Matt Gaetz Is More Outraged Over McCarthy in the Speaker’s Office Than He Was Over Rioters in the Capitol

Representative Matt Gaetz is livid that Kevin McCarthy has “occupied” the speaker of the House office—and he’s making a bigger deal about it than he did when rioters actually occupied the Capitol.

McCarthy has made no secret of his desire to be speaker, and he clearly thought he had the role on lock, going so far as to move his things into the speaker’s office Tuesday morning. But after three consecutive votes, not only did he lose every time, but he also lost votes as the session dragged on.

Gaetz, who has been staunchly opposed to a McCarthy speakership, demanded to know Tuesday night why McCarthy was still in the speaker’s office considering he had not yet won the gavel.

He was joined by Andy Biggs, who not only voted against McCarthy every time but also ran as a long-shot challenger in the first round.

Gaetz’s outrage seems particularly ironic when compared to his reaction the last time the Capitol was occupied: on January 6, 2021, when it was overrun by supporters of former President Donald Trump trying to stop Joe Biden’s election win from being certified.

Gaetz had already been involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. A loyal Trump toady, he has repeatedly downplayed the January 6 riot, including insisting that the FBI was involved in the attack.

On the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, Gaetz referred to the rioters as “patriotic Americans … who had no intent of breaking the law and doing violence.”

“We’re ashamed of nothing,” he said on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser and extremist Steve Bannon.

Gaetz’s animosity toward McCarthy actually stems in part from the latter’s response to January 6. McCarthy considered Gaetz to be one of the chief offenders during the riot, The New York Times reported.

McCarthy said Gaetz was acting recklessly, such as by attacking Republican leaders who opposed Trump on television. McCarthy’s number two, Republican Whip Steve Scalise, accused Gaetz of “potentially illegal” behavior.

At the time, Gaetz slammed both McCarthy and Scalise as “weak men.” And now he’s one of the main obstacles to McCarthy becoming speaker.

The House will reconvene at noon Tuesday to try again to elect a speaker for the new Congress, and here’s what could happen:

1. Somehow, Kevin McCarthy will prevail. This seems unlikely. Consider: During Monday’s three votes, his people were surely begging, pleading with at least some of the 19, then 20 Republicans voting against McCarthy  to switch back to supporting him or at least to vote “present.” They would have wanted to see that 19 go down to 17 on round two and 15 on round three. Instead, it went slightly up, to 20.

One never knows what goes on behind closed doors, and maybe there are some setup carrots McCarthy can offer the hard-liners to win enough of them over. But look at the math. At a minimum, he needs to flip 10 deniers to vote for him and nine to vote “present.” The nine voting “present” would reduce the overall number of votes to 425 from 434 (there is one vacant district, Virginia’s 4th, where Democratic incumbent Donald McEachin died and which, by the way, is a D+10 seat). Half plus one of 425 is 213, 10 more than McCarthy won yesterday. 

Looking down the list, it’s awfully hard to see 10 who’ll flip to McCarthy. Nothing’s impossible. But the reward-and-punishment system that exists on today’s radical right will reward continued resistance and punish capitulation. They bring McCarthy down, they’re heroes to Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon and the rest; they cave, they’re ninnies. Anger and dissension on the far right just deepen.

2. Steve Scalise or someone else emerges. Jim Jordan? Maybe, but he’s just not a good fit for the job. Well, none of them is a good fit for the job, but Jordan especially—he’s a pit bull, period. Can you picture him corralling votes, doing all that hard work that Nancy Pelosi has done so well over the years? Impossible.

Scalise raises an interesting set of mostly unexplored questions. He once told a Louisiana reporter, explaining his broad philosophy, that he was “David Duke without the baggage.” That quote is making the rounds in the liberal media right now. It’s time for the Democrats to pick it up. How will that sit with the moderate Republicans—and there are a few now, the several new members who helped the GOP get this majority? Will they want to go back to their voters in two years and explain their vote for that man? It’s possible that Scalise loses some support from the middle, if Democrats raise the issue properly.

The third idea floating around, that some consensus candidate will emerge, is the fantasy of people who think Aaron Sorkin is writing this. There are only two outcomes: McCarthy, or a non-McCarthy acceptable to the hard right that is running this show. However it ends, it’s a GOP disaster 30 years in the making and will hang over the entire two-year session.

It was George Santos’s first day in Washington Tuesday, and it seems like his reliable political chops and gravitational charm are not working quite yet. While the serial liar, and now representative, has apparently enjoyed some allyship from Marjorie Taylor Greene, he wasn’t otherwise seen doing much socializing.

As members of Congress steered clear of fraternizing with the guy whose identity we just can’t be sure of, he didn’t seem keen to talk to the people giving him the most attention: members of the press.

Appearing less like a man trying to make a splash on his first day on the hill, and more like a man advised by his lawyer to remain silent, Santos certainly isn’t projecting confidence to voters, or even to people wondering if he deserves to be in Congress at all.

After being royally exposed for lie after lie during the past few weeks, Santos has shown no intention of resigning, and the Republican caucus overall hasn’t made any substantial indication of what they will do. It’s a bit concerning for such an unflappable liar to just be sitting in Congress like a bored middle schooler.

Meanwhile, Santos is facing reopened criminal charges in Brazil for allegedly stealing the checkbook of an elderly man his mother was taking care of as a nurse, and using it to buy some $1,300 worth of clothes and shoes.

Santos also faces legal scrutiny stateside. The congressman-elect recently came into an irregularly quick and massive fortune, and loaned more than $700,000 to his campaign. As a result, both federal and local authorities are probing into Santos’s campaign and financial dealings. So while we can’t seem to address Santos’s almost-criminal level of lying, he may be charged with actual gross criminality.

Not only did Kevin McCarthy lose three rounds of votes Tuesday to become speaker of the House, but he also lost votes in the process.

In the first two ballots, McCarthy received only 203 votes out of the 222 seats his Republican Party holds in the House of Representatives. In the third round, he got 202 votes after Representative Byron Donalds switched his ballot.

McCarthy and his allies have been scrambling in the past couple months to amass the 218 votes necessary to secure the gavel. But he clearly thought he had the speakership on lock, telling Punchbowl News he was confident he would win by the second round of voting.

The California representative also refused to recess between votes on Tuesday to try to whip up the support he needs. Rather than try and make deals with his 19 staunch opponents, McCarthy seemed to believe that continuing to sit and mingle in the chamber as the session dragged on would do the trick.

The House adjourned after the third round of voting, leaving McCarthy to strategize (and stew) until the session resumes the following day.

Here are the 19 Republicans who have consistently voted against McCarthy’s bid for speakership.

• Andy Biggs
• Dan Bishop
• Lauren Boebert
• Josh Brecheen
• Michael Cloud
• Andrew Clyde
• Eli Craine
• Matt Gaetz
• Bob Good
• Paul Gosar
• Andy Harris
• Anna Paulina Luna
• Mary Miller
• Ralph Norman
• Andy Ogles
• Scott Perry
• Matt Rosendale
• Chip Roy
• Keith Self

Republicans opened their new House majority by removing metal detectors installed after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

While much of the spotlight on Tuesday is on the House speaker’s gavel, the first convening of the 118th Congress also marks the persistence of an extremist politics that existentially threatened members of Congress just two years ago.

The metal detectors’ removal is just an emblem of this Republican-led Congress’s ambitions, which include things like seeking more information about perennial boogeyman Hunter Biden’s laptop. House Republicans have focused much of their January 6-related attention not on the attacks themselves but instead on how attackers were treated after being arrested.

More broadly, scores of Republicans either dismiss or even promote the extremism that led to January 6. Some have called investigations into the attacks “witch hunts.” One of the newly elected members, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden, even used campaign money to fund his own trip to the January 6 riots, where he proudly joined the attackers.

And yet Van Orden joins other far-right Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene in supporting Kevin McCarthy for House speaker; while Greene has spent substantial airtime defending the Republican leader, Van Orden joined 53 other “Only Kevin” Republicans expressing sole support for McCarthy as speaker.

In his attempts to curry favor with detractors, McCarthy has proposed numerous rule changes, including one that would gut the Office of Congressional Ethics. While his efforts haven’t yet convinced his opposition, it just goes to show that the folly of conservative governance will plague this Congress no matter who gets the gavel.

Agenda items already parroted most by Republican members are mostly steeped in conspiracy and cynicism. And their first major action, even without a House speaker, was to make it easier to bring weapons into the Capitol. So while there may be an entertaining element to the “Republicans in Disarray” narrative, one thing is unfortunately certain: The corrupt, dangerous far right will maintain stride in this Congress.

It’s been a bad day for Kevin McCarthy, who lost two rounds of votes Tuesday to be speaker of the House, an outcome unseen in a century that threatens to unleash chaos as representatives rush to make deals.

The California Republican has made no secret of his desire to be speaker of the House, but he and his allies have been scrambling in the past few months to amass the votes necessary to win the gavel. Alabama Representative Mike Rogers went so far as to threaten to ban anyone who votes against McCarthy from sitting on a committee.

But McCarthy won a mere 203 votes out of the 222 his party holds in both rounds of ballots. His Democratic challenger Hakeem Jeffries won 211 and then 212 votes, consistent with party lines.

The two are now in a floor fight, or an instance when it takes multiple rounds of voting to pick a speaker. It will continue for as many rounds as are necessary to fill the position.

In Congress’s 200-year history, there have only been 14 instances in which it took more than two ballots to confirm the House speaker. The last one was exactly 100 years ago. It took nine rounds of votes to resolve that battle.

Lawmakers can adjourn between rounds of votes to try to compromise. But it’s still not clear if McCarthy can make enough deals to finally get what he wants.

Five lawmakers, who have dubbed themselves the “Never Kevin Five,” have sworn not to vote for him no matter what. Another seven also seem unlikely to come around, according to Time. The holdouts don’t trust McCarthy and consider him too wishy-washy on issues that are important to them, such as impeaching President Joe Biden, and too likely to bend in order to stay in power.

Congress cannot move forward until the speakership is filled, so the voting will continue until someone wins. McCarthy can still pull it off, but it will be a vicious slog.

This piece has been updated.

On Monday evening, 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during a late-season matchup between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals. As the athlete lay motionless on the turf receiving CPR, tens of thousands of fans went silent, players buried their heads in their hands in despair, and the Bills team knelt in prayer for their fallen comrade.

Hamlin collapsed right before 9 p.m.; an ambulance arrived to administer CPR around 9:03. At 9:17, officials announced the game would be temporarily suspended. The game was not announced to be fully suspended until 10 p.m., an hour after Hamlin first collapsed on the field. Hamlin remains in critical condition after what was deemed cardiac arrest.

After the collapse, and before the game was suspended, ESPN’s Joe Buck repeatedly stated that players would have five minutes to warm up in order to resume play. There even is a shot of the Cincinnati Bengals quarterback tossing a football, keeping his arm loose. “They’ve been given five minutes to quote unquote get ready to go back to playing,” Buck said. “That’s the word we get from the league and the word we get from down on the field.”

The report of a five-minute warm-up was also repeated elsewhere, including on ESPN Deportes and Westwood Radio, noted journalist Timothy Burke.

NFL Executive Vice President Troy Vincent claimed ignorance in a conference call hours later. “Five-minute warm-up never crossed my mind, personally. And I was the one … communicating with the commissioner,” Vincent said. “We never, frankly, it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play. That’s ridiculous. That’s insensitive. And that’s not a place that we should ever be in.”

It is certainly possible that there may have been miscommunication. But the ambiguity of what exactly happened offers another illustration of the struggle between the players and a league hungry to leach out as much as they can from them, even as the world watches one of them fall. After all, it seems the NFL was not eager to suspend the game in the first place:

This, while the NFL claimed the NFL Players Association was “in agreement with postponing the game,” feigning the idea that the league was leading the charge to stop play. We can be generous while we seek clarity about what exactly happened. But we ought not take statements from the NFL—which has allowed an alarming number of its players to develop brain degeneration and is famous for suppressing sexual assault claims against both players and executives—at face value. So the question stands: Is the NFL lying about how much it tried to stop the game after a player collapsed?

The House of Representatives will choose its new speaker Tuesday, and it currently seems that Kevin McCarthy does not have enough votes to win the gavel.

The California Republican has made no secret of his desire to be speaker of the House. But even though he is backed by former President Donald Trump and far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, things don’t look good for him.

McCarthy appeared confident he would win, laughing off the idea that his number two, Majority Whip Steve Scalise, would be selected speaker instead.

But McCarthy and his allies are scrambling to amass all the votes necessary. In a meeting Tuesday morning, Alabama Representative Mike Rogers reportedly threatened to ban anyone who votes against McCarthy from sitting on a committee.

Republicans hold only nine more seats in the House, and McCarthy needs a majority—218 votes—in order to be elected speaker. Five Republicans, the self-dubbed “Never Kevin Five,” have already vowed not to support him. One of the five, Representative Andy Biggs, is challenging McCarthy for speakership. It’s highly unlikely he will win, but he could draw more votes away from McCarthy.

Democrats, who will put forward Hakeem Jeffries, will definitely vote against McCarthy. If neither McCarthy nor Jeffries wins an outright majority, it will trigger a so-called “floor fight”: repeated rounds of votes until someone wins. It would be the first floor fight in 100 years. It’s unclear if the chamber will recess between votes so representatives can attempt to make deals.

Congress cannot move forward until a speaker is elected. The House cannot approve a rules package for the new session or committee leadership. Politico also reported that if the speakership isn’t filled by January 13, committee staffers would have to go without pay.

McCarthy could still pull it off: Only named votes, meaning only ballots that have a name written on them, are counted. If any representatives choose to abstain or only vote “present,” then their votes are no longer included in the overall total, which lowers the final amount needed to win. However, any ballots that choose a write-in candidate—such as Biggs—would count toward the total.

Nancy Pelosi won with only 216 votes in 2021, and her predecessor, John Boehner, also won with 216 in 2015.

If he does win, McCarthy has already promised to unleash a raft of unproductive and even harmful measures, such as an investigation into Hunter Biden, anti-LGBTQ policy, and a cut to aid for Ukraine.

Jason T. Schofield, the elections commissioner for Rensselaer County in upstate New York, is set to plead guilty to federal criminal charges in the New Year after being accused of leading a plot to cast votes in at least eight other people’s names without their permission.

According to the Times Union, the notice of Schofield’s change-of-plea hearing was filed on December 13—just hours before the Republican-led Rensselaer County Legislature voted 16–2 to reappoint Schofield to a second term as election commissioner. This, after Schofield had already been facing federal criminal charges since September.

In September, the FBI arrested Schofield on accusations that the county elections commissioner was fraudulently applying for absentee ballots in the names of people who didn’t request ballots or Schofield’s assistance, or didn’t know that Schofield was using their personal information. The indictment alleged that Schofield brought ballots to voters, took possession of some ballots himself, and had voters sign ballot envelopes but not actually vote—enabling him to cast votes in the voters’ names.

Schofield’s plea agreement includes his pledge to cooperate in the federal investigation that is examining the use of county resources and employees to gather absentee ballots.

The election fraudster was appointed to the county elections commission back in April 2018, after resigning from the Troy City School District Board of Education, where the Times Union reports he spent 15 years as a board member and seven years as president.

Other officials are also being targeted by the investigation, including two Rensselaer County employees—one described by insiders as a GOP operative, another an assistant for county Executive Steve McLaughlin, who was indicted last year on campaign finance felony charges. The investigation has also led to the guilty plea of former Republican Troy City Councilwoman Kimberly Ashe-McPheron, for fraudulently submitting absentee ballots in last year’s primary and general elections.

The remarkably ever-widening scale of the upstate investigation follows a wider trend of Republican officials and voters being guilty of the phantasmal voter fraud they so often fearmonger about.

Read more at Times Union.

Donald Trump’s newly released tax returns confirm that the IRS failed to start auditing him until two years into his presidency. One of the larger questions that arises from this disclosure is whether there was a reasonable explanation for why an audit wasn’t carried out in a timely fashion, or whether the former president perverted the functions of government to suit his own needs.

Trump repeatedly (convolutedly, and ridiculously) insisted that he couldn’t release his tax returns because they were under audit. But as it turns out, that wasn’t really the case. The House Ways and Means Committee revealed last week that the IRS actually failed to audit Trump until 2019, despite a program that makes auditing sitting presidents mandatory. Those audits are still not completed.

What’s more, the IRS did not even begin auditing Trump’s tax returns until April 3, coincidentally the same day the committee Chair Richard Neal sent the agency a written request for the records.

In the IRS’s defense, the agency is chronically understaffed. But it might have been trying to stay out of the maelstrom of controversy surrounding Trump’s taxes, noted Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

As Bookbinder explained in The Atlantic, though, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that “Trump used the levers of government to shield himself from scrutiny.”

Trump appointed several allies at the IRS over his term. He’s certainly no stranger to using his political powers to protect himself and his cronies. An analysis of his tax returns by the Joint Committee on Taxation appears to indicate Trump used his office to steer federal business to his own companies. He and other government officials would also stay at his hotels while traveling abroad.

The IRS seems to have selectively struggled to carry out its audits of recent presidents; the agency demonstrated itself to be fully capable of conducting thorough annual audits on Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But when it finally got around to Trump, the audit was initially assigned to just one employee—a doubly puzzling choice given the nature of the real estate mogul’s complicated business holdings.

So what really happened? It’s possible that the Senate, which will remain under control of the Democrats, might pursue an investigation. If this inquiry takes as long as the one that only finally got Trump’s tax returns released this week, we could be waiting quite a while for answers. Either way, this is not a good look for Trump—or the IRS.