Johnson and Trump Push Major Election Conspiracy with Proposed Bill

In an effort to save his job, House Speaker Mike Johnson will meet with Donald Trump on Friday—but a new detail about their expected joint announcement seems, on its face, like a complete waste of time.

Fox News reported Thursday that the pair will use the platform to announce an election integrity bill to bar noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections, even though that’s already illegal.

The meeting comes at a time of extreme tension for Johnson, who faces the possibility of being the second speaker in U.S. history—and within the last six months—to be kicked out of leadership. Members such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who filed a motion to vacate Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, are upset that the leader of the lower chamber hasn’t made big enough strides to advance their party’s policy goals. In their opinion, working with the opposite party—as politicians are traditionally expected to do—to draft bipartisan legislation is a sign of failure.

And Republicans don’t have much patience for the reality of the situation, which is that the party’s razor-thin House majority effectively forces Johnson to liaise with Democrats to pass anything at all. Instead, they want Johnson to remain staunchly loyal to the far-right cause, all while attacking him with examples of inaction that are fueled by their own division.

To salvage the mess, Johnson met with Greene for an hour on Wednesday, offering the conspiratorial Georgia Republican a spot on a proposed “kitchen cabinet” of advisers to the speaker. But the water is not yet under the bridge: After the meeting, Greene told reporters that she would “wait and see” before making a decision on the offer.

“I explained to him, this isn’t personal,” she said. “But he has not done the job that we elected him to do.”

Johnson is, ultimately, in an impossible position. Even though his caucus is frustrated by his inaction, actually acting upon his promises, such as sending aid to Ukraine, would almost certainly be a death knell for his six-month tenure wielding the gavel.

Johnson’s downfall bears an uncanny resemblance to the final days of his predecessor, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who got the boot from eight members of his party after he committed the same sin of working with Democrats in order to pass a 45-day stopgap funding bill. At the end of the day, Johnson’s inability to unify a historically divided—and unproductive—GOP flags even deeper problems in the health of the conservative party.

Georgia’ Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones may soon face the music for serving as a fake elector for Donald Trump in 2020. 

On Thursday, Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said he would personally take up the investigation into Jones’s actions. The move comes after Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, was disqualified in 2022 from investigating Jones because she once hosted a fundraiser for his political opponent.

Skandalakis was under fire for taking so long to select a replacement for Willis, and was even sued by four Georgia residents to make an appointment. In the end, he chose himself.  

Willis has already brought charges against Trump and several of his Republican allies for seeking to overturn the 2020 election results for Georgia after the once staunchly red state unexpectedly voted for Joe Biden.

In an effort to mitigate the disaster that was the 2020 election, Trump and Republican allies in multiple states tried to use slates of fake electors to claim that the states that had voted for Biden had really voted for Trump. Many of those fake electors were high-ranking state Republicans, and in Georgia, one of those fake electors was Jones, a state senator at the time. He and 15 other fake electors claimed they were the “duly elected and qualified electors” from Georgia in signed documents.

“I’m happy to see this process move forward and look forward to the opportunity to get this charade behind me,” Jones said in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Fani Willis has made a mockery of this legal process, as she tends to do. I look forward to a quick resolution and moving forward with the business of the state of Georgia.”

If the investigation implicates Jones in a crime, he wouldn’t be the first Georgia Republican to get in trouble over the electoral process. Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of the state Republican Party, was found to have voted illegally in nine elections from 2008 to 2010. Meanwhile, Trump is resorting to desperate measures in his own Georgia trial, launching a last-minute attempt to get Willis thrown off the case after an earlier effort fell apart.

All of this bad press should convince Georgia Republicans to try to fix things ahead of November’s coming elections. Instead, state lawmakers just passed a bill that would make it easier to kick registered voters off the rolls. 

The Arizona legislature devolved into a state of chaos after Republicans abruptly shut down a discussion to repeal the state’s recently reinstituted draconian abortion ban, with Democrats chanting “Shame” at their colleagues across the aisle.

On Wednesday, Republican state Representative Matt Gress motioned to bring House Bill 2677—a formal effort to repeal the abortion law—up for a vote. But that effort was cut short when another GOP lawmaker motioned to go into recess, throwing the legislature into disarray.

“He does not care about the women who will die because of this horrific ban,” shouted one Democratic lawmaker, pointing at Gress.

“I absolutely—” started Gress, before getting cut off by other lawmakers, who shouted “absolutely not!”

Another effort to make a motion to repeal the law also failed after the recess. House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci, a Republican, motioned to adjourn, gaveling the session out before the “nay” votes could even be heard. Meanwhile, in the Senate, a similar move by Democratic lawmakers to strip the law was also suddenly adjourned.

Following the bedlam, Republican House Speaker Ben Toma seemed more focused on scolding House Democrats than finding an immediate solution to the dangerous law.

“These are difficult conversations we all need to have, and we absolutely cannot have them when Democrat legislators act as uncivilly, and engage in appallingly childish behavior, as we saw on the House Floor today,” Toma wrote in a statement. “That’s not how we debate important issues down here and I find it completely unacceptable and disappointing.”

But Toma’s plea for more time falls flat considering that the legislature will only be meeting once per week now that state budget negotiations have begun, reported The Center Square.

The state’s Supreme Court decided Tuesday to revive a near-total abortion ban from 1864, before Arizona was even a state, that offers no exceptions for instances of rape or incest. But some Republicans in the state—especially the ones currently on the campaign trail—immediately came out against it, including Senate candidate Kari Lake, Representative David Schweikert, and Representative Juan Ciscomani.

Former Republican Governor Doug Doucey also lamented the decision, even though he appointed four of the justices who contributed to the court’s majority opinion.

The flip-flopping is no coincidence, especially as abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nationwide abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans last November, resulting in major losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Postelection, those raw numbers turned into some stunning platform reversals for the conservative party, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem can no longer enter about 10 percent of the state she governs. And she has no one but herself to blame.

Noem has repeatedly accused Native American tribes in South Dakota of working with Mexican drug cartels, and accused Native parents in tribal areas of not being involved in their children’s lives, blaming them for poor academic performance. So three major tribes have voted to ban her from their land.

The Standing Rock Tribal Council voted Tuesday to formally banish Noem from its reservation. The move comes just a week after the Cheyenne River Sioux banished Noem from their lands. And on March 18, the Oglala Sioux did the same. There isn’t much she can do about it, either: South Dakota does not have criminal jurisdiction on any of its nine Native American reservations.

“It’s not acceptable for Kristi Noem to lie repeatedly, stoke further division, and endanger the people of the sovereign nations which pre-exist the United States and South Dakota, which have illegally annexed and occupied sovereign territory of the Oceti Sakowin,” said Chase Iron Eyes, the director of the Lakota People’s Law Center, in a statement.

But Noem is unrepentant. In an email to The Daily Beast, spokesman Ian Fury said, “Banishing Governor Noem does nothing to solve the problem. She calls on all our tribal leaders to banish the cartels from tribal lands.”

Noem already had a fractious relationship with the tribes in her state. Her cavalier handling of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a high number of cases in Native communities, and she tried to prevent the tribes from implementing their own pandemic safety measures.

Noem is reportedly on the shortlist for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, and her record among Natives could affect her standing. But considering Trump’s own crazy record with Native Americans before and during his presidency, he may not care.

Newsmax went light on the research on Thursday, airing a segment accusing President Joe Biden of forgetting that Africa was a country while apparently believing that Africa is a country.

“He said that Biden didn’t know that Africa was a country, he couldn’t remember the year his son died, he didn’t know the last names of staff members, he forgot when he was vice president, all very embarrassing stuff,” said Newsmax host Rob Finnerty, throwing a question to Representative James Comer about special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s mental acuity.

But no mention of Africa was made in the 388-page report. So where did Finnerty get the idea that Biden had mixed up the continent’s geographical status?

Well, the rumor may stem from a speech Biden gave as a vice president at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in 2014. While addressing leaders of the continent, the text of Biden’s speech said that there was “no reason the nations of Africa cannot and should not join the ranks of the world’s most prosperous nations in the near term, in the decades ahead.” Except Biden stumbled on “nations,” dropping the -s and saying, instead, “nation of Africa.”