Congress

The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policy last week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.

One of the two Johns — John Cornyn and John Thune — is in all likelihood going to be the next leader of the Senate. One may potentially, based on the very favorable map for Republicans this cycle, may be the next majority leader. It’s a massive trade in power, away from the long-tenured Mitch McConnell and his diaspora of consultants and groups, and into the new hands of different Senate staffers and teams. But one thing that Cornyn and Thune represent is not just a generational shift, but a shift in the nature of the leadership and what they represent. Cornyn and Thune were both recruited in 2004 by Karl Rove as part of the effort by George W. Bush to take the Senate.

As the 2024 presidential election picks up steam, so is the race to kiss up to the presumptive GOP nominee. The battleground has taken to the sky as seven Republican House members push to rename DC’s international airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport.  Representative Guy Reschenthaler, the House GOP's chief deputy whip, introduced a two-page bill to rename the Washington Dulles International Airport after the former president on Friday.  "In my lifetime, our nation has never been greater than under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump," Reschenthaler told Fox News.

Congress struck a major blow against TikTok's Chinese ownership Thursday morning, by passing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require parent company ByteDance to sell its US entity within six months in order to retain access to American app stores and web hosting services. The bill, passed by a 352-65 margin, now heads to the Senate. It offered a rare time that former president Donald Trump found himself allied with progressive members of the Squad in opposition, while Representatives Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries joined forces in voting for the bill, which would help combat the espionage concerns that intelligence officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly raised.

Steve Nikoui’s son, Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, was killed alongside twelve other American service-members outside of Abbey Gate at the Kabul Airport during the Biden administration's hasty exit of Afghanistan in August 2021. That's why Nikoui's outburst, “Do you remember Abbey Gate,” interrupted the president’s State of the Union address on Thursday, roughly fifty-one minutes through the speech. Nikoui was escorted out, arrested, placed in handcuffs and charged with a misdemeanor that could see him in jail for up to ninety days. “I remember what set me off," Nikoui told The Spectator Friday night, in his first interview since his arrest. "When he was talking about kids, in one moment, they're glorifying these abortions...

“I will kill you if you fucking shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really fuck you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”  This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the biggest news in politics has nothing to do with the presidential election — it’s the decision by Mitch McConnell to step down after leading the Senate Republicans for seventeen years. McConnell’s choice to exit was inevitably going to come at some point, and announcing it this early allows him to escape the many questions about how he’d potentially work with President Trump in the future. McConnell doesn’t want to have to play pretend, and after his bout with recent health issues, he also eliminates the ability of Democrats to play games of comparison around Joe Biden’s age and enfeebled nature. It’s going out in a time of his own choosing — in sports, business and politics, that’s a rare thing to accomplish.

What is decadence? In popular usage, it is synonymous with “excess,” especially of a sensual or appetitive nature. I am not sure what it means that we encounter the word most often these days in connection highly caloric chocolate confections. Perhaps such linguistic degradation, in which serious things are reformulated in an atmosphere of ironic depreciation, is one sign we live in a decadent age. In any case, at its core I believe that decadence has less to do with excessive consumption or sensuality than with ontological attenuation.   What does that pretentious mouthful mean? It means that decadence is essentially about the hollowing out of vital institutions, not their surrender to gluttony, lust and profligacy.

The Senate’s gay sex scandal started with a bang, but has ended with a whimper. This morning, the Capitol Police announced that they will not be pressing charges against Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the disgraced former Ben Cardin staffer filmed having sex with a male partner in the Hart Senate Office Building, as first reported by Cockburn. “For now, we are closing the investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding a sex video that was recorded inside the Hart Senate Office Building on the morning of Wednesday, December 13,” the Capitol Police said in a statement. “Despite a likely violation of congressional policy — there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed.

Congressional Democrats have finally admitted why they are so scared of Donald Trump — they think he’s out to kill them. January 6 was just a preview to a possible round of sweeping political assassinations. “Donald Trump and his lawyers essentially asserted that the president has the right to assassinate people, to kill people without any prospect of prosecution unless they’re first impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate,” Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN last Tuesday after Trump's DC circuit Court of Appeals appearance. Raskin was referring to an argument made by Trump’s lawyer John Sauer that the former president is immune to criminal persecution for official acts taken while in office.

As a new Covid variant, JN1, has cropped up across America, the public health officials who were at the forefront of the Covid-19 pandemic were hauled into Congress and pressed on lockdowns, the origins of the coronavirus, school closures and more behind closed doors. The most prominent target, Anthony Fauci, was particularly grilled by the House’s bipartisan Covid Select Committee for fourteen hours over two days. Unreported until now is the lack of interest by the committee’s top Democrat, the confirmed conflicts of interests that an American scientist investigating Covid’s origins had and the carelessness with which Fauci ran his grant-making.