Johnson Swears In Republican in Record Time After 50-Day Delay for Dem

House Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Matt Van Epps to Congress Thursday morning, less than two days after Van Epps won a special election for the Tennessee 7th congressional district seat.

The time it took to swear in Van Epps, a Republican, was much shorter than the seven weeks Johnson waited before swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat. Grijalva won a special election to represent Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23 to replace her father, Representative Raúl Grijalva, who passed away in March. She was only sworn in on November 12.

Johnson initially refused to swear in the younger Grijalva for days, and once the government shut down at the beginning of October, claimed that he couldn’t do so until that impasse was resolved. The more likely reason was that Grijalva would have been (and later became) the deciding vote on a petition that would trigger a House vote on the government releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Van Epps’s vote is critical for the narrow House Republican majority, and since Congress and President Trump have now approved the Epstein files, Johnson doesn’t see the need to drag his feet. Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, was endorsed by Trump. However, he defeated his Democratic challenger Aftyn Behn by a much smaller margin of victory than expected, leading national Republicans to worry about the 2026 midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

The two survivors who clung to the wreckage of the Pentagon’s September 2 airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean were still actively trying to advance their drug mission—at least, that’s what Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley is expected to tell Congress Thursday.

Bradley plans to spill how he and his advisers determined that the pair of survivors were still aboard the damaged vessel alongside packages of narcotics, supposedly making them legitimate targets for a second attack, according to defense officials that spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

Bradley is meeting lawmakers for a closed-door briefing Thursday as pressure ramps up in Washington to hold someone accountable for the merciless killing. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has faced enormous heat over the last week for the September double tap. But in an apparent effort to save Hegseth and his post from further scrutiny, the White House has redirected blame toward Bradley, who was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the attack.

Since early September, the U.S. has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The September 2 attack was the first such attack. But it is also the only known instance in which survivors were deliberately targeted and killed.

The entire debacle could be swept under the rug if Bradley’s account is deemed accurate. Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech, told the Journal that if the survivors were genuinely capable of threatening U.S. military personnel after the first strike, then the Defense Department would have a “legitimate explanation for the second strike.”

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed out four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey after months of conflict.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, contrary to Hegseth’s announcement in October that Holsey was retiring a year into his tenure, the defense secretary asked Holsey to resign. Tensions between the two began since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January and increased with the administration’s campaign to bomb boats in the waters near Central America, ostensibly to target boats smuggling drugs.

Holsey was concerned about the legality of the strikes, former officials told the Journal, and soon afterward, Hegseth announced the admiral’s retirement. The move to push out a highly decorated Naval officer raises questions about whether military leaders are on board with the boat bombings, and if their concerns are even being heard.

While other military leaders have been pushed out during Trump’s second term, Holsey is the only commander to be dismissed during the current military operation in Central America.

“Having [Holsey] leave at this particular moment, at the height of what the Pentagon considers to be the central action in our hemisphere, is just shocking,” Todd Robinson, who was assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs until January, told the Journal.

Holsey’s background lends itself to the military’s current operation. A former Navy helicopter pilot, the admiral has experience in intercepting drug shipments and had expressed interest in increasing interceptions. In his confirmation hearing in September 2024, Holsey told senators that he wanted a stronger approach to “dismantle the drug cartels.”

“My first deployment to the Southcom area of responsibility was over 33 years ago conducting counterdrug missions,” the admiral said at the time.

Hegseth and Holsey were on good terms at times during the past year, with the admiral preparing military plans after Trump said he wanted to reclaim the Panama Canal. At other times, though, Hegseth thought Holsey was a source of leaks from the DOD. But by the time the boat strikes began in September, the secretary had already lost confidence in the admiral, according to the Journal.

Holsey’s last day is December 12, and he has not spoken publicly about stepping down. But Hegseth is facing increased scrutiny over the legality of the strikes from Congress, including Republicans, and the admiral’s dismissal is going to reflect poorly on Trump and his secretary of defense.

The U.S. economy has seen 1.1 million layoffs this year—the most since the Covid-19 pandemic—even as President Donald Trump constantly proclaims us to be the “hottest country anywhere in the world.” 

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday that there were 71,321 layoffs in November. This brings the year’s total up to 1.17 million, which is a whopping 54 percent higher than last year and the highest layoffs have been since the pandemic hit the economy in 2020. Employers have also seen a 35 percent decrease in hires from last year. 

This negative economic news comes as new Politico polling shows that nearly half the country thinks that the cost of living is the worst they’ve ever seen—and they hold Trump directly responsible for it. 

Trump ran on affordability, on helping working-class Americans left behind by globalization. But as his economy sputters, he continues to attack the very notion, calling affordability a “Democrat scam.” 

If the scale continues to tip in the wrong direction while Americans continue to struggle with higher prices and stagnating wages, it could spell a very rough 2026 midterm for the GOP.  

America’s news media companies are not taking the Pentagon’s new press restrictions laying down.

The New York Times named several key Trump officials in a sweeping lawsuit Thursday, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. The newspaper argued that the Pentagon’s new rules—which effectively forced out dozens of highly lauded legacy journalists and replaced them with fawning, far-right upstarts—actually “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”

The suit further argued that the punitive policy violated the First Amendment by seeking “to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

Under Hegseth’s new rules, credentialed Pentagon reporters were required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced in October, forced journalists to choose between reporting government-sponsored propaganda or having their press credentials revoked.

Dozens of journalists walked away from their desks at the Pentagon as a result, refusing to capitulate to Hegseth’s new standard. In turn, Pentagon officials offered those newly vacated spots to conservative outlets ideologically aligned with the Trump administration, including One America News, The Federalist, and LindellTV, a new outlet formed by Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who practically bankrupted himself by broadcasting conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election.

The Times’ legal complaint seeks a court order to suspend Hegseth’s new rules, as well as a declaration that the initiative “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” was illegal.

In a press briefing Wednesday, a senior attorney for the Times said that the paper had discussed a joint lawsuit with other news organizations similarly affected by the policy, but ultimately decided to proceed alone.