Mike Johnson Is Losing His Caucus to a Border Deal Breakdown

Speaker Mike Johnson is facing down his first major challenge as the leader of the lower chamber’s Republican caucus: In just a matter of weeks, he’ll need Congress to reach a consensus on two contentious issues—border funding and international aid. It’s a feat that hasn’t been achieved in decades, in a venue where compromise has proven to be the Waterloo of Republican speakers.

Despite Johnson throwing his weight into securing a deal, it’ll be a “steep road” for the newly minted speaker, as one lawmaker told The Hill. Negotiators in the Senate, who face challenges of their own to surmount as its members debate their part of the pending deal, aren’t confident that their success—should it come to fruition—will be replicated by Johnson in the lower chamber.

At stake is a $105 billion national security package proposed by the Biden administration, which includes more than $13 billion to address border issues, along with $14.3 billion in aid to Israel and more than $61 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has suggested could be the difference between winning or losing the war.

The major obstacle is a familiar bugaboo: Republican infighting, fueled by a razor-thin conservative majority in the House. The fractious Republican caucus, whose famous inability to work together led to Johnson’s anointment in the first place, has already started to seep into the discussions on this latest deal, with some lawmakers outright refusing to negotiate.

The chaos within the caucus is being furthered by outside pressure. Conservative policy group Heritage Action urged lawmakers on Tuesday to strike down any plans etched by the upper chamber, insisting that H.R. 2, an asylum-limiting immigration bill proposed by Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, was the “only solution to securing the border.”

“Worse, the proposal coming out of these ‘negotiations’ will likely be used as leverage to advance President Biden’s request for $106 billion in fiscally irresponsible spending, including an additional $60 billion for Ukraine that fails to meet conservative standards and $13.6 billion for fake ‘border security’ that would accelerate Biden’s open border operations,” wrote Heritage Action’s president, Kevin Roberts, in a statement.

“House and Senate conservatives should reject this proposal and commit to supporting H.R. 2 to restore safety and security for the American people. Anything less is unacceptable,” he added.

Even as conservatives stall, Democrats have agita of their own regarding a deal in which many fear their party is poised to give away too much to the GOP in the terse negotiations.

“We have been willing to give a lot in these talks. We are way out of [our] traditional comfort zone for Democrats,” one of the negotiators, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, told reporters. “At some point, Republicans are going to have to say ‘yes.’”

In recent election cycles, young voters have consistently delivered major wins for Democrats. Republicans have decided that the best response is to try to disenfranchise young people.

This year alone, at least 15 Republican-controlled states have introduced or implemented legislation to change the rules around using student IDs at voting booths, according to the Voting Rights Lab. And Rolling Stone reported Tuesday that there is a wider push afoot among GOP lawmakers to eliminate some students’ ability to vote in their school’s state altogether.

“Young people are the reason why Biden won in 2020 and Democrats up and down the ballot won in 2022 and 2023,” Abhi Rahman, the national communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told Rolling Stone. “If Gen Z continues to vote, we’re on the cusp of the most progressive era in our country’s history. Republicans know this as well, and that’s why they’re doing everything they can to stop young people from voting.”

The GOP’s effort to suppress the vote of college students is well underway in the state of Wisconsin, where the state Supreme Court just last week heard arguments to overturn the Badger State’s heavily gerrymandered district maps. That court leans left for the first time in 15 years, after the April election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz—who won in large part due to massive youth voter turnout.

Immediately after the election, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker declared that “younger voters are the issue.” Months later, the state Republican convention considered a resolution to require out-of-state college students to vote absentee in their hometowns. The resolution ultimately failed to advance, but it’s just one part of a much larger effort from the Wisconsin GOP to curtail the youth vote by whatever means available.

In recent years, Wisconsin Republicans have tried to make it harder to register, taken steps to decrease the number of ballot drop boxes and voting booths and to shorten the early voting period, and tried to impose more onerous residency requirements, as well.

In New Hampshire, state Republicans introduced a bill in March that would bar any out-of-state college students from voting in local and state elections. The bill was ultimately killed.

A Texas Republican lawmaker also introduced a bill in March that would prohibit polling booths on college and university campuses (the bill has not advanced out of committee). And Virginia Republicans unsuccessfully tried to repeal a law that would let people age 16 and older register to vote if they will be 18 by the next major election.

Despite appearances, this is no piecemeal effort: Such measures are all part of a larger plan outlined by Republican strategist Cleta Mitchell. Speaking at an RNC donor retreat in April, shortly after Protasiewicz’s win, Mitchell called on the GOP to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration, and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters. Both young voters and mail-in votes tend to skew Democratic. Mitchell insisted the U.S. electoral systems must be changed in order “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.”

Republicans can see the writing on the wall, but they’re taking away the wrong message—and there’s been little, if any, talk among national Republicans about winning young voters back. Increasingly, the GOP seems bent on simply eliminating younger voters from the electorate entirely. During the 2022 midterms, young voters turned out in record numbers and overwhelmingly voted Democratic. GOP luminaries responded with calls to raise the voting age.

Rather than implementing policies about things that young people actually care about—such as environmental protection, increased abortion access, and LGBTQ rights—Republicans are instead embracing stances that alienate huge swathes of the new generations of voters. And then they get angry when young people don’t support them, and the cycle of pushing younger voters out begins anew.

Rupert Murdoch is set to be deposed on Tuesday and Wednesday in relation to the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit between Smartmatic and Fox News. The questioning will take place in Los Angeles and has not appeared on the public docket for the case, according to Reuters.

Smartmatic filed its lawsuit in 2021 after the conservative broadcast giant baselessly touted Trumpian conspiracies that the voting machine company had participated in election fraud. Fox has subsequently spent the better part of the last two years trying and failing to throw the case out of court.

“They needed a villain,” the lawsuit said. “They needed someone to blame. They needed someone whom they could get others to hate. A story of good versus evil, the type that would incite an angry mob, only works if the storyteller provides the audience with someone who personifies evil.”

“Without any true villain, defendants invented one,” the lawsuit noted. “Defendants decided to make Smartmatic the villain in their story.”

The deposition will be the second time this year that Murdoch has had to sit for questioning related to Fox’s spindly election lies, after the corporation reached a historic $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in April over similar allegations.

Along with Fox Corporation and Fox News, Smartmatic is seeking damages from five individuals: Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, as well as Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, and former host Lou Dobbs. In order to win the defamation case, Smartmatic will need to prove that the defendants spread the lies with “actual malice,” meaning that they either knowingly spread misinformation or recklessly disregarded the truth.

Although Murdoch’s name is missing from the list of defendants, proving that he was personally involved in the decisions that shaped Fox’s coverage while serving as chairman of the company could help Smartmatic prove that Fox Corp is liable.

The 92-year-old retired from his perch as king of his media empire—which encompasses Fox, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and the Dow Jones Newswire, among others—in September, turning the management of the company over to his son, Lachlan Murdoch.

Senator Tommy Tuberville thinks the U.S. military is the “weakest” it’s been in history, but he conveniently blames it on “wokeness” instead of something that has recently become a far more damaging problem for our armed forces: his own blockade on military promotions.

Tuberville has blocked nearly 400 military promotions since March as a part of a one-man protest against the Defense Department’s policy of reimbursing travel costs for service members who have to travel out of state for an abortion. The Pentagon has repeatedly warned that his actions harm military readiness, but Tuberville refuses to budge.

Instead, the Alabama Republican trotted out a familiar Republican scapegoat Monday night. “$114 million on diversity training, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Tuberville said on Newsmax. “We’ve got the weakest military that we’ve had in probably your or my lifetime.”

“Now we’ve got a lot of good military people, but infiltrating our military is all this wokeness. And it’s coming from the top.”

This isn’t the first time Tuberville has blamed military shortcomings on wokeness. In September, he said the Navy was headed “downhill” because “we’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker.”

Tuberville does think, though, that diverse ideologies should be allowed in the military—specifically white nationalists, who he believes should be allowed to serve. The lawmaker has repeatedly refused to accept that white nationalists are racist, despite this being, for all intents and purposes, the defining characteristic of white nationalism.

If anything is weakening the military, it’s Tuberville’s stunt. The Pentagon has warned repeatedly that the lawmaker’s blockade is doing ongoing harm to military readiness, with the secretary of the Navy accusing Tuberville of “aiding and abetting” Communist regimes by holding up promotions.

Tuberville’s crusade has led to multiple high-level positions remaining unfilled, leaving different military branches scrambling whenever something goes wrong. In early November, General Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack. There is no indication that Smith’s workload—which was double its normal size thanks to Tuberville—contributed to his heart attack, but it likely didn’t help.

Even Tuberville’s fellow Republicans have grown sick of his shenanigans. One of the most scathing rebukes the Alabama lawmaker has received came from Senator Dan Sullivan, who called Tuberville’s belief that he wasn’t damaging military readiness “ridiculous” and “patently absurd.”

“How dumb can we be, man?” Sullivan demanded. Pretty dumb, apparently!

Two Jewish Democrats are leading the charge against a repugnant proposal floated by Montana Republican Representative Ryan Zinke—a bill that seeks to “deport Palestinians” from the United States.

Representatives Greg Landsman and Dan Goldman, both of whom are staunchly pro-Israel in the ongoing conflict between that nation and Hamas, have come down hard on Zinke’s xenophobic proposal, which the former Trump secretary of the interior dubbed the “Safeguarding Americans From Extremism,” or SAFE Act, countering it with a resolution rebuking the bill and condemning its 10 Republican co-sponsors.

“They’re trying to expel an entire community of people from the United States,” Landsman said in a press release. “It’s un-American. It’s not who we are. And it’s going to get people hurt. We need these folks to pull back on this dangerous rhetoric and to stop adding fuel to this fire. It’s not helping the Israelis, it’s certainly not helping the Palestinians, it’s absolutely undercutting our role in pursuing peace and stability in the region and here at home.”

If passed, the SAFE Act would render Palestinian Authority passport holders inadmissible to the country, revoke visas issued to Palestinian passport holders on or after October 1, revoke the parole of passport holders on or after October 1, and direct Homeland Security and ICE to “identify and remove” Palestinian passport holders living in the U.S., according to a release by Zinke’s office.

In a joint statement issued by Landsman and Goldman, the pair argued that the rhetoric employed in the bill “unfairly and dangerously conflates Palestinians with Hamas and its actions,” and further decried the proposal as “un-American, bigoted, and … designed to inflame tensions which could result in violence.”

Zinke responded to the criticism by blaming the Biden administration’s alleged inaction on immigration, claiming they are “completely incapable of vetting anyone coming into our country,” Axios reported.

The escalating rhetoric is a sign that the Middle Eastern conflict has further divided Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, the two parties battled one another in a string of letters sent to Biden’s office, in which more than 100 Democrats asked the president to offer immigration protections for Palestinians. Days later, Republican Senators—including Senators J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott—sent their own missive, imploring Biden not to consider the special protections.