House Speaker Mike Johnson pretended Wednesday that Republicans have any basis at all for moving forward on impeaching President Joe Biden, and that this is a serious inquiry. Johnson soberly intoned that the Republicans understand “impeachment requires time … You don’t rush something like this.”
Meanwhile, House Republican leadership told members that they’ll be taking a formal vote on impeachment in the next few weeks, possibly in January. That’s even while their plans for a hearing with their primary witness, Hunter Biden, are crumbling around them. Johnson laughably praised the committee chairs for conducting their circus “methodically and transparently,” when right now they’re trying to force Hunter Biden’s testimony to happen behind closed doors.
Johnson really gave the game away, though, in a statement that could have come straight from “1984”’s Ministry of Truth. He claimed that both of Donald Trump's impeachments—in which he was on the Trump defense team—were “brazenly political” and “meritless.” The GOP's efforts to impeach President Joe Biden, however, are “just the opposite” because “the Republican Party stands for the rule of law.”
That’s the whole game, right there. It’s not about the rule of law. It’s about revenge for Trump. Period.
Hunter Biden wants to testify to the House Oversight Committee in public, not behind closed doors. He’s watched as his associates have given private depositions only for Republicans to leak misleading and outright false accounts of their answers, and the president’s son doesn’t seem interested in being a victim of that process. Hunter Biden’s offer to testify publicly has James Comer, the chair of the Oversight Committee, talking fast and offering a lot of excuses. A closed-door deposition, Comer insisted to Sean Hannity Tuesday night, “is for all practical purposes public. We will release the transcripts.”
But not before Comer and his buddies go out and set the narrative about the deposition by lying about it.
There’s a reason Hunter Biden might want the world to see his answers live. In late July, his former business partner Devon Archer gave a closed-door deposition. Within hours, Comer and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, with Comer claiming, “Today, we saw Joe Biden has lied to the American people. He knew exactly who his son was getting those millions and millions of dollars of wires from, and he spoke to them, and he spoke to them often.” Days later, under pressure, Republicans released the transcript of Archer’s deposition, and, of course, it showed nothing of the sort.
Talking to Hannity on Tuesday night, Comer pretended he hadn’t spent months lying his inflated head off about everything related to the “investigation.” Comer constantly spits out numbers of pages of documents that the committee has obtained, dollar amounts of money paid to people associated with Hunter Biden, and accusations that President Joe Biden has in some way been receiving that money—without any evidence at all of that final, critical point.
“Everyone knows that if you have a credible, substantive investigation, you have depositions, you have transcribed interviews, then you bring in people for committee hearings,” Comer told Hannity. “I’m not doing this for entertainment. This is a credible investigation.”
(Pause to laugh.) A credible, substantive investigation, he says. (Helpless laughter.) Man, if you have to repeat “credible investigation” like that on friendly ground like Hannity, you are giving something away.
“This will be a very transparent investigation, as it has been from the very beginning,” he added. Transparently partisan, for sure. But again, we’ve watched as Comer and other Republicans have lied and obfuscated and manufactured baseless claims about the president. We know better—but Republicans are relying on having Hunter Biden give a private deposition that they can twist and set a false narrative on before they release the transcript and only a few people bother to read the whole thing.
Tuesday on Newsmax, Comer again claimed his reasons for wanting a closed-door deposition were very serious investigative ones, complaining that a hearing doesn’t offer the opportunity to dig into the documents “without filibustering, without interruption, without going five minutes back and forth.” But then he said something that got to the real issue, complaining about “[Reps.] Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman and little Moskowitz jumping up and down.” (Here's why Rep. Jared Moskowitz is apparently living rent-free in Comer’s head these days.)
Rep. Elise Stefanik sounded a similar note in a Wednesday interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business. “In an open public hearing, you see the Democrats turn this into a charade.” In other words, you see the Democrats push back. Stefanik also showed how fully the fix is in despite no evidence of corruption by the president. “This is not about Hunter Biden,” she said. “This is about Joe Biden and whether or not he is compromised. I believe he is fully compromised, and I believe that as we continue uncovering evidence, we will see that this is the greatest political corruption scandal of our lifetime.”
Republicans are trying to sound like Very Serious Investigators as they push for that closed-door deposition. But this comes after Comer and others have spent months showboating on Fox News and Newsmax, building a baseless public case about the president’s alleged corruption. They have nothing to show for it but partisan talking points, as we see when they subject themselves to questioning by nonpartisan reporters. Nothing about this is “a credible investigation,” and what they’re really worried about is Hunter Biden testifying publicly and putting that on view for the whole world.
House Republicans are still all-in on their plan to impeach President Joe Biden for Something Something Hunter Biden, even if they still haven't been able to work out the pesky details. But Hunter threw a wrench in the gears Tuesday morning with an offer to testify, in person, to the House Oversight Committee investigating him—but only if his testimony is public.
Crack Republican investigator and committee chair James Comer immediately shot that idea down, because at no point in the process did Republicans intend for Hunter Biden to actually respond to any of this. No, Republicans absolutely do not want Hunter to come in and testify publicly about their speculations and accusations.
Now Fox News and other Republican disinformation factories have to come up with some spin on why the House committee is right to not want the American public to hear Hunter's willing testimony. Acyn has the clip, so here's your shit show:
Fox News hosts trying to convince their viewers that a closed door deposition of Hunter Biden is better than a public hearing pic.twitter.com/KPxznk5NUK
Michele Tafoya: But I agree, I prefer hearings to be done behind closed doors, because I think they actually get to the heart of the matter, and they get some truth, and they can ask questions without preening for the camera, without all the grandstanding.
Yes, that's what the Republicans investigating the Something Something Hunter Biden conspiracy hate more than anything else: grandstanding. Comer and Jim Jordan are known nationwide for their unwillingness to do anything that looks like grandstanding. Republicans specifically selected lawmakers who would be least likely to tolerate grandstanding, which is why Comer and Jordan are joined on the committee by such level heads as—taking a deep breath here—Virginia Foxx, Glenn Grothman, Pete Sessions, Clay Higgins, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina Luna, Paul Gosar, and Marjorie Taylor “Absolutely No Grandstanding Here” Greene.
The House hearings on Hunter Biden are likely the most dignified and least showboating hearings to ever have occurred in any Congress anywhere, in fact. They ooze decorum like Jordan oozes concern for college athletes’ welfare.
Hmm. The chyron identifies Tafoya as a "former NFL sideline reporter." During her many years on the field, I wonder if she ever discovered a football game going on.
“That is my preference, and for Abby Lowell, for his attorney to say, ‘well you all use that to misinform, and to distort the facts,’ well you know what? You can do that too. After he comes out of his closed door session, you feel free to knock yourself out and you can distort too.”
Ah, and there we have the perfect encapsulation of the Fox News mindset: The truth isn't important! Nobody wants to see the truth for themselves! What's important is how partisans want to "distort" the facts, and the other side can distort the facts too, and then Fox will broadcast the distorted facts that it thinks are best and those are what you, loyal couch potato, should then base your entire mushy worldview around. That's how America is supposed to work.
It seems like just last week House Republicans were loudly crowing about how America needed to see all of the Capitol security camera footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection—absolutely needed to see every bit of it (except for the bits they're going to withhold because of reasons and the bits where they're going to blur out faces so that nasty, nasty law-abiding Americans can't snitch on any more rioters than they've already snitched on). Now we're hearing that cameras and public broadcasts are bad and what Americans really want to know is what the loudest conspiracy freaks in Congress think they should know.
I mean, you can't say she's wrong here. Roger Ailes built a whole network around that idea and he died rich and only mildly discredited, shunned, and a social pariah.
“I mean, it's a silly argument and Comer has said, ‘fine, sit before us publicly, a public hearing, we will do that later. We want the closed door one first.’”
And if you can't trust Comer and Jordan to keep their word, who can you trust? Ask Jordan's old wrestling team: This is a man who's never told a lie.
“And I think it's totally, totally appropriate. Hunter Biden would love nothing more than to sit, have cameras pointed at him, and try to generate the narrative that he wants to form.”
That darn grandstanding Hunter Biden. He tricked Rudy Giuliani into possessing his criminally hacked computer files. He tricked the least grandstand-y group of House Republicans to ever exist into displaying his hacked, private nude photos during a public hearing. He tricked them into focusing obsessively on all of the lowest moments of his life, using all of his worst failures as tabloid fodder for the sake of discrediting his father. Now he's trying to trick them into allowing him to tell his side of the story, after years of Republicans broadcasting their own version?
This week should have proved once and for all to Republicans everywhere that the MAGA minority in Congress is ungovernable and, worse, opposed to having a government at all. New House Speaker Mike Johnson faces the same reality that every recent GOP speaker has faced, but it looks like it might get worse than what even former Speaker Kevin McCarthy dealt with.
Once again, the only way Johnson could get a continuing resolution to keep the government running was with Democratic votes—the same way McCarthy did it (though with a hint more grace and far less drama). And once again, the minority of Republican maniacs who run the show hit back. In McCarthy’s case, the rebellion led to his ouster. But so far, they aren’t threatening that for Johnson. However, they did grind the House to a legislative halt, again, preventing it from passing appropriations bills that they should have loved, larded down as the bills were with the MAGA maniacs’ own poison-pill provisions.
You can lay this situation at McCarthy’s feet. He gave the place away to the maniacs in exchange for holding the gavel for nine months. That included putting three of the most extreme members in the GOP conference—Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky—on the powerful House Rules Committee. They’re the ones responsible for making sure every extreme amendment from the likes of Andy Biggs, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert gets a vote on the floor.
Those amendments are why the “moderates” in the GOP joined the hard-liners in shutting down the latest appropriations bill, voting against a procedural rule to advance it.
Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from New York, voted against it in protest of having to keep taking disastrous votes on far-right amendments that are doomed to fail. “The amendments are going to fail, the bill is going to fail, it won’t get sent to the Senate, it won’t be signed by the president,” LaLota said.
By the way, that trick of blocking a motion to proceed to a bill hadn’t been used by majority members in the House since 2002, and back then, it was used just once. It’s been deployed several times by Republicans just since June. This is how broken the House is since “regular” Republicans folded and let the small group of extremists run the show.
Speaking of broken, ladies and gentlemen, meet the Senate where a growing MAGA contingent promises to bring some of the House chaos to the upper chamber. From Oklahoma’s brawling Markwayne Mullin to Alabama’s one-man national security threat, Tommy Tuberville, we’re moving far beyond the traditional GOP obstruction with filibusters and into unprecedented territory.
Democrats salvaged something from all this wreckage this week: the continuing resolution that will keep the government operating for the rest of the year. No question, that’s a great thing to have accomplished. But because Democrats did it, the MAGA rampage will get even worse, and it’ll start as soon as Congress returns from its Thanksgiving break.
In other words, getting those appropriations bills done in a few months comes down to Johnson realizing that if he wants to succeed in this job, he’ll have to break the hold the minority nihilists have on the House. That means working with Democrats on everything from determining spending in bills to restructuring the Rules Committee to end the maniacs’ control of it. If the House ceases to function—which we are perilously close to—the legislative branch doesn’t work. The Senate can’t legislate by itself. While we’re talking reform, Senate Republicans have to bow to reality and vote with Democrats to stop Tuberville from kneecapping the nation’s military.
Even when Republicans must know it’s against their best interest to spiral down the MAGA toilet, that’s what they’re going to do. That is, unless Johnson has any ambition to remain speaker after 2024. The easiest way for Congress to remain in Republican hands past 2024 is by showing they can govern, which they cannot do unless they get Democrats to hold their hands and show them how.
That’s exactly what Democrats should not do, though, unless they get something significant in return, like an end to bogus impeachment efforts and a say in what legislation comes to the floor. This past week might have been enough for Johnson to grasp the futility of letting the maniacs continue to rule, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Republicans are challenging labor leaders to fights and allegedly physically assaulting one another. Donald Trump says he will abolish reproductive rights entirely and is openly calling for the extermination of his detractors, referring to them as “vermin” on Veterans Day. The Republican Party has emerged from its corruption cocoon as a full-blown fascist movement.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was not impeached by the House of Representatives Monday—barely. Georgia’s contribution to the debasement of Congress, namely Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, filed the privileged resolution against Mayorkas last week on the charge that he has violated his oath of office by, in part, “allowing the invasion of approximately 10,000,000 illegals across our borders.” (Greene apparently wrote this one up all by herself.)
Eight Republicans voted with Democrats to punt on the resolution, essentially killing it (for now) by referring it to the House Homeland Security Committee. Yes, a mere eight Republicans, despite the fact that there have been no impeachment hearings held about Mayorkas and his job performance. There has been no evidence presented to any committee that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. But 201 Republicans—including 17 of the 18 GOP members representing districts that Joe Biden won in 2020—didn’t care about any of that.
The only one of the “Biden 18” to vote against the impeachment was California Rep. John Duarte. Eleven other Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, did not vote.
Those supposed GOP “moderates,” like Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, love to bitch about having to cast hard votes for amendments on appropriations bills that will never become law. “So they make us take votes that don’t make sense, right?” Bacon complained just last week, whining about how extreme his party has become.
Meanwhile, he—and the rest of them—lined up with the repugnant Greene on this absolutely bogus impeachment resolution. This is what they endorsed Monday night:
Darrell Issa is right, I am a hardworking member of Congress who puts the American people first. But we all know what Darrell Issa lacks… 🏈🏀⚾️🎾🎱 https://t.co/j4YX9Gc5Fp
Just one word explains why Democrats had such a massive election night on Tuesday: abortion. On the newest episode of The Downballot, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap all the top races through the lens of reproductive rights, which continue to motivate Democrats and even win over a key swath of Republican voters. Nowhere was that more evident than in Ohio, which voted to enshrine the right to an abortion into the state constitution by a double-digit margin, despite countless GOP attempts to derail the effort.
The early weeks of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure are seeing a predictable outbreak of “moderate” Republicans saying they sure hope that the impeachment inquiry that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched against President Joe Biden will “go where the evidence goes” and rely on “an orderly and fair process.” Those quotes are from Reps. Don Bacon and Doug LaMalfa, respectively, who will provide invaluable cover for Johnson as he works to get the media to buy into his Very Smart Constitutional Lawyer persona. But a Washington Post article on the impeachment dynamics under Johnson contained maybe the most damning possible passage on Johnson’s approach.
But in this week’s private meeting with moderates, Johnson appeared to agree with Republican lawmakers who argued that since Biden’s polling numbers have been so weak, there is less of a political imperative to impeach him, according to Bacon and others who attended the meeting.
I’m sorry, but how is that a passing mention in a story largely focused on how Johnson “has taken a more reserved tone, both publicly and privately, urging members to conduct a thorough and fair investigation with no predetermined outcome”? If Johnson’s “more reserved tone” is based on feeling that it’s no longer politically important to impeach Biden, that’s not a sign that he’s prioritizing being “thorough and fair”; it’s a sign that he’s proceeding from an entirely partisan starting point!
Before he became speaker and decided that his play was looking like a serious guy by getting the media to ignore that his constitutional law work was anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, Johnson promoted House Oversight Chair James Comer’s baseless allegations against Biden. “The things that the evidence is leading us to, the allegations that are very serious and have been made in the mounting evidence stacking up to show is the causes that are listed right there in the Constitution,” he said in late September. “So we have no choice. Why are Democrats ignoring it purely for partisan political purposes?” Also in late September, he stood on the House floor and railed against the media for correctly observing that the impeachment inquiry “may be weakest in history” and was “the most predictable impeachment investigation in American history.” It goes on. “One thing that remains clear: The list of credible allegations that Joe Biden engaged in bribery schemes continues to grow,” he tweeted in early October. “The Constitution specifically lists bribery as a cause for impeachment. We can't have a President that is bought & paid for by foreign adversaries.”
Sure, Johnson gave lip service to following the evidence from time to time, but he regularly promoted Comer’s wildest allegations against Biden as truth, and presented impeachment as the logical and necessary outcome, the constitutional responsibility of the House for such corruption. And now the reporting shows that if, as speaker, he is backing off a little, it’s not just because he has decided it’s important to look like a statesman but also because he thinks impeachment is currently less important from a partisan standpoint, based on the polling.
This is who Mike Johnson is. The media needs to actually pay attention, rather than reporting such massively damning information as if it were a ho-hum scenario not worthy of extended comment.
The band is back together, and it is a glorious day as Markos and Kerry’s hot takes over the past year came true—again! Republicans continue to lose at the ballot box and we are here for it!
House Republicans have now subpoenaed Hunter Biden and James Biden, President Joe Biden’s son and brother, as part of their ongoing and so far fruitless effort to connect the president to any kind of corruption at all. Republicans have been on this for nearly a year in an investigation involving thousands of pages of documents and multiple witnesses, but they keep pretending that if they harass Biden and his family a little more, they’ll find something. Because we’re talking about Republicans, they’re definitely not worried about hypocrisy, but they can still look bumbling, confused, and all-around bad, as Rep. Greg Murphy showed when faced with a tough barrage of questions from CNN’s John Berman.
Berman set Murphy up with a simple question, referring to those subpoenas to Hunter and James Biden: “Will you vote to hold them in contempt” if they don’t respond? “Absolutely, absolutely, why would they not be, what do they have to hide?” Murphy responded, oozing relaxed confidence.
He didn’t seem ready for the follow-up: “Why have you changed your position on holding people in contempt of Congress? You voted against holding Steve Bannon in contempt.”
BERMAN: If Hunter & Jim Biden don't respond to subpoenas, will you hold them in contempt? GREG MURPHY: Absolutely B: Why did you change your position? You voted against holding Bannon in contempt M: It's different when someone is in office B: What office was Hunter Biden in? pic.twitter.com/OTy9CJNAVV
Murphy’s response made no sense right from the start. “Well, I think it’s a little bit different when you have the president of the United States, when you have somebody who’s not an elected official, you have the president of the United States was selling his influence, his son was ...”
This kicked off an extended back and forth, with Berman trying to pin Murphy down on who the heck the elected official in question was, given that neither of the people who has been subpoenaed is an elected official. Asked about contempt of Congress for people who don’t respond to subpoenas, Murphy only wanted to talk about the president—who has not been subpoenaed.
At one point, Berman stopped Murphy to press on the fundamental problem here: “I’m sorry, who are you saying is in elected office here when you’re talking about holding people in contempt of Congress for being nonresponsive?”
Murphy: “Well, tell me what office Steve Bannon was in.”
Berman: “Well, tell me what office Hunter Biden is in.”
“No, I’m not talking about Hunter Biden,” Murphy said, in a conversation that was entirely about his vow to vote to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress if he didn’t respond to a subpoena. “I’m talking about Joe Biden, the president of the United States.”
“You haven’t subpoenaed him,” Berman responded. “I’m asking if Hunter Biden or Jim Biden, the brother and son of the president, who are not elected officials, if they’re not responsive, will you hold them in contempt?”
“Think about this, John,” said Murphy, who was obviously not thinking about anything but how to fit his talking points into this inconvenient line of questioning. “If you’ve seen the facts, the facts that have occurred, we’ve seen that there’s been influence-peddling.” Then, having delivered that line that was not an answer to the question being asked, he dived back into his canned and baseless accusations against the president. Who has not been subpoenaed.
Berman tried to pull it back on track by again pointing out that Murphy had voted not to hold Bannon in contempt.
“Yeah, but was Steve Bannon related to the president of the United States?”
“No, he was a former employee of President Donald Trump, and the other people who you did not vote to hold in contempt literally worked for the former president, Donald Trump.”
Murphy blathered about Hunter Biden “using the Biden brand,” which he insisted was “an entirely different standard, John, and you know it.” Well, yes, we all know that the different standard here is that Biden is a Democrat and Republicans are determined to drag him down even without evidence of corruption.
“I just, no, I don’t, I’m actually still confused,” Berman responded. “We’re talking about private citizens, and my question to you is if they are not responsive to the subpoena would you hold them in contempt. You say yes for Hunter Biden. You voted no for Steve Bannon, and then you talk about there’s a different standard for elected officials but neither of them are elected.”
Just to be clear, Murphy’s stated, albeit muddled, position is that it’s more relevant to subpoena people who happen to be related to a president than people who worked for a president in his official capacity. But trying to discern a logic beyond the partisan witch hunt is kind of pointless, because that’s the only there there. They want to get Joe Biden, and since they haven’t been able to find any evidence he’s corrupt, they’re going to use “Biden family” to muddy things.
Ivanka Trump takes the stand and is suddenly very forgetful
Ivanka Trump reluctantly took the stand in the New York civil fraud trial against Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, after repeatedly trying to delay her testimony or escape it altogether. By all accounts, she was more polished than her brothers, who testified last week, but she seemed to have a lot of problems recalling the details of her dealings as a Trump Org executive. Daily Kos followed the trial live, and you can read a full recap of her testimony here. Let’s just say she hasn’t done dear old dad any favors.
There are a lot of happy, tired (and possibly hungover) Democrats today
Democrats nationwide are still rejoicing after another night of electoral wins. Reproductive rights dominated in Ohio, where you’d expect Republicans to get the message loud and clear: We aren’t going back. But not Ohio Republicans! They immediately retreated to fantasyland and started plotting a new path to ending reproductive rights.
Republicans immediately got to work breaking things again
Finally, with the clock ticking on government funding, Republicans are realizing they need to get the ball rolling or another government shutdown is what we’ll all have on the table this holiday season. Unfortunately, Republican disarray is deepening, and we are again careening toward a disaster unless they get it together.
House Republicans are back to working as an arm of the Trump 2024 campaign. And they aren’t going to let a little thing like a lack of evidence stop them.
Florida’s chief financial officer has come up with a new way to light taxpayer money on fire: Pay for the legal defenses of an alleged billionaire facing more than 90 criminal counts.
President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden has been the center of uncountably many Republican-crafted conspiracy theories, all of them after Donald Trump came to believe that Biden would be his 2020 general election opponent.
Hunter himself has mostly chosen to remain silent, but this past Thursday, he published an opinion column in USA Today condemning the effects the omnipresent Republican hoaxes might have on other substance abusers fighting to recover.
What troubles me is the demonization of addiction, of human frailty, using me as its avatar and the devastating consequences it has for the millions struggling with addiction, desperate for a way out and being bombarded by the denigrating and near-constant coverage of me and my addiction on Fox News (more airtime than GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) and in The New York Post (an average of two stories a day over the past year).
The New York Post running two Hunter Biden stories a day for an entire year is evidence of a different sort of addiction. It's not clear why one is considered more disgraceful than the other.
The science of addiction and recovery has made great strides in just the past decade. However, far too few will ever experience the miracle of recovery unless we change the stigma around addiction.
For those of us who live in recovery and for those who love someone in recovery, we know how hard fought our newfound lives are in letting go of the shame and making amends.
The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven factions represents a real threat to those desperate to get sober but are afraid of what may await them if they do.
Notably, the younger Biden specifically names some of the worst offenders.
My recent haircut turned into a wild conspiracy to evade drug tests, tabloids steadily splash nude pictures of me on their covers, and even a member of Congress displayed revenge porn of me on national television.
My addiction doesn’t justify Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui posting altered nude photos of me with “editorial creativity over the pictures.” My addiction shouldn’t permit the likes of Rudy Giuliani or a former Peter Navarro aide to debase and dehumanize me for their own gains.
What Hunter Biden doesn't mention is that the hoaxes Republicans have imposed on him have the strong stench of criminal behavior—and not on his part. Trump's first impeachment came about because Trump withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the Ukrainian president into announcing a supposed "investigation" of a Rudy Giuliani-pushed hoax targeting Hunter. The hoax was debunked before Trump ever made the move, but the extortion attempt continued anyway.
When Giuliani and other Republican operatives later announced they were in possession of stolen data they claimed came from a Hunter-owned "laptop," it became the focus of a new ecosystem of hoaxes and conspiracy claims. But it now appears far more likely that the leaked data was obtained through criminal hacking efforts—and that the "laptop" itself never existed.
Whether out of desperation or sheer exhaustion, House Republicans unanimously voted in a new speaker more than three weeks after Kevin McCarthy was booted. And what a doozy of a speaker he is: Rep. Mike Johnson is an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ bigot who is all in on an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden based on lies. He considers himself and Rep. Jim Jordan to be “like Batman and Robin,” and if he were Robin before, maybe now he gets to be Batman. And all 18 Republicans representing districts President Joe Biden won in 2020 got behind this extremist.
Nine Biden-district Republicans voted for Jordan as speaker all three times. Another three voted for him twice before flipping their votes the third time. But Johnson? The “most important architect of the Electoral College objections” in the House on Jan. 6, 2021, according to The New York Times? He got all 18 of them. And all 18 of them are going to have to answer for it in their 2024 reelection campaigns—Democrats will make sure of that.
Democrats are heckling the vulnerable New York Republicans from across the chamber, crooning "bye bye" as they fall in line behind Johnson
