There’s a New Republican Whine About Biden’s Energy, and It’s Insane

Republicans are annoyed that Joe Biden successfully delivered the State of the Union address, disproving their many potshots about his mental and physical infirmity.

Biden was animated during his Thursday night speech, successfully going back and forth with GOP hecklers. Apparently, his energy did not sit well with a Republican Party that has long mocked him as “Sleepy Joe.”

Immediately after the address, Fox News host Sean Hannity described Biden’s speech as “so hyped-up it was bizarre” and even “frightening.” Later in his segment, during an interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Hannity said Biden was “very jacked up” and “overcaffeinated.”

Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump, at whom Biden took aim several times throughout the speech, made several all-caps comments about the State of the Union on Truth Social.

“THIS IS LIKE A SHOUTING MATCH, EVERY LINE IS BEING SHOUTED,” Trump complained on Truth Social.

He also suggested that “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!”

Trump’s favorite doctor, Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, also posited Biden was overmedicated. We should probably trust Jackson on this one, as he allegedly knows a thing or two about overmedicating people in order to get results.

Ari Fleischer, who served as George W. Bush’s White House press secretary, insisted that Biden’s energy was still a sign of the president’s age. “Biden sounds like an elderly man arguing with his family because they’re trying to convince him he shouldn’t drive,” Fleisher wrote on social media.

Republican political consultant Frank Luntz warned that Biden’s volume levels could be off-putting to undecided voters.

The GOP has insisted throughout all of Biden’s presidency, as well as his two campaigns, that he is too old to hold office. Republicans insist he is suffering from cognitive decline (while ignoring Trump’s own many gaffes and fumbles).

Many people were quick to point out that Republicans cannot have it both ways.

“You people are actually pathetic,” reporter Elie Mystal replied to Fleischer. “‘Biden’s too old’ to ‘Biden’s too loud’ in sixty seconds.”

Mike Johnson continues to get tongue-tied when trying to talk about IVF, with his latest bonkers comments coming during an interview on Thursday.

Republican lawmakers have rushed to portray themselves as defenders of in vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that classified embryos as children. But Johnson appears to be struggling to reconcile his party’s newfound talking points with his avowed far-right Christian and anti–reproductive rights beliefs.

In an interview on Thursday, CBS host Tony Dokoupil asked Johnson whether destroying embryos constituted murder for someone who believes life begins at conception, as the House speaker does.

“It’s something that we’ve got to grapple with,” Johnson said. “It’s a brave new world. IVF’s only been invented, I think, in the early ’70s.”

The 1970s were half a century ago, so the technology on this one isn’t exactly up for debate—as many of Johnson’s own colleagues who have relied on IVF to start a family know quite well.

Johnson has refused to explicitly say whether he believes that the destruction of an embryo constitutes murder. But his past actions speak plenty loud. Johnson has long argued that life begins “from the moment of fertilization,” the same logic applied in the Alabama ruling.

He has repeatedly voted against increasing reproductive rights, ranging from abortion access to contraception. He also co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, alongside most of the rest of his caucus, which would federally enshrine fetal personhood. But when asked in November about his history on legislating against fertility treatments, Johnson claimed he couldn’t remember “any of those measures.”

Since the Alabama ruling, Johnson and his Republican colleagues have talked plenty about supporting IVF, but they have done very little to actually protect access to the treatment. A group of seven GOP representatives introduced a resolution last week expressing support for IVF and calling on elected officials to protect the treatment, but the measure is nonbinding and doesn’t actually achieve anything. Five of the co-sponsors represent swing districts and are likely just trying to appeal to their constituents.

Johnson’s comment Thursday also echoes the logic in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the landmark Supreme Court case that rolled back the nationwide right to abortion. The court’s conservative justices determined that abortion was not a fundamental right because “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Essentially, because modern medicine has progressed, people do not have the right to bodily autonomy.

But it’s unclear how far back something has to go to be considered “history.” Again, IVF has now been around for half a century. The first record of abortion in the world is from 1550 BCE, and the procedure was definitely being performed in the American colonies.

For what it’s worth, Johnson himself was also only invented in the 1970s. He was born in 1972, and now, 50 years later, we’re all having to grapple with his policy choices.

A New York judge has ruled that the jury in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial should be kept completely secret—except, of course, to Trump and company.

Both parties and their attorneys, staff, and consultants in the case will have access to the names of jurors, though other details will be kept more secret, according to Judge Juan Merchan. Residential addresses and places of work will be kept strictly confidential and shared only with attorneys and away from Trump, Merchan noted, citing the potential for harassment in the high-profile case of the volatile former president as reason for the safeguards.

“The Court further finds good cause … that there is a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of jurors,’” Merchan wrote, adding that Trump has “an extensive history of publicly and repeatedly attacking trial jurors and grand jurors.”

It remains to be seen if that precaution will be enough to keep Trump from targeting the batch of private citizens conducting their civic duty.

Trump’s habit of lashing out at those around him in the courtroom became abundantly clear during a couple of his legal trials last year. During his New York fraud trial, for example, he repeatedly smeared Justice Arthur Engoron as “crooked” and baselessly asserted that one of the judge’s law clerks was having an affair with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He has extended similar treatment to other court staff doling out his judgment, including special counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Judge Tanya Chutkan, and countless others, sometimes defying court-ordered gag orders in order to do so.

And his rabid followers took that a step further in his Fulton County case, during which far-right conspiracy theorists doxxed a grand jury, circulating their full names, ages, and addresses and ushering a deluge of hate and violent threats their way.

“Defendant’s conduct in this and other matters—including his extensive history of attacking jurors in other proceedings—presents a significant risk of juror harassment and intimidation that warrants reasonable protective measures to ensure the integrity of these proceedings, minimize obstacles to jury selection, and protect juror safety,” prosecutors wrote in their motion to Merchan.

About a third of Trump’s 91 criminal charges stem from the hush-money case, in which Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

It wouldn’t be the first extraordinary measure taken to keep a jury safe from the ire and scrutiny of Trump’s followers. Jurors were kept fully anonymous and partially sequestered in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case, with Judge Lewis Kaplan citing Trump’s behavior as reason for the extreme measures.

Shortly after the jurors handed down the verdict, Judge Kaplan warned them to “never disclose” that they were on the jury, out of concerns for their safety.

There are still hours on the clock before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, but Republicans have already thrown off House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plea for civility.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made clear that she would have no qualms about slinging more mud at the president’s annual visit to Congress.

Greene told Fox News’s Chad Pergram Thursday that her “district was fine with me calling him a liar last year” and that she would “decide in the moment” if she felt the urge to do it again.

She reportedly made the comments while handing out pins with the name Laken Riley, the 22-year-old woman who was killed by an undocumented immigrant and who has since become the face of a bill that would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants arrested for theft.

During Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address, Greene, clad in a $495 fur-trimmed, white alpaca coat that was meant to echo the Chinese spy balloon, led a GOP chorus that loudly booed and jeered the president. The group regularly interrupted the address and caused a scene so humiliating for the party that it got former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to mouth to them to “shush.” At one point, while Biden explained the potential for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in talks on the debt limit, Greene shouted, “Liar.”

That show necessitated a similar warning from Republican leadership ahead of Biden’s return to Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson privately urged party members to keep decorum during Congress’s annual visit by the president.

“He just said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum,’” one GOP lawmaker told The Hill on Wednesday.

“We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming,” the lawmaker added, referring to Democrats. “I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”

Donald Trump must have gotten tired of winning, because he just added a six-figure legal bill to his ever-growing pile of lawsuit fines.

A London judge has ordered Trump to pay £300,000 (or $382,000) in legal fees for Orbis Business Intelligence, court documents released Thursday showed. Orbis is a consulting firm founded by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele.

During his career in British intelligence, Steele ran the Russia desk. In 2016, he compiled a dossier that alleged Trump and members of his inner circle had been “compromised” by Russia’s security service. Documents in the dossier, which have not been verified, claimed Russia had been grooming Trump for collaboration for years. Two memos also said that Trump had participated in “sex parties” in St. Petersburg and received “golden showers” from sex workers in Moscow.

Trump sued Orbis, claiming he had “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress,” particularly from the sex-related claims. He has denied all the allegations in the dossier, which was leaked to and then published by Buzzfeed in 2017.

But presiding Judge Karen Steyn threw the case out last month, saying it was “bound to fail.” And now, she has ordered Trump to reimburse Orbis for the company’s legal fees incurred during the daylong hearing.

That $382,000 bill, however, is just a drop in the bucket of Trump’s growing legal fees. The former president owes more than $466 million for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. He was initially fined $354 million, but interest adds an additional $112,000 per day.

Trump also owes a total of $88.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll—$5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her and $83.3 million for defaming her a separate time. He owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more in fines and gag order violations during his myriad lawsuits.

What’s more, Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani says he still hasn’t been paid for legal services. Giuliani estimated that Trump owes him about $2 million in total.