Mike Johnson

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. This old adage has taken on a new meaning for the left as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is developing a bit of a habit for displaying allegedly "far-right" flags. In under a week, the New York Times has unearthed images of dissident flags waving proudly at the justice’s house on two separate occasions, leaving Democrats clamoring about judicial ethics.   The smoking gun in the controversy is an “Appeal to Heaven” flag that was seen flying at Alito’s summer home on Long Beach Island in New Jersey last summer. The flag, which depicts a pine tree, was first used during the American Revolution but has since become associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement after being brandished by January 6 protesters.

If a motion to vacate the speaker of the House fails resoundingly, does it make a sound?The answer is, of course, yes — with a Capitol Hill press corps that loves nothing more than pitting all-too-willing Republicans against one another. Next week, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to finally pull the trigger on her quixotic quest to oust Speaker Mike Johnson — but she’s likely to be left holding a bag of small-dollar donations and press clippings, which is what her detractors think she is actually motivated by.On one side of the push to oust Johnson is a trio of Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar.

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.

Did Iran’s ayatollah have the worst birthday ever? His eighty-fifth kicked off with a bang, as Israel retaliated after Iran’s unprecedented strike across the Jewish state that featured a failed barrage of lethal drones over the weekend. What comes next from Iran remains anyone’s guess — but the Israeli response, which struck an Iranian military but not nuclear site, served as an undoubted shot across the bow to the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The message was that it can’t attempt to directly attack Israel’s homeland without consequences and that Israel has the capability to attack Iran’s nukes if they so please. Iranian proxies, like Hamas, not only invaded Israel on October 7, but have been plaguing global shipping routes for months.

Speaker Mike Johnson is extending a high-profile olive branch to one of his biggest intra-party foes of the day: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Johnson made her one of the impeachment managers as the House hands the reins of the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas to a less-than-excited Senate. Just days ago, Greene was performatively threatening to oust Johnson hours before Congress headed into a multi-week recess. Now, she’s joining with a group of Republicans in asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to expeditiously schedule an impeachment hearing for Mayorkas. It’s not just Greene who is obviously being helped out by Johnson with this announcement.

Tonight President Joe Biden is set to deliver one of what may be his final major speeches as president: the State of the Union. After a completely empty schedule today, the president will address both Houses of Congress — but rivals are speculating if he’ll even make it through the evening. “Will the president be juiced enough to appear to be coherent?” Representative Darrell Issa wonders. And, “how will he deal with immigration. Those are the two issues that I think are on everyone’s mind,” he said. Prior to the speech, the House Republican Conference hosted a media row where dozens of lawmakers spoke about their expectations heading into tonight’s speech. “Border, border, border,” is what some, such as Oklahoma’s Kevin Hern, want to hear from the president.

House Republicans successfully impeached Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a 214-213 vote on Tuesday after an initial failed attempt last week. Mayorkas is the first cabinet official to be impeached since 1876. Speaker Mike Johnson said Mayorkas “deserves to be impeached,” arguing that Mayorkas lied to Congress, refused to comply with federal immigration law and violated his oath of office. Impeachment articles accused Mayorkas of a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.”To say it is extremely unlikely that Mayorkas would be convicted by the Democrat-controlled Senate is an understatement. This serves as more of a symbolic measure for Republicans.

Few moments are less promising to reach a bipartisan deal than the months before a presidential election. And few issues present greater obstacles than limiting illegal immigration. Even the word “illegal” is contested. Progressives say it is too harsh. Conservatives say it is simply truthful. It is no surprise, then, that the compromise “border-security bill” gasped its final breath this week. The Senate bill, negotiated by a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent, met a hostile reception as soon as the text was released. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly brought it up for a procedural vote, where it went down in flames. Why such stiff opposition?

The smallest-ever House Republican majority is squabbling once again, and the irony is that much of the frustration is focused on a tiny group of Republicans who tanked what they claimed to want last year.The usual gang of safe-district Republicans, Republicans running for higher office and anti-team players are agitating to shut down the border or shut down the government, even though many of them voted against a bill last year that would have implemented meaningful border security provisions and cut spending — even with divided government. Ironically, the then-chair of the Freedom Caucus, Scott Perry, negotiated this deal — which included the entirety of the House GOP’s border security package with the exception of strengthening the E-Verify immigration system.

Some details of the latest congressional border deal, negotiated by Republican senator James Lankford and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, dropped Saturday. Conservatives didn’t have high hopes for negotiations, but the reported deal is worse than imagined. The Senate has been tight-lipped about discussions, but Rosemary Jenks, government relations director at the Immigration Accountability Project, says sources familiar with the negotiations have leaked details to her. The current framework of the deal reportedly involves expanding legal immigration and providing greater incentives to illegal immigrants in exchange for slight changes to border policy.

White House officials confirmed Tuesday that defense secretary Lloyd Austin kept his prostate cancer diagnosis to himself for a month before informing the White House, adding further scrutiny to Austin’s recent failure to inform Biden or the National Security Council that he was in the ICU for several days. Austin, who oversees a department tasked with deterring conflict, received his diagnosis in December, according to a statement from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a Republican speaker of the House is facing ire from the Freedom Caucus that is mad about a deal he’s cutting with Democrats, who run almost the entire government.2024 picked up right where 2023 left off, with the narrow GOP House majority stuck between a Freedom Caucus-shaped rock and a hard place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With at least a partial government shutdown looming, Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed budget deal strikes many as almost exactly what former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party foes used as their alleged final straw against him. The Freedom Caucus, which went from loving Johnson to comparing him to John Boehner in slightly over a month, called Johnson’s $1.

Former president Donald Trump’s support among voters in Iowa now tops 50 percent, according to a new poll from the Des Moines Register and NBC News. It’s the widest lead Trump has enjoyed in the first state to vote as part of the Republican primary process. Fifty-one percent of likely Republican caucus goers said Trump is their first choice, a gain of eight points since the last poll published in October. That puts him up more than thirty points over his nearest challenger.Aside from this being an obvious victory for Trump, who enjoys a likely insurmountable lead, the poll is also very bad news for former UN ambassador Nikki Haley.

The Florida Man had a plan. It was obvious from the beginning, but this being Washington, despite all the bizarre outcomes of the post-Cold War political scene — interns, scandals, impeachments, Donald Trump in the White House and out of it, the Cheneys surrounded by cheering Democrats — normalcy remains the assumed status quo. Normalcy does not encompass a plan to vacate the speaker’s chair with the unanimous help of the other party. In fact, prior to 2019, anyone could have used the same tool the Florida Man would deploy to unseat a speaker. They just never tried it officially, because to do so would be crazy, risking handing control of the House to the minority. And it was that audacity which kept the Florida Man’s plan alive.