After the vote, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said via X, formerly Twitter, that the censure resolution “was deeply flawed and made legally and factually unverified claims, including the claim of leading an ‘insurrection’.”
Greene shot back on social media: “You voted to kick me out of the freedom caucus, but keep CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Boebert and you voted with the Democrats to protect Terrorist Tlaib.”
To unpack this Greene crazy: Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) has criticized fellow Republicans’ plan to impeach President Biden without any evidence, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) was kicked out of a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” with her date after causing a disturbance that involved both vaping and groping.
Asked about this accusation from Greene, Roy told the Hill’s Mychael Schnell: “Tell her to go chase so-called Jewish space lasers if she wants to spend time on that sort of thing.”
To this, Greene replied with a new post: “Oh shut up Colonel Sanders, you’re not even from Texas, more like the DMV.” Roy, who grew up in Northern Virginia, has a white goatee not unlike the whiskers on the chin of the late founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Ladies and gentlemen, the People’s House is back in business.
In the nine days since Republicans pulled Mike Johnson from the back benches, the new speaker has presided over a second failed attempt to expel indicted Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), the introduction of not one but two resolutions to censure Tlaib, and a resolution to censure Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) for pulling a fire alarm during a vote. Johnson managed to turn an area of near-unanimous support into a partisan brouhaha by making funds to help Israel defend itself against Hamas contingent on a provision making it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes. With just two weeks to go until the federal government runs out of funding, Johnson is floating a cockamamie “laddered” approach that would replace the looming shutdown threat with 12 new shutdown threats.
If this is the new speaker’s idea of a functioning House, maybe having the House speakerless and inoperative for 22 days wasn’t so bad after all.
The internecine feuding in the GOP resumed immediately after Johnson’s elevation. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason T. Smith (Mo.) publicly blasted Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) for causing the crisis by filing the motion to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). Gaetz responded — by, some speculated, insinuating on social media that Smith is gay. Smith “called me a liar,” Gaetz wrote. “It’s a somewhat predictable projection. Because he lives a lie every day.” Gaetz declined to elaborate.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) stepped up his efforts to impeach Biden with the panel’s announcement that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money.” Bank records indicate it was actually repayment of a loan Biden made to his brother when the current president was a private citizen.
Comer’s wild allegations keep crumbling upon scrutiny, which might explain why he said of his impeachment inquiry: “I don’t know that I want to hold any more hearings, to be honest with you.” He prefers closed-door depositions, which he can selectively leak to create false impressions.
Buck pointed to his colleagues’ allergy to facts when he announced this week that he was retiring from Congress. “Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing January 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said in a video explaining why he was quitting. Of these “self-serving lies,” he continued: “These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law. It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”
Johnson’s response to all this: more self-serving lies. In his first interview as speaker, he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “it looks and smells a lot like” Biden received bribes. He also said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had “committed impeachable offenses” and agreed with Hannity that Biden has experienced “cognitive decline.” (At a subsequent news conference, Johnson maintained that the impeachment inquiry, which Comer and others are using as a fundraising tool, is “outside the scope of politics.”)
“People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?” Johnson said to Hannity. “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
What about the bit about bearing false witness, Mr. Speaker?
Johnson was caught in another whopper by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week. Republicans claimed that their bill offering $14.5 billion in aid to Israel was “offset” by cutting the same amount from the IRS. But the CBO forecast that the cuts to the IRS would actually cost the federal government an additional $12.5 billion — as reduced enforcement makes it easier for people to cheat on their taxes.
“Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” Johnson responded to the CBO.
Only in Louisiana, apparently, do they think that if you stop collecting taxes, your tax receipts will increase.
Johnson has continued moving spending bills through the House along party lines, at levels that violate the bipartisan budget deal enacted this year. In the Senate, by contrast, a package of spending bills passed this week on a broadly bipartisan vote of 82-15. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished her House counterparts “to get serious about governing, get back to the spending agreement they negotiated, and work with us to finalize bipartisan bills.”
But that isn’t going to happen. The House “chaos caucus,” which ousted McCarthy and turned the lights out in the chamber for 22 days, has found its man. Johnson is well on his way to being a chaos speaker.
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