Nancy Mace

After a long wait, the text of the bipartisan Senate bill for Ukraine and border funding was finally released on Sunday night. The massive piece of legislation clocks in at 370 pages and, in addition to the border policy changes previously reported on here, sends an additional $60 billion to Ukraine, tightens asylum standards, prohibits removal of unaccompanied minors, authorizes $1.4 billion in FEMA funding for resources for migrants settling in the US and gives President Biden the authority to overturn any emergency authorization at the border. The House GOP’s verdict is in: Speaker Johnson asserted that the legislation is “dead on arrival” in his chamber.  “I’ve seen enough.

The US is currently launching retaliatory air strikes in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon confirmed this afternoon.  The strikes come after three American servicemembers were killed in a drone strike by an Iranian-backed militia on Sunday, with dozens more wounded. Top Biden administration officials had said “it will pretty be clear” when the American response begins. “The first thing you see won’t be the last,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told the media Wednesday. -Matt McDonald Soros staffers unionize — and immediately get laid off This month’s better-than-expected jobs numbers are cold comfort to employees of a George Soros-funded group that recruits young Democrats to run for office.

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.

The political left isn’t content to secretly smelt statues of Robert E. Lee or remove a plaque honoring the Confederate general’s horse, Traveller. Apparently, the Democratic Party’s own history is too problematic to bear.  Over the years, the Democratic Party’s official website has undergone some curious changes. The Spectator previously reported on the Democrat logo changing from sky blue to royal blue after President Joe Biden took office. It seems the “Our History” page is also getting whitewashed.  Since 2019, the history page has neglected to mention anything about the Democratic Party prior to the 1920s.

This Friday October 13, governments around the world received a warning from Israel: look out for yourselves, look out for your Jewish citizens, as terrorism may reach your soil.The Israel National Security Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that all Israelis abroad remain cautious, “keep away from the demonstrations and protests and — if necessary — check with local security forces regarding possible protests and disturbances in the area.”“Against the background of Operation Swords of Iron,” the agencies said in a joint statement, “Hamas leadership has called on all of its supporters around the world to hold a ‘Day or Rage’” against Jews around the globe.

The likelihood of Steve Scalise's ascent to the speakership is high at this hour, with his 113-99 victory over Jim Jordan in the House Republican Conference meeting. But there are a few challenges ahead that could prove difficult in an upcoming afternoon of voting on the floor. Jordan's total was disappointing for his supporters, who had hoped the vote would effectively be flipped, leading Scalise to bow out and wait for another day, content with his continued role as majority leader. But Jordan's team is not exactly expert at whipping votes, and the abstention of eight members didn't help him any.  What Scalise brings, effectively, is a normal continuity of leadership.

Representative Nancy Mace, newfound foe of ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy, has been using a software for official work that is expressly not permitted by House rules. The South Carolinian chairs a subcommittee on CyberSecurity on the Oversight Committee, and recently passed the MACE Act, which unusually she named after herself — yet uses the work management site Monday.com to handle a number of tasks in her office. “We used it for everything and Nancy ran it,” a former Mace staffer tells The Spectator. All legislative and media planning work went through this platform, sources say; we’re also told by former Mace staff that her office has used it to conduct constituent services that could leave personal information of her constituents potentially vulnerable.

My Tuesday evening unexpectedly freed up when a much anticipated (just kidding!) joint Fox News interview with GOP presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie was scrapped. Why? The Republican National Committee threatened to exclude the pair from future RNC debates for violating an agreement they made not to appear in any unsanctioned debates. Although Fox News avoided the term “debate” when advertising the planned special segment, the RNC was not convinced. Christie and Ramaswamy both lashed out at the RNC in response, claiming it was proof of a “broken” primary process and harmful to the party's ability to have substantive “dialogue” about issues.

Et tu, Nancy Mace? The iconoclastic congresswoman from South Carolina put one of eight nails in Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — prompting a series of cascading events beyond any one person’s control and total uncertainty in the continuity of America’s government. Mace, first elected to Congress with support to the tune of over $4 million from McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund, undertook quite a heel-turn from January, where she labeled her partner-in-chaos Matt Gaetz a “fraud” to today, when she teamed up with Gaetz and every single House Democrat to jettison McCarthy, leaving the country in uncharted waters and the House without a speaker.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair is the quintessential Davos man. In the sixteen years since he left office, he has criss-crossed the globe, giving speeches and advising sometimes unsavory clients. And yet this week he has delivered a dissenting comment on the issue that his fellow conference-hoppers spend a lot of time worrying about. Blair has caused a bit of ruckus in the UK this week thanks to an interview with center-left magazine the New Statesman in which the former Labour Party leader questions the wisdom of unilateral action on climate change.

Welcome to Thunderdome, your weekly update on Hunter Biden’s love life, which won’t require any conjugal visits after all! (A downside perhaps, because some girls find that hot.) Thanks for listening to our weekly podcast, the latest edition of which is available here. I hope you’ve subscribed, and you can stream it here: https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=RPTTP8496072750 The dynamics of parallel stories often create ridiculous scenarios for today’s partisan water-carriers. When a system is inhabited by people who often share aspects of corruption, the number of pot-kettle moments tends to overwhelm. So it is with the current dominant tropes being pushed wholeheartedly by those with no apparent compunctions.

Some weeks it feels like the line between politics and the law has all but vanished. From Hunter Biden’s plea deal and Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal woes to the brouhaha surrounding gifts accepted by Supreme Court justices and John Durham’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to defend his report on the FBI and Russiagate, this is one such week.  For more on the Hunter story, check out my colleague Ben Domenech’s latest. Meanwhile, a fresh row about the Supreme Court bubbled up in an unusual way overnight.

We've come a long way in the two and a half years since the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop were unleashed on the world. In addition to the splashy, X-rated photos and videos of Hunter surrounded by drugs and prostitutes, the New York Post's reporting honed in on a set of emails that suggested Hunter's foreign business dealings involved his father, President Joe Biden. In one email, an official for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanks Hunter for the "opportunity" to meet then-Vice President Biden. In another, Hunter's business partner alludes to setting aside 10 percent of a deal with a Chinese firm for "the Big Guy." These bombshells served as the flashpoint for a series of investigations that are finally nearing their conclusion.

If you want to be a prominent member of Congress in this day and age, the surest path is to become a hype machine for the ideological extremes of your party. Yet Nancy Mace gives no signs of responding to these tabloid incentives in conversation with her constituents. It’s an odd thing to say about a politician in 2023, but you might even find yourself taking her seriously. In a Washington where the House of Representatives is dominated by GOP would-be pundits, including bomb-throwers such as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, the second-term Republican from South Carolina’s 1st district sounds like a politician from a different era.

With the make-up of Congress still taking shape after the midterms, perhaps the last thing anyone expected was any kind of bipartisanship. Yet despite a contentious campaign where rising crime featured prominently in attack ads, the first order of business in both the House and the Senate was a provocative move on marijuana. In the House, Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin and Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace cohosted a hearing on how state cannabis laws have developed and what reforms the federal government might yet undertake. The hearing was surprisingly friendly, save for an outburst from Texas congressman Pete Sessions who in a rambling monologue compared legalizing pot to profiting from slavery.