Mike Johnson’s Caving to Trump May Have Just Cost Him in the House

Representative Rick Crawford will be the next House Intelligence Committee chair, following his colleague Mike Turner’s unceremonious removal by Speaker Mike Johnson Wednesday.

Politico reported Thursday that Johnson will name Crawford to the position following Turner’s removal on Donald Trump’s orders. The move was a surprise even to the Republicans on the panel, and some in the GOP are angry at Johnson for how he handled the move.

“He dragged Mike along,” one senior House Republican said, speaking anonymously.

Another Republican warned that Johnson had just “cost himself political capital,” while a third warned that Turner was ready to go scorched earth.

“Mike’s never going to vote for another fucking thing around here again,” the third Republican said. “He’s mad.”

One Democrat, Representative Jim Himes, said Turner’s ouster “sends a shiver down my spine,” adding that Turner wasn’t a Republican who was quick to “bend the knee” to Trump and kept his “eyes on the prize” of oversight.

Trump sought Turner’s removal because he “believes that Turner is basically an intel community sycophant,” one source told The Daily Beast Wednesday. Johnson has said Trump was not involved in the decision.

Turner has warned of Russian propaganda “being uttered” on the House floor, and voted to certify Joe Biden’s win in 2020, putting himself in Trump’s and many conservatives’ crosshairs. Turner’s decision last year to back the reauthorization of Section 702 also has drawn the ire of the right, as well as the ACLU, for its potential to spy on Americans without a warrant.

Meanwhile, Crawford voted against Ukraine aid last year, in contrast to Turner’s staunch support of the country following its invasion by Russia. Turner’s departure will be seen as good news to the MAGA right who oppose any further aid to Ukraine, and Crawford’s appointment gives Trump a firm loyalist at the top of a powerful House committee, getting rid of another possible critic of his national security decisions.

Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent won’t commit to not cutting Medicaid.

In a heated back and forth Thursday with New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, the hedge fund manager refused to specify where exactly he stood on the future of the critical health care program, claiming instead that he would leverage future negotiations on Medicaid to “empower” states.

“Yes or no: Will you recommend cutting Medicaid?” pressed Luján.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear if you said Medicaid or Medicare,” stuttered Bessent.

“Will you recommend cutting Medicaid?” the senator reiterated.

“Medicaid? The, um—I will—it’s the business of Congress to do the budget,” Bessent responded. “And I am in favor of empowering states, and I believe that for some states that will be an increase and for some states that will be a decrease.”

“So, Mr. Bessent, will you recommend cutting Medicaid to President Trump? And I’ll remind you that you acknowledged that one of your responsibilities as secretary of the Treasury will be to be providing this advice,” Luján said.

“I will get back to you on this,” Bessent concluded.

More than 72 million Americans, or roughly one in five citizens, were enrolled in Medicaid as of October, according to a federal Medicaid factsheet. The joint federal and state health care program provides comprehensive health care insurance to low-income Americans.

The wildly popular program has come under increased scrutiny by Donald Trump and his allies since his November win. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in November, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk (the potential co-chairs of the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency) said they intended to take a knife to “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid, though they refused to specify how much they planned to burn from the health care programs.

That could help Trump extend his 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit, and which Bessent repeatedly vouched for and framed on Thursday as a salvation for America’s working class.

A stunning 61 Democrats on Thursday voted in favor of MAGA Representative Nancy Mace’s useless and antagonistic immigration bill. 

On its face, Mace’s so-called “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act” doesn’t seem like a problem. The bill  “ensures predators who pose a threat and have been previously convicted of sexual assault, domestic violence and other heinous crimes are turned away or immediately deported,” the South Carolina representative wrote in an op-ed last September. 

But in reality, the bill’s aim is redundant at best. Undocumented immigrants can already be deported on account of any crimes, and about 200,000 were deported in 2023. Documented immigrants can be deported for crimes as well, including the exact grounds Mace is referring to. 

At its worst, the bill’s vague text could hurt the very people it claims it’s trying to help. Multiple groups, including the National Task Force to end Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, have come out in opposition to Mace’s bill, stating that it increases the scope of what constitutes “grounds of inadmissibility.” In effect, it would “negatively impact immigrant survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and fail to alleviate the primary barriers to safety and stability experienced by survivors seeking relief under the Immigration and Nationality Act.” 

The group went on to argue that abusers could use this potential law to accuse their victims of abuse when they actually acted in self-defense. That’s not to mention things like language barriers, fear of retaliation or arrest, a lack of knowledge of rights, and many other obstacles that could result in immigrants being hurt by this bill. 

Here are the 61 Democrats who voted for the bill regardless:

1. Boyle — Pennsylvania
2. Budzinski — Illinois
3. Bynum — Oregon
4. Clyburn —South Carolina
5. Conaway — New Jersey
6. Courtney — Connecticut
7. Craig — Minnesota
8. Cuellar — Texas
   
9. Davis — North Carolina
10. Figures — Alabama
11. Gillen — New York
12. Golden — Maine
13. Vicente Gonzalez — Texas
14. Goodlander — New Hampshire
15. Gottheimer — New Jersey
16. Gray — California
17. Harder — California
18. Hayes — Connecticut
19. Himes — Connecticut
20. Horsford — Nevada
21. Houlahan — Pennsylvania
22. Johnson — Texas
23. Kaptur — Ohio
24. Kennedy — New York
25. Khanna — California
26. Landsman — Ohio
27. Lee — Nevada
28. Levin — California
29. Lynch — Massachusetts
30. Magaziner — Rhode Island
31. Mannion — New York
32. McBride — Delaware
33. McClain Delaney — Maryland
34. McDonald Rivet — Michigan
35. Morrison — Minnesota
36. Moskowitz — Florida
37. Panetta — California
38. Pappas — New Hampshire
39. Perez — Washington
40. Riley — New York
41. Ryan — New York
42. Salinas — Oregon
43. Scholten — Michigan
44. Schrier — Washington
45. Sewell — Alabama
46. Sherrill — New Jersey
47. Sorensen — Illinois
48. Soto — Florida
49. Stanton — Arizona
50. Subramanyam — Virginia
51. Suozzi — New York
52. Swalwell — California
53. Sykes — Ohio
54. Titus — Nevada
55. Torres — New York
56. Trahan — Massachusetts
57. Tran — California
58. Vasquez — New Mexico
59. Vindman — Virginia
60. Whitesides — California

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is planning to skip out on Donald Trump’s inauguration, Politico reported Thursday.

A spokesperson for Pelosi told Politico that she would be joining other Democrats who planned to miss Monday’s festivities.

The decision is hardly surprising, considering that Pelosi has been a staunch critic of Trump, and the president-elect has lobbed plenty of accusations at her in response. Just earlier this week, Trump called her “guilty” in a rant about Jack Smith, possibly referring to his old accusations that she could be tried for treason for her involvement in his impeachment inquiry.

Pelosi isn’t the only one who has no interest in setting aside her disdain for Trump: Michelle Obama will also play hooky on Monday.

Several Democratic lawmakers will be similarly absent, including Representatives Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and Ayanna Pressley, who said she would be “with my constituents honoring Dr. King’s legacy.”

Pelosi has made plenty of enemies on both sides of the aisle as she’s affixed herself as the power player of the Democratic establishment. Earlier this week, first lady Jill Biden expressed her disappointment in Pelosi, who had refused to fight for Joe Biden to stay in the presidential race. After Trump won, Pelosi blamed Trump’s victory on Biden’s insistence on prolonging his campaign. Last month, she successfully killed a bid from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive, to join the House Oversight Committee as ranking member.

President Joe Biden is suddenly looking for ways to keep TikTok alive in the U.S. market, despite the fact that he was the one to sign a law banning it in the first place.

“Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” a Biden official told NBC News, noting that the administration is “exploring options” to keep TikTok from going offline.

TikTok is reportedly prepared to shut down its app on Sunday, when the ban is scheduled to take effect, though the actual language of the law technically only mandates that the platform be taken off app stores to prevent new users from downloading it.

The forty-sixth president has just two days left in office before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House. Reinterpreting the law could save Biden’s final days atop the executive branch from being marred by the massively unpopular ban and effectively defer the issue to the MAGA leader.

The Supreme Court is poised to weigh on whether the law banning TikTok is constitutional. Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”

But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

Meanwhile, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will attend Trump’s inauguration, sitting on the dais alongside other Silicon Valley leaders, a Trump transition source told Axios. He will join X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. All of these men have opportunistically caved to the incoming forty-seventh president’s politics since he won in November, in an apparent bid to curry the executive’s favor on the advent of a tech-centric, AI-fueled future.