Kevin McCarthy, Shortest-Serving House Speaker in U.S. History, Is Retiring

Two months after losing the highest position in the House, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he’s completely done.

On Wednesday, the California representative announced that he would be leaving his longtime career in Congress’s lower chamber by the end of the month.

“It is in this spirit that I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year to serve America in new ways,” McCarthy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “I know my work is only getting started.”

McCarthy’s new leaf will take him behind the GOP’s recruitment effort for new talent, scouting and supporting rising elected officials around the country.

“The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders,” McCarthy said.

His retirement follows a radical ousting in October, when he became the shortest-serving House speaker in U.S. history thanks to a fringe, far-right minority in the House who he empowered in order to secure the gavel in the first place.

With McCarthy’s forthcoming absence, Representative Bill Johnson’s impending retirement in March, and Representative George Santos’s recent expulsion, a historically divided caucus of House Republicans will be left with a slimmer than slim majority—potentially pulling weight with just one seat.

“Now in 2024, we will have a 1 seat majority in the House of Representatives,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on X. “I can assure you Republican voters didn’t give us the majority to crash the ship. Hopefully no one dies.”

McCarthy’s ascent to the House’s highest seat came after a grueling 15-ballot vote earlier this year in which he handed the tools of his ultimate demise to a fringe collection of far-right members of the House led by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, agreeing to terms that a single member could spur a no-confidence vote and initiate his dismissal.

McCarthy has been seemingly weighing his future in Congress since the ousting, noting at The New York Times DealBook Summit last week that he was considering an exit.

“If you just got thrown out of speaker, you’d go through different stages, would you not?” he said. “I want to know that it’s the right thing to do. And then if I’m walking away from something that I spent two decades at, I don’t want to look back and say I made an emotional decision.”

McCarthy’s exit is the latest in a sweep of retirements from Capitol Hill, which includes the exit of former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry and 29 other members of the House, including Representatives Ken Buck, Debbie Lesko, and Michael Burgess. Seven senators have also announced they will not be seeking re-election after their current terms end, including Senator Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin.

McCarthy, for his part, hasn’t hid his resentment for the members who ousted him. Last month, he was caught in a bout of schoolyard drama in which Representative Tim Burchett accused the California Republican of elbowing him in the back, which McCarthy fervently denied.

“If I were to hit somebody, they would know I hit them,” McCarthy said.

This story has been updated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr seems to have been a little closer to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein than previously admitted.

During an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters, the presidential candidate admitted that he had been on Epstein’s so-called Lolita Express jet not just once but twice.

The first time was in 1993 on his way to spend Easter with his mother, and on another occasion, he flew on the jet with four of his children to Rapid City, South Dakota, to go “fossil hunting for a weekend.”

“My wife had some kind of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell and they offered us a ride to Palm Beach,” Kennedy said.

“Otherwise I was never on his jet alone, I’ve been very open about this from the beginning,” Kennedy said, noting that this was 30 years ago and long before “anybody knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious issues.”

That’s one more time than Kennedy told Newsweek in November, claiming that he had been on the jet just once.

“All of this information should be released and we should get real answers on what happened to Jeffrey Epstein and any of the high-level political people that he was involved with, all of that should be transparent to the public,” Kennedy added.

The Kennedy and Maxwell families have had ties going back decades.

Maxwell was once a guest at the wedding between disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Kerry Kennedy at which Maxwell boasted about sleeping with John F. Kennedy Jr., reported the New York Post.

In October, Kennedy announced that he would quit his Democratic bid for the presidency in favor of running as an independent—much to the chagrin of Republicans, who fear the conspiracy theorist could pull some votes away from GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

Donald Trump revealed a trick up his sleeve to beat Joe Biden in the 2024 election: He thinks the president will die before it even happens.

Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and Republicans regularly use his age to argue that he is unfit to hold office. During a Tuesday night town hall, Fox News host Sean Hannity said Biden was “struggling cognitively” and asked Trump if Biden could still be the Democratic presidential nominee.

“I personally don’t think he makes it,” Trump said to cheers from the audience. “I think he’s in bad shape physically.”

“Do you remember when he said, ‘I’d like to take him behind the barn’? If he took me behind the barn and I went like this,” Trump said, blowing air, “I believe he’d fall over.”

Trump is only about four years younger than Biden, but Biden has received far more questions about whether he is capable of being president. This is despite the fact that Trump’s own slip-ups are growing increasingly common. For instance, in October, Trump mixed up Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Biden’s age is proving an issue with younger voters, but not necessarily because they believe he is mentally unfit. Instead, they worry that both Biden’s and Trump’s advanced ages prevent them from understanding young people’s perspectives on major issues.

This isn’t the first time that a Republican has made a morbid and crass quip about Biden’s age. In February, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert delivered a sermon in Texas during which she appeared to joke about praying for Biden’s death.

“Joe Biden’s president. We don’t know what to do, Lord!” Boebert said. “It’s all right, we pray for our presidents. You know, it says, ‘Let his days be few and another take his office.’”

During a Fox-hosted town hall on Tuesday, the GOP presidential candidate admitted that he would become a dictator if reelected—but just for the first day.

“The media has been focused on this and attacking you—you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Sean Hannity prompted.

“Except for day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

“After that, I’m not a dictator,” he chuffed.

“That sounds to me like you’re going back to the policies when you were president,” Hannity said.

The brash admission came after Hannity tried earlier in the event to get the former president to rule out abuse of power, asking if he “in any way” had “any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law to use the government to go after people.”

“You mean like they’re using right now?” Trump retorted, repeating claims that Biden has weaponized the DOJ against him while deriding his indictments and 91 felony charges as “made up.”

“I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time—if you like criminals,” Trump said. “And he got indicted once. I got indicted four times.”

Trump has talked up quite a storm in recent months about getting retribution against his political enemies if he returns to the White House. During a Veteran’s Day speech, Trump pledged to “root out” the “vermin,” whom he denoted as “Communists, Marxists, fascists”—a grouping he has previously used to refer to mainline Democrats, including President Joe Biden.

Trump’s reentry plan also, blatantly, includes an agenda to dismantle the “deep state,” stripping tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections via a 2020 executive order known as “Schedule F” and subsequently firing them, according to the Associated Press. That could include federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him.

“Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.

Still, none of Trump’s blatantly authoritarian and fascist rhetoric seems to be interrupting his favorability among Republican voters. As of Wednesday, the GOP front-runner was still polling head and shoulders among his conservative competitors at 59.8 percent, leaving Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Koch-backed former ambassador Nikki Haley in the dust, according to aggregated data by FiveThirtyEight.

Former Vice President Mike Pence could testify against Donald Trump in the latter’s trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in August for trying to overturn the state’s election results and charged with felony racketeering. Pence had not been considered a part of the legal proceedings in Georgia until CNN reported Wednesday that he could be expected to take the stand.

Witness lists submitted by Fulton County prosecutors remain under tight seal. But sources familiar with court documents anonymously told CNN that Pence is listed on the latest witness list, among more than 150 names.

Pence has already made clear that he knows the 2020 election was legitimate. While Pence’s rebukes of Trump have been generally tepid, they stand in stark contrast to other members of his party, who continue to push Trump’s conspiracy theories.

“Despite what the former president and his allies have said for now more than two and a half years and continue to insist … the Georgia election was not stolen, and I had no right to overturn the election on January 6,” Pence said after Trump was indicted in August.

Pence has also said he will testify if legally compelled to do so. But he has previously appeared unwilling to participate in the multiple investigations into his former boss.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and his keeping hundreds of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, was forced to subpoena Pence to testify about January 6. Pence, who described the insurrection as “the most difficult day of my public life,” still refused to comply with the subpoena until a judge intervened.

Pence is not the only major Trump ally to appear on a witness list in the Georgia case. Trump’s former lawyer Lin Wood, who was one of the first to promote the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, was listed as “a witness for the State” in a September court filing.

Wood denied that he had flipped on Trump and said he was only responding to a subpoena.