law by President Joe Biden, when they’re picking these very political fights. It also doesn’t help when the entirety of the House GOP leadership has endorsed Donald Trump even before voting begins in the 2024 primaries.

It doesn’t help governing to have the chair of the House Republican Conference, the fourth-ranking House Republican, parroting Trump on national television and defending his Nazi rhetoric, but that’s exactly what Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York did on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Stefanik called the arrested Jan, 6 insurrectionists "hostages," just like Trump did. She refused to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election, and she defended Trump’s Hitleresque claim that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. “Our border crisis is poisoning Americans through fentanyl … so yes, I stand by President Trump,” Stefanik told host Kristen Welker. Pressed to answer if that meant she stood by Trump’s words, Stefanik said “yes,” then said Trump has the “strongest record when it comes to supporting the Jewish people.”

That’s Republican leadership, but there are still rank-and-file “moderates” telling the Post they “believe their chances of keeping the House rely on reelecting swing-district incumbents and other conservatives willing to compromise.” Because those conservatives have been so willing to compromise so far.

They’re right about one thing: Keeping the House would be easier if they abandoned MAGA politics and compromised. Recent polling from the Post demonstrates that the majority of voters won’t be amenable, for example, to the idea that the convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists are “hostages” since 50% of Americans view the Jan. 6 crowd as “mostly violent.”

To win in 2024, House Republicans—especially swing-district incumbents—need something to hang their hats on that isn’t MAGA. So far they’ve done nothing to show they’ll be able to accomplish that.

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House GOP kicks off a new year of dysfunction with another impeachment

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House GOP kicks off a new year of dysfunction with another impeachment

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Joan McCarter

Trust the Republican House to make a difficult situation exponentially worse. Not content with establishing a new record of dysfunction and ineffectiveness in the first session of the 118th Congress, they’re kicking off the second year with another waste of precious time: a second baseless impeachment, this time against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s basically the first thing on their agenda when they return to work next week, with the first hearing scheduled for Jan. 10.

Never mind that the first deadline for a partial government shutdown is Jan. 19, and the House has made zero progress in meeting it. Instead, Republican leadership has chosen to start impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas for his “decision-making and refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress, and that his failure to fulfill his oath of office demands accountability,” according to Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green of Tennessee.

Mayorkas’ team at DHS slapped back. “The House majority is wasting valuable time and taxpayer dollars pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote,” spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.

The White House was equally scathing. “Actions speak louder than words,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement. “House Republicans’ anti-border security record is defined by attempting to cut Customs and Border Protection personnel, opposing President Biden’s record-breaking border security funding, and refusing to take up the President’s supplemental funding request.”

“After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 Border Patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl earlier in 2023, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement,” Bates said.

That Senate effort—which aims to find a compromise on immigration that will get enough Republican votes to allow aid to Ukraine to continue—is ongoing, though its success is far from certain since the House GOP is working to poison it. Senate Republicans will point to the House GOP’s opposition to justify their refusal to support any agreement. To that end, House Speaker Mike Johnson is spearheading another stunt, leading a delegation of about 60 Republican House members to visit a border facility near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday.

Johnson’s trip is fueling the hard-line stance on immigration, but he’s also painting himself into a corner with the House extremists. Catering to the hard right on immigration is extremely unlikely to help him avert a government shutdown—since a government shutdown is what the Freedom Caucus wants.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a prominent member of the caucus, made that clear enough in a letter Tuesday, writing that he was skipping this trip to the border because it is not enough. "Our people—law enforcement, ranchers, local leaders—are tired of meetings, speeches, and press conferences,” he said, adding that the House should be “withholding funding for the vast majority of the federal government until it performs its basic duty to defend the borders of a supposedly sovereign nation."

The more Johnson bends to extremists on immigration, the more emboldened they will be to force a shutdown over the issue. He’s setting himself up for failure, for the very same trap that every Republican speaker since John Boehner has fallen into. Either Johnson bucks the Freedom Caucus and risks being ousted like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, or he allows a disastrous shutdown.

Meanwhile, there’s reality: In the past week, illegal border crossings have decreased. But reality isn’t likely to make any difference to Republicans; it rarely does.

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White House engages on Ukraine/immigration stalemate

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Speaker Mike Johnson faces same old GOP dysfunction in the new year

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Joan McCarter

There’s a big backlog of critical business facing Congress when members return in January, thanks to all those issues they put off dealing with in 2023. The House will reconvene with an ever-slimmer Republican majority that is somehow even more dysfunctional than the one that kicked off this year. An ousted speaker, an expelled member, a simmering civil war, and midterm retirements made for a bitter end to the first session of the 118th Congress and set Speaker Mike Johnson up for a potentially catastrophic second half in 2024.

Congress left for its holiday break in mid-December, one-quarter of the way into the 2024 fiscal year, with no agreement between the House and Senate on overall funding levels after House Republicans reneged on the agreement they made with President Joe Biden to resolve the last big crisis over the debt ceiling. That deal was brokered under the last speaker, Kevin McCarthy, in one of his desperate attempts to keep his job. The current speaker is showing little inclination to reverse course.

“We all shook hands, we passed it,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, told Politico earlier this month. “And now the speaker is saying: ‘Never mind, we’re going to go backwards.’”

The continued stalemate is going to make meeting the Jan. 19 and Feb. 2 deadlines to fund the government for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year challenging, to say the least, even while Congress is supposed to be putting together its budget for the 2025 fiscal year. As if.

Though still a newbie speaker, Johnson is already stymied by the extremist Freedom Caucus, whose far-right members keep holding the threat of what happened to McCarthy over him. One of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy, Eli Crane of Arizona, is making that abundantly clear.

“One of the positives is that the precedent has now been set for the first time in history that at least with this group, and this slim majority: If you make repeated promises that you do not keep, you will be held accountable,” Crane told The Hill.

A bunch of less extreme House Republicans took a stab at changing the rules so that one chaos agent—aka Matt Gaetz—no longer has the individual power to get the ball rolling on ending a speakership. The push to overhaul the “motion to vacate” rule went nowhere, and is still causing tension in the conference.

“We looked like a bunch of idiots. We looked like a banana republic a few months ago,” McCarthy ally Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana told The Messenger. “I don't think you should have one moron that should be able to trigger that vote.”

Speaking for the “morons,” new Freedom Caucus chair Bob Good of Virginia is happy with the status quo—and happy to wield the threat against Johnson.

“I think most of us hope it would never need to be filed again,” Good said, but added, “you can’t control the future.”

While that internecine war is bubbling away, Johnson also faces the reality of an even slimmer majority than his predecessor wrestled with. With said predecessor deciding to jump ship early, New York’s George Santos expelled, and Ohio’s Bill Johnson on his way out the door early next year, the new speaker is only going to have two Republican votes to spare—that is, as long as Democrats remain unified, something they’ve become remarkably good at.

Johnson has already had to rely on Democrats to keep the government running and pass the big defense authorization bill his party’s hard-liners hated, moves that made him even less popular with the maniacs running roughshod over his conference. Any way you slice it, the first few weeks of January are going to be pretty darned miserable for Johnson, and he’s finally going to be forced to make decisions about how to deal with his fractious caucus.

Hey, Kev—Don’t let the door hit you on the way out

GOP infighting intensifies as Matt Gaetz targets Republicans

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