House Republicans Suddenly Miss Kevin McCarthy After All That Losing

After losing two major votes, House Republicans are suddenly starting to regret giving Kevin McCarthy the boot.

The House on Tuesday voted 250–180 against a $17.6 billion aid package for Israel, a measure brought by Speaker Mike Johnson in an effort to kill the bipartisan Senate border deal. The lower chamber also failed to pass articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Four Republicans joined all Democrats to oppose the move.

In the hours following, as Republicans lamented the brutal losses, some lawmakers began to wish they had kept McCarthy in charge.

“Getting rid of Speaker McCarthy has officially turned into an unmitigated disaster,” Representative Thomas Massie, who had supported McCarthy, tweeted Wednesday morning.

“All work on separate spending bills has ceased. Spending reductions have been traded for spending increases. Warrantless spying has been temporarily extended. Our majority has shrunk.”

When someone commented that Republicans should have kept serial fabulist George Santos in Congress but were right to dump McCarthy, Massie replied, “Name one thing that’s improved under the new speaker.”

The night before, Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced the motion to vacate McCarthy in the first place, also bitterly complained about McCarthy’s absence.

“Wouldn’t it have been nice to still have Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives?” Gaetz said on Newsmax. “He would have been a reliable vote for impeachment.”

Gaetz still managed to twist the knife, though, noting that after his ouster, McCarthy resigned from Congress at the end of 2023, leaving House Republicans with a precariously thin majority. “If he wasn’t speaker, he wasn’t willing to stick around,” Gaetz said.

“I think that the errant expulsion of Santos and the abject selfishness of Kevin McCarthy contributed to this result as much as the three Republican members who voted ‘no.’”

Even before Johnson took over from McCarthy in October, Republicans had proven themselves wholly unable to accomplish anything in Congress. Even some of the farthest-right members of the caucus have been forced to admit as much. Since Johnson took over, the GOP’s majority has shrunk significantly, leaving the party with even less wiggle room to get measures passed.

Meanwhile, McCarthy—who is probably currently dancing around his California home to “How You Like Me Now”—is plotting revenge against the Republicans who kicked him out of Congress. His allies are working to recruit primary challengers to those eight turncoats.

Senate Republicans are starting to turn on their leader Mitch McConnell over his support of the bipartisan border deal, a situation that echoes the October ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

McConnell has urged his fellow GOP senators in recent days to support the bipartisan measure, but he has been met with resistance. Some Republicans think that any deal brokered with Democrats is an automatic nonstarter, and some are following Donald Trump’s orders—but whatever the case, enough oppose the border bill that McConnell was forced to finally admit Tuesday that the measure has “no real chance” of passing.

Senator Ted Cruz pointed to McConnell’s stance on the bill Tuesday when he called for the minority leader to step down. When asked at a press conference whether it was time for McConnell “to go,” Cruz replied, “I think it is.”

“I think a Republican leader should actually lead this conference and should advance the priorities of Republicans,” Cruz said.

While Cruz has long opposed McConnell’s power, even voting against him for Senate minority leader in 2022, he’s not alone this time. Shortly after the bill was unveiled on Sunday, Senator Mike Lee took to X (formerly Twitter) to blast the measure as “an unmitigated disaster.”

“I cannot understand how any Republican would think this was a good idea—or anything other than an unmitigated disaster,” Lee wrote. “WE NEED NEW LEADERSHIP—NOW.”

Many other Senate Republicans have been privately and publicly lambasting McConnell’s negotiation over the deal, even though it contains a lot of the border policies Republicans have been demanding for months.

The calls for McConnell to resign over his support for a bipartisan deal are reminiscent of the House ousting McCarthy after he helped broker a deal with Democrats on the debt ceiling. It’s unclear whether Republican senators are moving to oust McConnell from his leadership position, or if they would even succeed at doing so.

But McConnell’s power in Congress has slowly started to wane. Some Republicans started to grow frustrated with him at the end of 2022 over his support for continued U.S. aid to Ukraine (another element of the bipartisan bill). And last summer, he froze up during two different public appearances, prompting demands he resign due to flagging mental capabilities.

Hours after a federal appeals court unanimously voted against all three of Donald Trump’s presidential immunity arguments in his January 6 case, the former president’s biggest fans in Congress decided to introduce a nonbinding resolution that Trump “did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

One after another, a hurried collection of MAGA House Republicans made their case for the former president.

“We are here today to authoritatively express that President Trump did not commit an insurrection, and we believe Congress has a unique role in making that declaration,” Representative Matt Gaetz said. “It’s not the job of the states and especially not the job of some bureaucrats in Colorado to make this assessment and interfere with the right of voters to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice.”

“Is there a practical implication if this passes; would this help Trump legally in court, or is this just a symbolic thing?” asked one reporter.

“I think it would be incredibly helpful, legally, if we were to adopt this provision. You know, I’ve been the victim of federal crimes,” added Gaetz, who is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly paying $900 to a sex trafficker for sex with a minor. “If we’re the purported victim, in Congress, and we’re saying this was not an insurrection, I think that would hold a great deal of weight.”

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed equally keen for Trump’s favor when she took the podium, completely flipping the script by claiming that President Joe Biden’s actual inauguration was an insurrection.

“When they came to Washington and protested, all of you called it an insurrection,” Greene said, referring to more than 2,000 rioters who forcefully entered and devastated the Capitol building—of which 749 have received criminal sentences.

“And then when Joe Biden was inaugurated and this entire Capitol complex was surrounded with 30,000 National Guard troops, none of you stood there and called that an insurrection,” she continued. “Oh no, you all stayed silent.”

New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who along with Gaetz is rumored to be on Trump’s short list for his vice presidential pick, also chimed in during the press conference to decry the legal effort to hold the former president accountable for attempting to thwart the transfer of power.

“As President Donald Trump continues to dominate in the polls, extreme Democrats will stop at nothing in an attempt to prevent President Donald Trump from returning to the White House,” Stefanik said.

It’s unclear if the one-page resolution, which was co-signed by 60 Republican members of the House, would have any sway in an actual court of law—especially when the Colorado Supreme Court already set a precedent for the language, ruling in December that Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s GOP primary ballot on the basis that he had taken part in an insurrection and violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced Tuesday that he is in Russia for the worst reason possible: He is going to interview Vladimir Putin.

Carlson has been in Moscow over the past few days, gleefully fueling speculation that he would interview the Russian president. Neither he nor the Kremlin would explicitly confirm or deny anything until Carlson posted a video on X (formerly Twitter).

Carlson said he was interviewing Putin so that Americans would finally know the truth about the war in Ukraine.

American “media outlets are corrupt,” he said in the video. “They lie to their readers and viewers, and they do that mostly by omission.”

He cited the multiple interviews Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has given to U.S. outlets. “The interviews he’s already done in the United States are not traditional interviews,” Carlson said. “They are fawning pep sessions specifically designed to amplify Zelenskiy’s demands.”

“That is not journalism. It is government propaganda.”

Carlson did not acknowledge that he himself has held multiple “fawning pep sessions” for a politician. Both while he was at Fox News and after he was unceremoniously fired, Carlson has repeatedly parroted Donald Trump’s talking points and invited the former president on air to spew falsehoods unchecked.

Meanwhile, Carlson claimed, no Western outlets have interviewed Putin, meaning most Americans don’t know “why Putin invaded Ukraine, or what his goals are now.”

Putin has actually made it pretty clear why he invaded Ukraine: He wants to force the country to rejoin Russia, in an effort to reestablish the Soviet Union. But if there is a lack of coverage about the Russian side of the invasion, it’s because Putin has cracked down on journalism.

Since the war broke out, the Kremlin has rushed to silence reporting on the military conflict. Two American journalists, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, are currently imprisoned in Russia for covering the war.

It’s likely that Putin only accepted Carlson’s request for an interview because Carlson, while at Fox, repeatedly expressed support for Putin on air and echoed Kremlin talking points. He has vehemently opposed U.S. military aid for Ukraine and blamed Western nations for Russia’s invasion because they supported letting Ukraine join NATO.

Donald Trump’s wallet is in for a new world of pain, according to a new letter by the judge in his $370 million New York bank fraud case.

That’s thanks to Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who is reportedly negotiating a plea deal with Manhattan prosecutors that would require he admit he lied on the stand during the trial, according to The New York Times.

In an email on Monday sent to attorneys for Trump, Weisselberg, the Trump Organization, as well as counsel for New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office, New York Justice Arthur Engoron explained he wanted answers before issuing his verdict.

“As the presiding magistrate, the trier of fact, and the judge of credibility, I of course want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune, and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial,” Engoron wrote.

“I do not want to ignore anything in a case of this magnitude,” Engoron added.

Engoron has asked the legal teams to respond by 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Ultimately, Engoron noted, he might use the news as reason to invoke “falsus in uno”—which would discount the credibility of Weiselberg’s entire testimony.

“If you’re going to issue a ruling and if it turns out Weisselberg lied, that’s going to harm the Trump Organization when it comes time for the verdict,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN on Thursday.

Weisselberg was a key witness out of the 40 odd people who took the stand during the bank fraud trial, in which Trump is accused of massively overinflating his net worth in order to broker better (and fraudulent) deals with banks and insurance companies.

The Times reported that prosecutors seemed particularly focused on claims Weisselberg had made on October 10 about Trump’s penthouse at Trump Tower, which had been overvalued on his financial statements by inaccurately reporting it as three times its actual size.

Engoron ruled prior to the start of the trial that James had proved that Trump committed fraud. What remains to be seen in Engoron’s verdict is just how much dough Trump will have to cough up as recompense for his scheme, which was likened by the judge to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The court has also floated the possibility of stripping the Trump Organization’s licenses to do business in the state.