Republican Congressman Complains His Party Has “Nothing” to Campaign On

If Congress doesn’t work out for Representative Andy Biggs, he may have a future writing campaign ads … for Democrats. The Arizona Republican admitted his party has accomplished “nothing” while in control of the House.

During a Thursday appearance on Newsmax, Biggs acknowledged the “embarrassing” truth: The GOP hasn’t managed to get anything done since taking control of the House of Representatives in 2022.

“We have nothing, in my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on, Chris!” Biggs told host Chris Salcedo. “It’s embarrassing!”

Salcedo echoed the sentiment: “The Republican Party in the congressional majority has zero accomplishments.”

The 118th Congress has passed just two dozen bills in its two-year session. Previous congresses have typically passed between 300 and 450 laws. Even when Republicans controlled both chambers under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, those sessions still managed to pass more than 70 laws.

Most of the current congressional session has been taken up instead by Republican in-fighting that resulted in two separate tortuous rounds of voting for a speaker. First in January 2022 for Kevin McCarthy and then again in October 2023 after McCarthy was ousted for making too many deals with Democrats.

Biggs is partially to blame for the lack of accomplishments, though. A member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, Biggs ran against McCarthy for speaker, contributing to the dragged-out chamber vote.

Biggs has repeatedly blocked budget bills, claiming he wants to decrease government spending but really helping push the U.S. dangerously close to a shutdown multiple times over the course of 2023. He also voted to oust McCarthy as speaker, plunging the House into chaos as the chamber scrambled to elect a new leader.

This is now at least the second time a Republican has publicly called out the GOP for getting nothing done. Texas Representative Chip Roy excoriated his colleagues in November during a House session.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “One!”

“Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides well, ‘I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”

Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” brand apparently worked so well for the former president’s prospects that his campaign has decided to use it again, this time copying and pasting the phrase into a GOP primary flier.

But now, Trump has a new target: Ron DeSantis.

The flier, which flooded mailboxes in Iowa, accuses DeSantis of attempting to “rig” the Iowa GOP primary.

“Stop the fraud. Reject DeSantis on January 15,” the flier reads, including a quote from Trump that claims, “When you swamp them with enough votes, there’s a point at which they can only cheat so much.”

The charge stems from an interview in which DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis, urged voters from around the nation to help their cause, claiming that “you do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” though “participate” does not necessarily translate to “vote.”

The baseless accusation of more voter fraud comes as a sign of weakness, not strength, as Trump prepares to square up against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the fast-approaching Republican primary. While Trump has led his competitors by a startling margin since the campaign began—and by nearly 50 percentage points at the time of publication—the pair do pose a serious if unconventional threat, particularly as the former president contends with several states removing him from the GOP ballot entirely on the basis of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley tried to explain away her recent failure to mention slavery when describing the cause of the Civil War and instead used one of the oldest “I’m not racist” lines in the book.

Last month, Haley forgot to mention slavery when asked about the cause of the Civil War, but during Thursday night’s town hall, she said it’s only because she grew up in the South, where slavery doesn’t need to be mentioned. Also, she used to have a lot of Black friends growing up.

“Chris Christie, though, said you came out and gave that answer not because you’re in his words ‘dumb or racist,’ but because you’re unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth. What do you say to that?” CNN anchor Erin Burnett asked Haley, referring to her recent Civil War gaffe.

“What I will tell you is that Chris Christie is from New Jersey,” Haley said after commenting that she’s never afraid to offend. “I should have said slavery right off the bat, but if you grow up in South Carolina, literally in second and third grade you learn about slavery. You grow up and you have—you know, I had Black friends growing up. It’s a very talked about thing. We have a big history in South Carolina when it comes to, you know, slavery, when it comes to all the things that happen with the Civil War, all that.”

“I was over—I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward,” the former U.N. ambassador added. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I knew half of South Carolinians saw the Confederate flag as heritage and tradition. The other half of South Carolinians saw it as slavery and hate. My job wasn’t to judge either side,” Haley continued, noting that “a leader doesn’t decide who’s right.”

The defense mode train of thought comes after a controversial campaign town hall held in North Conway, New Hampshire, last month, where the typically expedient politico stumbled and fumbled her way through answering what would better be likened to a middle school quiz question than a real stumper.

“What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” asked one audience member.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” the former South Carolina governor threw back before embarking on a response that made even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis comment “yikes.”

“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said at the time.

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley added. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”

Recent polling numbers have suggested that Haley could prove quite a challenge to the former president’s bid for the White House. A recent survey out of New Hampshire by the American Research Group predicted a Trump GOP primary win by a margin of just four percent—currying 37 percent of the Republican vote against potential runner-up Nikki Haley with 33 percent.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba appeared to suggest that certain Supreme Court justices owe her former boss for their jobs and should therefore rule in his favor.

Habba, who seems to have a habit of saying things that are bad for the legitimacy of Trump’s case, appeared on Fox News Thursday night to discuss Trump being disqualified from the Colorado and Maine 2024 primary ballots. Trump has appealed the Maine decision, an indication he intends to take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

“I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them,” Habba told host Sean Hannity. “People like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He’ll step up, those people will step up.”

“Not because they’re pro-Trump, but because they’re pro-law, because they’re pro-fairness. And the law on this is very clear.”

Habba was referring specifically to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation hearing was rocked by multiple sexual assault allegations. After a lengthy process, made especially painful by coming so soon after the #MeToo movement began, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court. Trump did not actually do anything to help Kavanaugh except complain a lot on X, formerly Twitter.

As for Habba’s claim that the “law on this is very clear,” it actually isn’t. That’s why the Supreme Court might need to weigh in on the issue of Trump’s eligibility.

Trump was disqualified from the primary ballots in Colorado and Maine after the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine secretary of state determined in December that he had engaged in insurrection and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to run for president.

Dozens of similar cases are either ongoing or already decided in other states—and some of the outcomes have been the complete opposite. The secretaries of state in Michigan, Minnesota, and California have all determined that Trump will remain on their presidential ballots.

Multiple legal scholars have urged the justices to resolve the issue and provide a single rule for all states, instead of having a messy mix of some state ballots with Trump’s name and some without. It’s unclear how the Supreme Court will rule, though. Many of the justices, including some appointed by Trump, are hardline textualists and could actually rule that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to Trump, disqualifying him.

Twitter’s algorithm is promoting what may be the most unsavory conspiracy theory yet: that the Perry, Iowa, high school shooting is somehow part of a larger Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.

Since Wednesday evening’s release of 943 pages of court documents related to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring, the conspiracy theories have run amok. But now, X (formerly known as Twitter) is helping take it to the next level.

One post by a verified QAnon promoter became the center of attention, garnering the most views on the floundering social media platform for claiming that the Perry shooting was a “false flag” to “distract the media” from the release of the documents.

“Not even 24 hours after the Epstein court document was released we have multiple victims who were shot at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa,” posted user @ShadowofEzra, mere moments after 17-year-old student gunman Dylan Butler opened fire on his classmates, killing at least one person and leaving another five injured. It received more than 1.5 million views by the time of publication.

“Make no mistake this is a false flag to distract the media from discussing anything in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and his clients. As more names will be released in the coming days we expect more serious distractions and false flags,” the account added.

It was just one of dozens of QAnon accounts sharing the same sentiment.

The wide spreading narrative is an entirely fabricated one, likely influenced by the conspiracy theorists’ own social media algorithms, which have been widely documented as drastically influencing users’ newsfeeds. Since Facebook was hounded for its role in promoting false news articles and memes planted by Russian-connected troll farms meant to influence the 2016 presidential election, social media algorithms have been roundly criticized for isolating users in feeds stacked with what they’d algorithmically prefer to see rather than what is actually happening.

In reality, practically every major news outlet has covered the recently unsealed documents—in just the last 24 hours, Google has recorded more than 3.8 million new items pertaining to the nine-years-in-the-making release, chief among them articles from reputable news outlets around the globe, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and thousands of others.

Meanwhile, there were 134 incidents of gunfire on U.S. school grounds in 2023—translating to an attack less than every three days, according to data from Everytown for School Safety, a statistic that unfortunately makes the occurrence of a school shooting more likely than not, Epstein’s revelatory case files be damned.

But not everyone, including some candidates for the highest offices in government, appear to have performed even that miniscule amount of research before sharing their own conspiratorial opinions on the matter.

“Not even 12 hours after the Epstein documents are released there is a mass shooting at a high school in Perry, Iowa,” posted Florida Republican Lavern Spicer, who is running for the state’s 24th Congressional District.

“I ain’t saying nothing,” she added.

X’s algorithmic choices on Thursday add to growing concern about the direction of the platform under Elon Musk, who has himself shared antisemitic and conspiratorial rhetoric that ultimately drove dozens of the company’s biggest advertisers, including Disney and IBM, off the platform.