This Horrible Congress Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Congress had a no-good, very bad year.

As the 118th Congress winds down the first of its two-year session, it’s abundantly clear that this latest iteration has come up shockingly short, passing just 20 bills through both chambers, according to Quorum legislative data analyzed by Axios. Four additional bills are currently waiting Biden’s signature.

That’s drastically lower than previous congresses, which tallied far above 50 bills in their first year and typically passed between 300 and 450 laws.

This year’s congressional report card sank below even some of Congress’s most unproductive years, reported Axios, including the 104th, 112th, and 11th Congresses, which saw Republicans controlling the House or Senate during Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. Still, those sessions managed to pass between 70 and 73 laws.

The abysmal productivity is thanks, in large part, to historic divisions and tensions among Republicans, who are still holding onto a slim majority, effectively necessitating unanimous consent to pass sections of their agenda.

The House has also failed to come up with budgetary solutions as the government stares down another looming government shutdown just weeks after it comes back from Christmas break.

The majority of bills that were able to slip through the cracks this year were unsurprisingly uncontroversial. Those included measures to rename Veterans Affairs clinics and to mint a coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, noted Axios.

Republicans also managed to waste the better part of two months over the last year, unable to pick a leader. Given the upcoming election, it’s unlikely that next year will prove more productive.

The GOP also chose to waste time on the impeachment of President Joe Biden, which even Republican lawmakers admitted failed to tie the president to any wrongdoing, let alone illegal activity.

Donald Trump wants someone to challenge Texas Representative Chip Roy in the primary.

Although Roy sits comfortably in the House of Representatives’ far-right wing, the Freedom Caucus member and Trump have locked horns a few times before. Trump took aim at Roy on Monday in a classic late-night social media post.

“Has any smart and energetic Republican in the Great State of Texas decided to run in the Primary against RINO Congressman Chip Roy. For the right person, he is very beatable,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If interested, let me know!!!”

Roy is currently running unopposed in the Republican primary. And since the deadline to file candidacy was last week, it looks likely to stay that way.

Trump and Roy have bumped heads a few times since the latter took office in 2019. Roy voted against overturning the 2020 election results. A year later, when Roy ran for GOP conference chair, Trump endorsed Representative Elise Stefanik. Stefanik was elected.

Roy was also one of the first backers of Trump’s 2024 primary opponent, Ron DeSantis. Roy first endorsed DeSantis in March, before the Florida governor had even officially declared his candidacy.

Once touted as Trump’s successor, DeSantis failed to pick up steam and is trailing Trump badly in the polls. But that clearly doesn’t mean Roy’s continued support for DeSantis doesn’t irk Trump. It’s possible that two years from now, the Texas representative will face a challenge from a Trump-backed candidate—and that candidate could dethrone him. But for now, his seat is very safe.

Young voters are proving decidedly less interested in a 2024 Biden win than they were four years ago.

A New York Times/Siena College poll published Tuesday indicates that most young voters are leaning toward voting for Donald Trump, with the indicted former president pulling 49 percent of the vote from constituents aged 18 to 29, with Biden at just 43 percent. That’s a stark contrast from July, when young voters preferred Biden by as much as 10 percentage points.

The difference is likely due to the president’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, in which Biden has been a staunch ally to Israel. That’s resulted in a 72 percent disapproval rating within the same age bracket, according to the poll. However, faced with Trump on the other side of the ballot, those voters say they may be more likely to stay home than turn up to the voting booths.

“I don’t want to vote for someone who is not aligned with my own personal values, as Biden has shown he is not when it comes to Gaza,” Colin Lohner, a 27-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, told The New York Times. “Do I vote for Biden or do I not vote at all? That’s really difficult, because if I don’t vote for Biden, I open up the possibility that Trump will win, and I really do not want that.”

So far, the conflict has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.9 million people living in the Gaza Strip—roughly 90 percent of its population—since the war began on October 7.

The dwindling poll numbers are an alarming difference for the beleaguered president, who needed the support of young and minority voters to clinch his 2020 bid for the White House. Biden has voiced his own concern, reportedly marking his favorability ratings as a known issue in a closed-door White House meeting with top aides the day before Thanksgiving.

At the time, Biden was neck and neck in general election polls with GOP front-runner Donald Trump, with Trump predicted to win by a hair with 43 percent of the vote against Biden’s 42 percent, according to a Morning Consult poll.

And yet, the president is particularly irked that voters are not rewarding him for low unemployment figures and a humming economy that has defied predictions of a looming recession. As of December 14, Biden trailed eight points behind the oft-indicted former president in a national survey, predicted to gain just 35 percent of the vote against Trump’s 43 percent, according to a HarrisX/Harris poll.

Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to prevent an expert witness from testifying in his upcoming defamation trial against writer E. Jean Carroll. In a fun twist, the expert witness is the same woman who helped set massive damages for Rudy Giuliani.

A federal judge ruled in September that Trump is liable for defaming Carroll in 2019 and owes her monetary damages. The exact amount will be set during the trial, which will begin in January.

Trump’s lawyers filed a motion on Wednesday asking presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan to bar Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor who analyzes social media trends, from testifying against the former president next month.

In the court documents, lawyer Michael Madaio argued that the damages estimates Humphreys had previously submitted were too high.

“The damages estimations in her initial report are egregiously inflated (to the tune of millions of dollars), utilize methods which ascribe harm in an unreliable and incorrect manner; and do not accurately reflect the actual harm to plaintiff’s reputation,” Madaio wrote.

Madaio took particular issue with the fact that Humphreys had initially included estimates for alleged damage caused by three different comments Trump made. Carroll is no longer suing over one of those statements, but Madaio argued Humphreys had not adjusted her estimate accordingly.

Carroll’s lawyer hit back Monday, pointing out that Humphreys had indeed accounted for the change in estimated damages in a supplemental report.

“Trump is understandably desperate to get rid of Professor Humphreys,” Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote in a filing asking to reject Trump’s request. “That Professor Humphreys recently testified in another case that resulted in a $108 million defamation verdict likely adds to Trump’s sense of urgency.”

Kaplan was referring to the defamation case against Giuliani. The former Trump lawyer was found liable in August for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. On Friday, Giuliani was ordered to pay the women a whopping $148 million in damages.

Humphreys testified against Giuliani on December 13, the same day Trump’s lawyers filed the motion to bar her from appearing at the Carroll trial. Her testimony was pivotal in determining the exact amount of damages he owed.

Humphreys is no stranger to Carroll’s case against Trump. The Northwestern professor already testified in Carroll’s first defamation lawsuit against the former president. In May, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages, based on Humphreys’s estimates.

Carroll’s second lawsuit is for comments Trump made in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her memoir. Judge Kaplan ruled that since Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse, his 2019 comments are by default defamatory. Carroll is now seeking up to $12 million in damages, based on Humphreys’s recommendation.

Clearly $148 million in legal penalties isn’t punishment enough for Rudy Giuliani, who took to Newsmax’s airwaves on Monday to vent even more defamatory lies about Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“Your initial allegations, do you still believe them to be true?” asked host Rob Schmitt.

“Yeah. Well, of course they’ll sue me again when I say that, but yeah, I do,” Giuliani said. “But they want me to lie. They, basically, they are suing me in order to lie to them.”

“If I showed you the evidence right now, and I think you’ve played it on your air, people would see that what I said was absolutely true,” he said.

Unfortunately for the former federal prosecutor, claiming that people made him lie may not be the concrete defense he hopes it to be.

Before last week’s judgment, Giuliani repeated election lies that he had previously admitted were untrue mere steps outside the courthouse, resulting in a wrist slap by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who warned that it could result in more defamation charges for the broke fixer. And despite repeated promises to provide evidence on his debunked allegations, when the time came to finally take the stand and make “definitively clear” that what he said about the pair of workers was true, Giuliani opted not to.

Freeman and Moss originally sought $24 million each in damages after the former New York City mayor accused them of manipulating ballots—claims that transformed into months of harassment, death threats, and protesters at their doorsteps. Instead, the jury decided they deserve far more. On Friday, a court ruled that the mother-daughter duo would receive $16 million each in damages for defamation, $20 million each for emotional distress, and another $75 million in punitive damages from the former Trump attorney.

On Monday, the pair hit Giuliani with another lawsuit seeking a gag order and to permanently bar America’s disgraced mayor from continuing to trash-talk them. That new suit is based entirely on baseless claims that Giuliani made over the weekend, including some statements allowed to air on Newsmax, according to the legal complaint.

“Are they actually going to put a gag on me while I walk around?” Giuliani joked on air.