House Republicans’ Majority Just Shrank Even More. Let the Chaos Begin.

House Republicans started the week with a new, even smaller majority that could set the chamber up for a remarkably unproductive session.

As of Monday, Democrats have 213 seats in the House. Republicans have just 219 seats, after Ohio Representative Bill Johnson served his last day in the chamber this weekend. There are also two other vacancies, with the expulsion of George Santos and the resignation of Kevin McCarthy late last year.

This will likely make it even harder for Congress to get anything done in its new session. If just three Republican lawmakers dissent, Republicans won’t be able to pass legislation. If Democrats win over four Republicans, they could flip the tables and push through their own agenda.

During the first half of its first two-year session, when Republicans had a larger majority in the House, the 118th Congress passed less than 30 bills through both chambers. Typically, Congress passes between 300 and 450 laws per session.

Even when Republicans controlled at least one chamber during Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidencies, Congress managed to pass at least 70 bills during those sessions.

This Congress’s low productivity can be blamed in large part on Republican in-fighting, particularly over government spending bills and their own House speaker. The party’s farthest-right wing has repeatedly demanded to slash government spending, taking the U.S. to the brink of a disastrous shutdown multiple times as representatives fought to get their way.

This led to McCarthy’s ousting as House speaker, after he made a deal with Democrats to keep the government funded. The multiple agonizing rounds of votes for speaker, first for McCarthy and then for his successor, Mike Johnson, have paralyzed the House. And Johnson may soon be on the chopping block, as well.

More than ever, Republicans can’t afford defectors if they want to pass anything. But they have yet to achieve total unity for a single vote. It’s starting to look less and less likely that Congress will achieve anything this year, either.

Republican Representative Nancy Mace, an outspoken sexual assault survivor, has endorsed rapist Donald Trump for president, yet another example of her constant stunning hypocrisy.

Mace announced her endorsement on Monday. “I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate. And until now I’ve stayed out of it,” the South Carolina representative told the AP. “But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”

“To be honest, it’s been a complete shit show since he left the White House. Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” she added.

It may not seem like a huge surprise that yet another Republican lawmaker has endorsed Trump for president. But when it comes to Mace, the announcement is particularly embarrassing.

Mace has made her story of surviving sexual assault a major part of her identity. She said it took her 25 years to share the story, after she was raped at just 16 years old, and it was one of the hardest things she’s ever done. Since sharing her story, Mace has at least somewhat advocated for rape survivors during her time in Congress, and repeatedly urged Republicans to adopt more moderate stances on issues such as abortion.

It’s also a little premature to call Trump the GOP’s nominee. There’s still another Republican in the 2024 presidential primary: former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who staunchly supported Mace in her 2022 congressional bid. Meanwhile, Trump endorsed her primary opponent, and called Mace an “absolutely terrible candidate,” “crazy,” and a “terrible person.”

That wasn’t enough to sway Mace’s views on Trump, as she apparently no longer even cares about her own previous warnings on the Republican front-runner. Mace had blasted Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, saying his actions that day “wiped out” everything Republicans had accomplished during his term.

Trump, as a reminder, has been found liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. The judge in the case went out of his way to clarify that as we understand the common definition of the word “rape,” Trump can be considered a rapist.

Trump is currently on trial for defaming Carroll when denying her accusations. Despite the fact that Trump is now a proven rapist, Mace is backing him.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though: For all her talk about not passing what she calls “asshole” measures on abortion, Mace falls in line with her party every single time. Mace betrayed her purported ideals for the sake of her party’s ideology a long time ago.

Electoral saboteurs are already leveraging the tools of the day to throw the New Hampshire primary.

A robocall utilizing a digitally manipulated recording of President Joe Biden rang the phones of New Hampshire Democrats over the weekend, imploring them to “save” their votes during the presidential primary on Tuesday, calling the write-in campaign “malarkey.”

“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” the call said, before dishing the phone number of Kathy Sullivan, the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

Sullivan, still a prominent New Hampshire Democrat, is the brains behind Granite for America, a super PAC dedicated to urging Granite State voters to write in Biden as a candidate on Tuesday after the state rejected a new Biden-backed DNC calendar that moved New Hampshire’s historically front-and-center primaries down the totem pole.

“I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy,” Kathy Sullivan, a former state party chair, told NBC News about whoever’s behind the robocalls, adding that she plans to involve federal law enforcement.

“I’m not going to let it go. I want to know who’s paying for it? Who knew about it? Who benefits?” she added.

The New Hampshire attorney general’s office said it is investigating the matter as an “unlawful attempt” at voter suppression.

“Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement, noting that it had received several complaints about the unsolicited contact. “These messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters. New Hampshire voters should disregard the content of this message entirely.”

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told NBC News that “the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately.”

Even a Trump campaign rally in New Hampshire wasn’t far enough away to allow Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to escape his past.

On Sunday, the MAGA Republican got trolled by an audience member during a campaign meet and greet, asking if Gaetz would be interested in a “bag full of underage girls,” and emerging with a sack containing a blow-up sex doll.

“Dude,” Gaetz chortled while nervously rubbing his hands together.

The attendee was quickly escorted out.

The allegation-infused present seems to be a part of a burgeoning trend for Gaetz, who just last month received a facetious award under similar circumstances at an Ohio GOP event.

On a livestream of the Strongsville Republican Party’s Christmas gathering, Gaetz was handed a trophy lauding him for his alleged dedication to using Venmo to pay for sex with underage girls.

“Congratulations for your dedication to using Venmo to allegedly pay underage girls to have sex with you,” the presenter said.

“Oh come on man, you’re so full of it,” Gaetz responded, continuing to hold the award in his hands.

The heavy-handed accusations against Gaetz arise from a Department of Justice sex-trafficking probe into one of Gaetz’s friends, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, paying a teenage girl to have sex with him and other men. That probe named Gaetz, who Greenberg claimed had paid him via Venmo to have sex with an underage girl in his network in 2017.

Eight months after Greenberg warned Gaetz to “steer clear” of the girl, the lawmaker Venmo’d Greenberg $900 in back-to-back payments, per The Daily Beast, telling the taxman to “hit up” the girl on his behalf. At that point, she was five months past her eighteenth birthday, while Gaetz had just turned 36.

Greenberg was later convicted of sex trafficking an underaged girl. No formal charges were issued against Gaetz as a result of the DOJ probe.

However, since then, the House Ethics Committee has launched its own investigation into Gaetz, examining not just alleged sexual misconduct but also allegations of illicit drug use and other wrongdoing by the Floridian.

Donald Trump is freaking out about E. Jean Carroll—again—in his longest posting spree against her yet.

Carroll’s defamation trial against Trump was adjourned Monday after one of the jurors became sick. Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed the courtroom around 10 a.m., according to reporters on scene. About 10 minutes later, Trump was off to the races.

Trump made 42 posts about Carroll (and one pushing falsehoods about the House January 6 investigative committee) on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes. Many of his posts included photos or clips of interviews that he has previously shared about Carroll. Trump’s posting rate is so fast that the former president must have some prescheduled, some drafts saved for constant reuse, someone else posting for him, or some combination of all three.

His Truth Social account shared media interview clips and social media posts that appear to come from Carroll, all stripped of context so as to paint her as some sort of sexual deviant. He also falsely claimed that the co-founder of LinkedIn is paying Carroll’s legal fees and that presiding Judge Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) are Democratic operatives.

Trump has made these claims about Carroll multiple times before. This is the third time during this trial that he has gone on such a posting spree. The first time was just before the trial began, and the second was—inexplicably—as he sat in the courtroom for the first day of the trial.

It’s likely that Trump is airing his grievances online because he is barred from doing so in the courtroom. Kaplan ruled two weeks ago that Trump and his lawyers cannot say certain things about Carroll during the trial—including many of the things Trump has been posting. But the posts could come back to haunt him, as Carroll’s lawyer has already said she’ll use his words as evidence against him.

This social media screed came just three days after a bizarre campaign event, during which Trump insisted Nikki Haley was responsible for security on January 6, 2021. Trump appears determined now to use the brain cells he has left to attack the woman he raped and defamed.

This trial is just to set damages. In May, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and then defaming her when denying her accusations. Kaplan ruled in September that since it was already proven Trump assaulted Carroll, the comments for which he is on trial this time are by default defamatory. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages. Trump already owes her $5 million.