House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claimed to be a constitutional law attorney in 2016, says the president has tariff authority under Article Two of the Constitution when Article One gives it to the Congress

 

The GOP grip on the U.S. House remains tenuous with the sudden death of Doug LaMalfa, CA-1, at 65

 

The Erinyes keep pursuing the Republicans for their crimes.

 

 Sudden death of Republican lawmaker shaves GOP House margin to three votes

... [Doug] LaMalfa's death imperils the Republican House majority, leaving Speaker Mike Johnson with just a three-vote margin after the formal resignation of Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene on Monday. 

House makeup is presently 218 Republicans to 213 Democrats, leaving Republicans able to lose no more than two votes on any party-line measure, assuming full attendance and participation.

It was also revealed Tuesday that Indiana Republican Congressman Jim Baird, aged 80, has been hospitalized after a car accident.

Democrats are set to gain one additional vote in their caucus after a runoff election in Texas later this month to replace Congressman Sylvester Turner, who passed away last March, taking the Republican margin down to two votes.

Another special election will take place to replace former New Jersey Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherill in April after she was elected the state's governor in November. ...

 

Texas' Tyrant Governor, Republican Greg Abbott, has deliberately denied representation in the US House to the residents of TX-18 since March 2025. 

 

Victor Davis Hanson is as blind to reality as Trump

 

Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Is Stronger Than He Ever Was, The Left Is Desperate

 

 

Trump II started his term with a 5-seat advantage in the U.S. House. 

 

Trump I started his term with a 47-seat advantage.

 

Nothing lasting was achieved the first time with a huge majority, and sure as hell won't be this time because he's incompetent and the Congress hates his guts.

 

The resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene may be just the tip of the iceberg about to sink Trump II forever. But even if it's not, a 5-seat advantage screams gridlock if Republicans will not compromise on anything.

 

Trump can issue all the Executive Orders he wants. They will be undone. He can declare all the emergencies he wants. They will be ended. 

 

There is no substitute for legislation, and he's not going to get any.

 

Meanwhile the Department of Defense is still the Department of Defense, my shrimp still come from the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great White North is still Canada, eh?

 

 

 

 

 

  

The fix is in on the Epstein files vote: MoveOn in action

 Trump last night reversed himself and said the House should vote to release the Epstein files.

Vote they will, except Speaker Johnson has rigged it so that the vote will be under suspension of the rules.

Which means they don't need a mere majority to pass it. They'll need 2/3 . . . of those present.

It's a 219 GOP to 214 Dem U. S. House. 

If they all show up the bill needs 286 Yeas to pass.

Good luck with that. 

"See, we voted. But aw shucks, it didn't get enough votes to pass. Oh well, time to move on as Trump said."

 

 

Hypocritical, disgraceful Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson thwarts democracy, slow-walks swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva (AZ-7), newly-elected on September 23rd

 Republicans refuse to swear in newly elected Democrat, delaying success of Epstein petition

 Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Republican leaders refused requests from Democrats to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) on Tuesday, saying she will be sworn in when the House returns to regular session.

Grijalva, who was elected last week in a special contest [September 23rd] to replace her father, the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), has already vowed to sign the discharge petition as soon as she’s sworn in, and the bipartisan lawmakers pushing to release the Epstein files had hoped to launch the process as quickly as possible. ...

Although there are no votes scheduled, the House floor opened up briefly at noon on Tuesday for a pro forma session, a routine procedure allowing one chamber to pause floor activities for long stretches without the consent of the other.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) presided over Tuesday’s pro forma session, gaveling out and refusing to recognize Democrats shouting on the floor as they attempted to force a vote on a Democratic proposal to keep the government open. He did not swear in Grijalva. 

“Historically, you do it when the House is in session other than pro forma,” Griffith said after the session when asked about not swearing in Grijalva.

Grijalva noted that Florida Republicans were sworn in during a pro forma session earlier this year, on April 2, the day after their special elections. The House had been in session the day before. ...

A shutdown would not prevent Grijalva from being sworn in. The full House was sworn in during a government shutdown when a new Congress started in January 2019. ...

“It is common practice in the House of Representatives that Representatives-elect are sworn in immediately following their decisive election, with some being sworn in as little as 24 hours after they have won,” wrote Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) . . ..

Imagine Democrats doing this to Republicans. The latter would be howling in front of the cameras about Democrats killing democracy.

These ghouls are all smiles on their way to the Charlie Kirk funeral

 

Look who's blaming the victims again!

 These guys slapped ginormous tariffs on China and now complain China is straining relations.

They also blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia.

The chutzpah.

Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban

 

Third time's a charm

 

SPEAKER: THERE WILL BE 3RD IMPEACHMENT IF DEMS TAKE HOUSE...

 

 

Harvey Weinstein to be tried for third time in New York...

 

GOP U. S. House of Representatives decides to . . .

Not sure what they're smokin' over there at CNBC this afternoon: 

House speaker starts August recess early to avoid Jeffrey Epstein votes

 

... On Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he was speaking with Maxwell’s defense lawyer to see if Maxwell “would be willing to speak with prosecutors” to see if she “has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.” ...

... Blanche previously served as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump when the president was indicted in four separate cases after ending his first White House term in January 2017. ...

$30 billion is not jet fuel for the economy

 

‘Big beautiful bill’ may help some seniors on Social Security. But it doesn’t eliminate taxes on benefits 

... The new additional senior deduction and other changes in Trump’s “big beautiful bill” may reduce taxation of Social Security benefits by approximately $30 billion per year, estimates the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ...               

$30 billion is 0.10 percent of current GDP of $29,962.00 billion.

House Speaker Mike Johnson wants you to know this is jet fuel for the economy. 

 

 

If it hasn't been jet fuel since 2017, it won't be now

Real GDP has been 2.43% compound annual 1Q2017 through 1Q2025. And that includes all the obscene pandemic spending.

This isn't even close to the 2.8% Trump cheerleaders are promising, let alone the 3% The Speaker touts.

 

Speaker Johnson: We've Given Everybody A Tax Cut, That Will Be Jet Fuel For The Economy

 

There's no new tax cut. The Trump tax reform from his first term simply continues. There's no injection of new money on a permanent basis involving tax bracket changes, nothing substantively different for the average taxpayer.

 

There are short-term gimmicks for seniors, earners of tip income, earners of overtime pay, car-buyers, etc., but most of these are scattershot and most importantly, most of them expire in 2028.

 

The incremental adjustments which occur naturally to standard deduction amounts would occur anyway. 

More above average income filers will be able to itemize than previously, but only until 2030.

 

 

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson's spending bill is in big trouble with the US Senate's Ron Johnson

 

Sen. Ron Johnson: Spending Cuts In House GOP's Budget "Basically A Rounding Error," Adds $22 Trillion In Debt

... You have heard people talk about zero-based budgeting. I'm talking about a budget of $5.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion. Those are options from Clinton, Obama, and Trump (first term), where you just take their actual outlays, plus them up by population growth and inflation, leaving Social Security, Medicare, and interest untouched. That would leave you somewhere between $5.5 trillion and $6.5 trillion. So you start there, but you have to do the work, and you need the time to do the work. ... I think we have enough [senators] to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.

Andrew Sullivan today: The GOP Congress has long since become the equivalent of Putin’s Duma — a rubber-stamp body designed solely to support the executive branch

 Here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(shadow banned by Elon Musk)

Democrats united under Hakeem Jeffries in the US House are the only ones in American politics above water right now

 US House Democrats voted unanimously against the Republicans' continuing spending resolution under -4.2 underwater Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (except for Democrat Jared Golden [ME-2], a Blue Dog Democrat who under ranked choice voting in Maine wins by being the second choice of people who voted for someone else).

Senate Minority Leader Democrat Chucky Schumer (-19.6) led eight other Democrats in the US Senate to pass the continuing spending resolution. 

Republicans are jumping the shark. Opposing that is popular. 

Democrats, are you listening?

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson wants to straight up demolish an entire US federal district court in retaliation against judges who issue rulings he doesn't like, just because he can

 

... "We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things." ...

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said eliminating a district court would create "massive, massive backlogs". ... 

Reported here.

Impeaching judges turns into big headache for Speaker Mike Johnson lol

 Hill Republicans already hated the ‘idiotic’ call to impeach judges. Then Trump jumped in. 

... Impeachment proceedings, even when they don’t involve presidents, can be time- and resource-intensive affairs. ... privately there is dread inside Johnson’s leadership circle about the prospect of having to pursue messy, certain-to-fail impeachments that could ultimately backfire on the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

“It’s never going to happen,” said a senior House Republican aide. “There aren’t the votes.”

“It would be such a heavy lift and we’ve got too many heavy lifts coming up,” said another top GOP aide. “What is the endgame here?”

A third said GOP leaders and even some conservative House members are “rolling their eyes” at the impeachment filings that “aren’t going to go anywhere.” ...

The do-nothing US Senate under John Thune has passed 0 of 5 appropriation bills passed by the US House under Mike Johnson who still hasn't passed the other 7 and now they all want to pass Biden's spending instead through FY2025 to please phony Republican Donald Trump

 

Kinda like a libertarian convention

 

Trump’s tax cuts are ‘stuck in the mud’ as Republicans split over spending 

 

. . . fiscal hawks said they could not support the massive package without more spending cuts. ...

This is just BS from Speaker Mike Johnson about LNG exports and Joe Biden's memory

 Whatever may be said about Joe Biden's memory, he didn't have a memory lapse in this instance as alleged by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. It's troubling that Mike Johnson would misrepresent this in this way. 

Joe Biden doesn't have a monopoly on "fake shit".

Sir, why did you [President Biden] pause LNG exports to Europe? Like, I don't understand. Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? You understand -- we just talked about Ukraine -- you’re fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine because they’ve got to get their gas from him."

He looks at me, stunned, and says, "I didn’t, I didn’t do that."

I said, "Mr. President, yes, you did. It was an executive order, like, three weeks ago."

He says, "No, I didn’t do that." He’s arguing with me.

-- The Moment Speaker Mike Johnson Knew Biden Wasn't "In Charge" Anymore 

LNG exports to Europe were not paused. And demand in Europe dropped in 2024. Biden signed a temporary pause for pending approvals of LNG exports, not for existing approvals of LNG exports. This and Mike's other comments in the story indicate that he is not exactly reliable on the subject. But he could have easily just looked it up.

Jan 26, 2024:

FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces Temporary Pause on Pending Approvals of Liquefied Natural Gas Exports

Sep 4, 2024:

US LNG export dominance tested as Europe's demand wilts

Meanwhile, Mike Johnson didn't tell anybody about this until now? Seems like a dereliction of duty for the man in line right behind the VP to become president in the event of incapacity or death.

And, oh yeah, US LNG export tanker loads hit a seven-month high in January 2025 at 71, through yesterday:

 

 

 

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts say Chicom's TikTok is toast

 

“The law is very precise, and the only way to extend that is if there is an actual deal in the works,” Johnson added. “I think President Trump is probably intrigued by all this and he likes to make deals, as you know. So we’re very hopeful that that can happen, and that 270 million American people who enjoy the platform can enjoy it, but enjoy it safely and not have their data being mined by our nation’s enemy.”

More.