Republicans Are Tearing Each Other to Shreds Over Foreign Aid Package

House Republicans traded personal barbs on Thursday as disagreements over foreign aid packages to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan threaten to throw the caucus into further chaos.

During a morning huddle around Speaker Mike Johnson, who has struggled to rally his party around the aid bills, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden got in Florida Representative Matt Gaetz’s face and called him “tubby.” Van Orden later confirmed the insult.

“He felt like he should call me a squish, and I wanted to remind anybody who has not been in combat and held his friend’s hand as they died being shot by the enemy really doesn’t have any business calling someone else a squish. And so, in fact, I did call him tubby and I stand by that,” he said.

Later, on the steps of the Capitol, Gaetz fired back at his Republican colleague who, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, has called for a motion to remove Johnson from the speakership.

“The only thing I gleaned from [the exchange] is that Mr. Van Orden is not a particularly intelligent individual,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz led the charge in October to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whom Johnson replaced. While Gaetz opposes the foreign aid packages, he has not called for Johnson’s ouster.

Johnson, physically and figuratively “surrounded by folks who have taken issue with his foreign aid plan,” reportedly “put his head in his hands and shook his head” on the House floor. The image sums up his brief time as speaker of the House. As for Gaetz, this is what he asked for.

Just months away from a presidential election that could decide the future of reproductive rights, congressional Democrats and abortion rights groups are not on the same page.

Many Democrats are warning that the right wing plans to revive the Comstock Act, a “zombie” law from 1873 banning the shipment of “every article or thing designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.” The act could be used as a de facto national abortion ban in the post-Dobbs environment, a move that conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have backed.

Several Democrats are pushing to repeal the law before the election, claiming that leaving it on the books would hand Donald Trump a loaded weapon with which to outlaw abortion nationwide without having an explicit ban on the procedure. But, NOTUS reported Thursday, they’ve received pushback from mainstream abortion rights groups. The organizations warn that passing legislation to repeal the law could cause complications with active litigation they are pursuing to challenge abortion restrictions.

“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.

Critics of inaction on Comstock have called this strategy “akin [to] leaving [a potential Trump administration] a nuclear bomb.” Under a government willing to wield it, the Comstock Act could be used to ban birth control, condoms, and even sex toys.

“In this era of abortion winning elections, if Democrats don’t force votes in both chambers—yes, even the House—and campaign on this very out-in-the-open Republican plan to further subjugate women and pregnant people, it will confirm the party’s antipathy to delivering anything of substance on abortion,” Susan Rinkunas wrote for The New Republic in March. “But if Democrats do sound the alarm on Comstock, they might save us all from a Victorian prison—and they could even win in November.”

Trump recently declined to publicly endorse a national abortion ban, instead saying restricting access to the procedure should be left to the states. But in doing so, Trump tacitly condoned every single Republican-backed law on abortion. And the Republican record speaks for itself.

Columbia University brutally cracked down Thursday on ongoing student protests against Israel’s ruthless war on Gaza, sending in city police officers to arrest some demonstrators.

Students at both Columbia and Barnard College have been protesting for months, demanding the university divest from companies doing business with Israel. As part of the protest, students set up an encampment in the middle of campus on Wednesday.

In response, police on Thursday deployed a drone and brought five corrections buses, according to Talia Jane, a freelance journalist at the scene.

Videos of the encampment showed police entering campus on Thursday and beginning to arrest students. Meanwhile, university officials have reportedly barred people visibly carrying food from entering school grounds, in an attempt to prevent protesters from getting supplies.

Another video shows students flooding the streets outside of Columbia’s campus, preventing the corrections buses from leaving with the arrested protesters.

Three students have reportedly been suspended for participating in the protest, and their college IDs were reportedly deactivated. One of the three is student organizer Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Democratic Representative Illhan Omar.

The university’s dramatically heightened response comes a day after university President Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism on college campuses. Shafik insisted that “antisemitism has no place on our campus, and I am personally committed to doing everything I can to confront it directly.”

The hearing, however, seemed to be more focused on the opinions of college faculty members, with Republicans Elise Stefanik and Tim Walberg specifically asking about disciplinary measures against two professors who made comments that were perceived as antisemitic.

Omar, on the other hand, asked Shafik about protests specifically, pointing out several attacks against antiwar as well as Palestinian solidarity protests, including an alleged chemical attack against pro-Palestinian protesters in January that is still under police investigation, according to Shafik.

Columbia has also been sued by five Jewish students and two student organizations after the university suspended the student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine in November.

Thursday’s police involvement at Columbia is further evidence that the response to campus protests over Gaza across the country has mostly been one of censorship and hysteria designed to suppress pro-Palestinian activism, as Osita Nwanevu wrote for The New Republic in December. The crowds at protests both on and off college campuses are diverse, with Jews, Muslims, Black, and brown demonstrators. Critics, particularly Republican lawmakers, often hide behind allegations of antisemitism as a way to launch attacks on academic freedom.

Funding for Ukraine and Israel has been hotly contested in Congress. For Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s just fodder for trolling.

As two separate supplemental aid packages make their way through the House, Greene has proposed a series of outlandish amendments to both bills. For a measure on Ukrainian military aid, Greene submitted amendments requiring members who vote for the aid to “conscript in the Ukrainian army,” and directing President Joe Biden to withdraw from NATO.

And for Israel, Greene, far from requiring aid to be conditioned on Israeli compliance with international law, played one of her old hits: She proposed that funding in the bill be allocated to “the development of space laser technology on the southwest border,” a callback to her previous antisemitic remarks about “Jewish space lasers,” with a bit of gratuitous eliminationist rhetoric about migrants.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose military aid to Israel, and opposition to arming Ukraine has become a signature position of the hard right. But Greene appears to have no interest in engaging with the subjects on their merits at all. Instead, the amendments are part of Greene’s campaign against House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she has threatened to oust for bringing aid bills to the House floor.

Johnson has struggled to get his caucus behind the aid packages; it’s the reason why he divided up the countries into separate bills. Greene is one of the faces of Republican resistance to Johnson’s leadership, but hard-line GOP dissatisfaction with Johnson dates back to his first days as speaker.

Greene’s opposition to aid for Israel puts her in the minority of her party, while Ukrainian aid has divided the Republican Party, prompting senior members to declare that their colleagues are repeating Russian propaganda. Greene has come under fire recently for praising Vladimir Putin and suggesting that Ukraine is waging a “war on Christianity.” But her latest stunt, emblematic of a distinctive style of conservative politics, suggests that her positions aren’t particularly principled. She’s just happy to get off a few jokes.

A Republican representative has a new conspiracy about the January 6 insurrection, and despite the GOP’s laundry list of theories about the attack, this might be one of the strangest yet.

Representative Greg Murphy floated the idea Wednesday night that Donald Trump’s secretary of the army “slow-walked” the deployment of National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 “in order to allow more chaos to occur” so that he could get a job in the Biden administration.

“They were ready to act, and they were slow-walked by the Secretary of the Army, apparently with some thoughts that he was going to join the Biden administration,” Murphy told Newsmax. “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of that, but that’s one of the general working diagnoses is, as we say.”

This is an incredible theory, to say the least. If anyone is guilty of delaying a response to the riots, it’s Donald Trump. Those close to the president that day even claim that he wasn’t interested in any swift action. This is coupled with the fact that many of those arrested in connection with the riots say that they were answering a call to action from then-President Trump himself.

Republicans have repeatedly downplayed the attack, insisting that it was full of fake Trump supporters who arrived on “ghost buses,” that the government instigated the whole thing, and even that rioters were just taking a walk.

For a party with a reputation of pushing military pride and “support the troops” rhetoric, Republicans have engaged in baseless attacks against U.S. military leaders in the post-Trump era, from holding up military promotions to attacking “supposed wokeness” within the armed forces. Murphy’s new theory really goes to show that to MAGA Republicans, no American institutions are considered off-limits if you can use them to score political points.