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.

Donald Trump’s campaign nixed access for a pool reporter to a New Hampshire rally on Sunday—even though he was there to represent five major news networks.

NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard, who has long covered Trump, told his employers on Sunday that the GOP front-runner’s campaign had suddenly objected to his presence.

“Your pooler was told that if he was the designated pooler by NBC News that the pool would be cut off for the day,” Hillyard wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. “After affirming to the campaign that your pooler would attend the events, NBC News was informed at about 2:20 p.m. that the pool would not be allowed to travel with Trump today.”

That eyebrow-raising decision may be in part due to a testy exchange between Hillyard and Trump ally Representative Elise Stefanik, who has played a major role in recent Trump rallies as she vies to become Trump’s V.P. pick.

At another campaign event Friday night, Stefanik—who has been in serious consideration for the number two spot among Trump’s inner circle—went full MAGA while fielding a question from Hillyard on E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case.

“How do you grapple with standing by [Trump’s] side while a jury is debating how much to award E. Jean Carroll for being sexually abused by Donald Trump?” asked Hillyard.

“The media is so biased. This is just another example of the media being out of touch,” Stefanik retorted before tirading about Trump’s odds against President Joe Biden, dubbing the case a “witch hunt.”

“Why not believe E. Jean. Carroll? It’s not me. It’s not the media. It’s a jury that found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll,” Hillyard interjected.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, confirmed to the Times that the network pool did not attend the event but added that the campaign does not “bar reporters based on their reporting.” Later on Sunday, Hillyard was allowed to attend a different New Hampshire rally held in Rochester.

Still, the spontaneous ban recalls Trump’s 2016 campaign, in which the real estate mogul barred Washington Post and BuzzFeed News reporters from his events. Trump then continued the practice while in office, at one point revoking the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta and banning another CNN pool reporter, Kaitlan Collins, from attending public events.

You have to hand it to Ron DeSantis: the man successfully brought a divided country together. Just not in the way he wanted.

The Florida governor on Sunday ended his presidential campaign, a run that was arguably more embarrassing to watch than for him to actually do it. But what should have been a serious and bittersweet moment was instead ruined by a now-classic DeSantis goof.

“We don’t have a clear path to victory,” DeSantis said in a video message, which he accompanied with the caption, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

DeSantis attributed the quotation to Winston Churchill, but in a perfect encapsulation of what a disaster his campaign was, social media users were quick to correct him. “The quoted words in this tweet do not appear in this phrasing in any of Winston Churchill’s books, articles, speeches and papers,” a community note on X (formerly Twitter) read. “They do appear in a Budweiser print ad from 1938.”

The note was later removed for unknown reasons, but other X users had the receipts: The International Churchill Society stated the British prime minister never said that quotation. It didn’t take long before someone else found the exact Budweiser ad that did use that line.

It’s also ironic that DeSantis accidentally used a line from a Budweiser ad, as the beer brand came under fire last year from the exact people DeSantis was hoping to win over. People on the right claimed Budweiser had gone “woke” after it did a brief ad campaign with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. And DeSantis was all too happy to fuel the fire against the company.

While the mistake is a terrible look for DeSantis, it feels like the perfect bookend to a campaign that has been a hot mess from start to finish. Throughout his campaign, DeSantis successfully managed to unite the United States in making fun of him. People across the political spectrum poked fun at how he allegedly ate pudding with his fingers, had apparently never seen a piece of pizza before, and didn’t know how to smile.

Right- and left-wingers delighted in the conspiracy that DeSantis wore lifts in his cowboy boots to make himself appear taller. Historically, taller presidential candidates tend to perform better. But instead of giving himself an edge, DeSantis made himself a heel.

DeSantis has also succeeded in uniting Floridians—against him. His popularity has dropped in the Sunshine State, and he may even go home to a state Republican Party that has soured on him.

So pour one out for Ron DeSantis. He’s just another Florida man now. But hey, at least that’s everyone’s favorite genre of joke!

The Baltimore Sun’s new owner isn’t quite the moral paragon he expects his businesses to be.

David Smith, the longtime chairman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group who recently scooped up the Sun in an undisclosed nine-figure deal, has lived a salacious private life at odds with his conservative media empire.

In August 1996, the Sun reported that Smith was caught by police in an undercover sting while receiving oral sex from a sex worker in a company-owned Mercedes. The Baltimore-based businessman was then detained overnight in the city’s Central Booking Center.

According to the paper, police said the sex worker broke off conversation with an undercover police officer when she saw “her regular date driving in the area.” She then ran over to a 1992 Mercedes, registered to Sinclair, and got in on the passenger side.

But that was just the one time Smith “got caught,” according to one unidentified friend of the media mogul who spoke with GQ in 2005.

“He’s a whoremonger. A real whoremonger,” the friend told the magazine. “He loves the titty bars. The only people he likes go to the titty bars with him. Those are the only people he trusts. He also goes out to Vegas all the time. He goes to the high-end titty bars. He’s always getting the private upstairs rooms, champagne, the works.”

At the time of the interview, Smith would have been in his mid-fifties.

While the Sun will not technically be included in the Sinclair media empire, it has already been warned that it will be expected to more closely resemble the politics of the Sinclair-owned local Fox station, which Smith spoke glowingly of during a contentious two-hour meet and greet with staff on Tuesday.

In the same meeting, Smith dropped that he had read the daily paper—which has been a staple in the Baltimore market since its inception in 1837—just four times.

Other upcoming changes on the menu include expecting Sun staff to conduct unscientific online polls on a daily basis, similar to the multimillionaire’s TV empire, per The Baltimore Banner.

Over the last several decades, Sinclair has become known for issuing unfounded scripts and segments from the top down to hundreds of its affiliates, resulting in toxic, Big Brother gibberish, per The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky.

Representatives for Sinclair did not respond to a request for comment prior to publishing. Nearly two decades ago, when the allegations were initially produced, David Smith and Sinclair’s executives and attorneys declined dozens of opportunities to comment when contacted by telephone, email, and when a reporter visited their office, according to GQ.

Growing numbers of Democratic lawmakers are openly pushing back on America’s ongoing blanket support for Israel in light of recent comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu sparked massive criticism after he declared Thursday that Israel intended to control all of the land in the region, instead of the two-state solution widely backed by the international community. He promised that there would never be a Palestinian state. Instead, Israel would control all territory west of the Jordan River.

The response from Democrats was immediate. On Friday, Representative Pramila Jayapal said Netanyahu’s comments “should cause us to reset our relationship of unconditional support to [his] government.”

“These are policies that are diametrically opposed to the U.S.’s stated goals,” the chair of the influential Congressional Progressive Caucus said in a video.

Also on Friday, a group of 15 Jewish Democratic representatives released a statement that succinctly rejected Netanyahu’s comments. “We strongly disagree with the Prime Minister,” the lawmakers said. “A two-state solution is the path forward.”

One of the signatories was the most senior Jewish member of Congress, Representative Jerry Nadler, who has previously slammed his Republican colleagues for using antisemitism as a political tool while in reality doing nothing to “genuinely counter” anti-Jewish hate.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, more Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors of Senator Chris Van Hollen’s move to condition U.S. foreign aid on human rights. While the move would apply to all countries, it is a clear signal to Israel.

“I think people are at the end of their ropes with the Netanyahu coalition … which includes pretty right-wing extremists,” Van Hollen told Politico. “It’s pretty clear that Netanyahu is listening much more to the extremists in his government than the president of the United States and the Biden administration.”

Van Hollen stressed that Biden needs to give up his “quiet diplomacy” and “mixed signals” approach toward Israel.

To Netanyahu’s credit, he does support a two-state solution—so long as the second state is on a completely different continent. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition has reportedly been secretly speaking with the Democratic Republic of Congo about resettling thousands of Palestinians in the African nation.

On Thursday, a group of 60 House Democrats sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him to explicitly state that the United States opposes the forced expulsion of Palestinians out of Gaza (otherwise known as ethnic cleansing).

“We have serious concerns both about extremist rhetoric from some Israeli officials and about proposals being floated by some in the Israeli government for the transfer of Palestinian civilians out of Gaza,” the letter said.

“The United States must remain committed, as you have stated on many occasions, to a future in which all Israelis and Palestinians live in peace with equal rights, dignity, and freedom.”

House Democrats are also reportedly going to call for the resignation of White House Middle East adviser Brett McGurk, a controversial figure that many critics see as the mastermind behind policies that allow for ongoing bloodshed in Gaza.

Israel’s attack on Gaza has killed more than 24,000 people since October. Israel receives $3.8 billion in security assistance from the U.S. every year.

Donald Trump’s classless pastime of bragging about his money may get him into even deeper legal trouble.

In a video deposition made public Friday by the New York Attorney General’s Office, the 2024 presidential candidate claimed that he only became president the first time because of the “brand,” and that, according to him, he should have tacked even more onto his bank statements—statements that New York courts have already deemed overinflated and fraudulent.

“If I wanted to show you a good statement, I would have added maybe $10 billion or something for the brand,” Trump said. “I mean I became president because of the brand, OK. I became president. I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”

Legal experts predict this could affect how much Trump will be expected to fork over to columnist E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury has already decided Trump is liable for sexually assaulting and defaming. Carroll is requesting damages of at least $10 million.

“This jury is allowed to consider how much Donald Trump is worth,” explained legal analyst Lisa Rubin on MSNBC. “Because if you’re trying to punish someone if they only have $10 in their pocket, that’s very different than punishing someone who has hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in their pocket.”

“So, if I’m Robby Kaplan and her team representing E. Jean Carroll right now, I’m poring over this video and thinking about how to use it if Donald Trump, indeed, takes the stand on Monday,” she added.

Trump is on the line in four criminal trials and two civil trials. The videotaped deposition, which includes a 479-page written transcript, stems from his $370 million bank fraud trial in New York in which Trump and his sons stand accused of deceiving banks and insurers by massively overvaluing the elder Trump’s net worth.

But that wasn’t the only outsized claim the GOP front-runner made in his testimony. Elsewhere in the deposition, Trump patted himself on the back for allegedly standing in the way of nuclear holocaust.

“I think you would have nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea,” Trump argued. “I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during the April 13, 2023, deposition after he was asked if he was too busy to run his company while he was in the White House.