Matthew Foldi

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.

As Joe Biden met with Xi Jinping on the West Coast, one of China’s favorite scientists had a rough day on the East Coast — where he revealed to Congress that his ties to controversial coronavirus research were deeper than suspected.  Peter Daszak, head of the controversial EcoHealth Alliance, was summoned to a closed-door, transcribed interview by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee of the Coronavirus Pandemic, where he was pressed solely by Republican lawmakers and the committee’s bipartisan staff on everything from gain-of-function research to his 2021 trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Will today be the day we get a permanent speaker of the House? It’s tough to say. House Republicans huddled this morning to figure out who they will put forward as their speaker-designee in the hopes that someone — perhaps, anyone! — can steer the rowdy House at a time of growing international strife. They eventually settled on Minnesota representative Tom Emmer. There’s no guarantee that Emmer will even get the required votes from the full House, however. To minimize that possibility, Representative Mike Flood circulated a “loyalty pledge” of sorts that all current speaker candidates signed, which requires them to support whoever the conference selects. Flood noted to me, though, that even Jesus Christ would struggle to get to 217 votes in this House GOP conference.

Forget boy math, forget girl math: focus on Speaker Math: getting anywhere near the magic threshold of 217 votes is proving almost impossible for any Republican. Back in January, even former speaker Kevin McCarthy couldn’t get to 217, clinching the gavel with 216 votes after some of his then-foes threw him a bone by simply voting present and therefore lowering the threshold. At that point though, he never dipped below 200 votes in his marathon bid to secure the speakership. Now, it’s former McCarthy foe turned McCarthy ally Jim Jordan who’s finding that getting to 217 is somehow almost harder than getting over 200. Following a second public ballot, Jordan is losing votes at a time when he needs momentum.

There’s an easy way out of the chaos in the House, led by a Florida man who’s leaning on lessons learned in his decades as a firefighter and basketball player: Representative Carlos Giménez, the general leading the Only Kevin charge. For some in Congress, the literal Only Kevin pins they wore back in January were as ephemeral as a Nancy Mace promise. But for Giménez, it’s about refusing to reward bad behavior and about loyalty to the man who recruited him to run for his current job. “There was an injustice done” in Giménez’s eyes, he tells me in his Capitol Hill office. “I think that the 96 percent [of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy last week] bent to rule of the 4 [percent]. Everybody talks about the majority here.

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.

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.

As the government barrels towards a shutdown, bipartisan flurries of lawmakers are rolling out legislation. They are taking aim at lawmaker pay, even their ability to raise money while American troops, border patrol and millions of others in the federal workforce go without remuneration. One man has found himself at the center of it all: a military veteran and freshman member of Congress who wants to make the nation’s capital in Washington, DC look a lot more like Iowa’s capital, Des Moines. As a state senator, Zach Nunn passed legislation that banned his colleagues, and himself, from trading individual stocks. He wasn’t necessarily ready to find senators in DC shoveling wads of cash and bricks of gold into their closets.

Rob Gronkowski may be retired from the NFL, but he and his Frenchie pup Ralphie were the MVPs of Congress as it returned from summer recess this week. The former Patriots and Buccaneers tight end even fueled some speculation that he’d seek to join the esteemed body down the road. Gronkowski took the Hill with bipartisan acclaim, bringing his talents to the nation’s capital to push Congress to #squashsuperbugs, like Valley fever. Gronk took up this new cause shortly after adopting Ralphie (and also shortly after he won his fourth Super Bowl).

Late last month, former president Donald Trump hosted the Gold Star families of the thirteen US military members who were slain in the 2021 Kabul Airport suicide bombing. “Trump was way more than I expected,” Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Sergeant Nicole Gee, told me. “The contrast is stark with the president we met at Dover.”  Trump “knew so much about the event, the kids, Bagram and who made decisions… He was a normal human and made eye contact, answered every question, even the uncomfortable ones.” Following their meeting with Trump, the former president surprised them all by spending several more hours with them, as he signed pictures of their children — and even a pair of bedazzled high heels.

Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission was supposed to be the next great trustbuster. But on the course of her rise to the nation's top antitrust law office, Khan allegedly misrepresented her credentials throughout her career and stands accused of lying to Congress. Representative Harriet Hageman, a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, levied a series of accusations to Khan in a barrage of Questions for the Record obtained by The Spectator. Hageman’s most sensational claims are that Khan lied to Congress, lied by omission to Congress and misrepresented herself as a lawyer while lacking the appropriate law license.