DON'T ALL THESE PIGS THINK THEY'RE ABOVE THE LAW?
McCarthy Proposes Gutting Office of Congressional Ethics in Bid for Speaker
Bozell: House Conservatives Voting for Speaker Must Choose Between Their Country’s Welfare and Their Personal Ambition
House conservatives voting to elect a speaker must take stock of their priorities, Media Research Center (MRC) Founder and President Brent Bozell said Tuesday prior to the impending vote, in which Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has few votes to spare.
“Every conservative in the House needs to ask what's more important; cause and country or personal ambition,” Bozell tweeted, linking to a story in The Hill reporting that a group of House Republicans, including Rep. Scott Perry, are looking to block the election of McCarthy as speaker:
“Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a critic of House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (Calif.) bid to become Speaker, argued ahead of the House leadership vote that McCarthy has ‘rejected’ his opportunity to win the Speakership.
“Perry said in a statement Tuesday morning that he and a group of other Republicans have ‘worked in good faith for months to change the status quo’ but asserted McCarthy has ‘sidelined or resisted’ them.”
In particular, Rep. McCarthy, who cannot afford to lose more than four votes, has rejected four key policies demanded by the conservatives:
- Creating a balanced budget;
- Replacing national income, payroll and estate taxes with a national sales tax;
- Approving a plan from Texas House Republicans to address the illegal immigration crisis; and
- Passing a bill establishing term limits for members of Congress.
On Sunday, a group of nine House Republicans released a letter expressing opposition to McCarthy’s refusal to yield on the issues, The Hill reports:
“‘The times call for radical departure from the status quo — not a continuation of past and ongoing Republican failures,” they wrote. ‘For someone with a 14-year presence in senior House Republican leadership, Mr. McCarthy bears squarely the burden to correct the dysfunction he now explicitly admits across that long tenure.’
Rep. Gaetz: McCarthy 'Refused' on 'Term Limits,' Balanced Budget, and 'Border Plan'
(CNS News.com) -- Explaining why he and several other House conservatives are not voting for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to be the new Speaker of the House, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said today that McCarthy had refused to accept some of the issues that conservatives wanted to address in the new Congress, such as term limits, a balanced budget, and a real plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
Gaetz also revealed that some incoming committee chairmen threatened to remove him and other conservatives from committees if they did not fall in line and vote for McCarthy.
"Those of us who will not be voting for Kevin McCarthy today take no joy in the discomfort that this moment has brought, but if you want to drain the swamp you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise," said Gaetz. "I am a Florida man and I know of what I speak."
Speaking at the Capitol, Gaetz was flanked by other opponents of McCarthy, including Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
"We offered Kevin McCarthy terms last evening that he rejected," said Gaetz. "We’ve sought a vote in a first quarter of the 118th Congress on term limits. He refused. We wanted a budget from the Republican Study Committee that balances on the floor in the first quarter. He refused. We wanted the border plan that the Texas delegation put together on the floor. He refused."
"And it is true that we struggle with trust with Mr. McCarthy because, time and again, his viewpoints, his positions, they shift like sands underneath you," said Gaetz. "Even Kevin McCarthy's own mentor recently said that, ‘the lies always change.’ And Mr. McCarthy is not only responsive to pressure from the right. Time and again, he has failed to achieve the goals that we seek on spending and on the fight."
Gaetz continued, "For months we've been asking Mr. McCarthy for his battle plan. How do we ensure that we stand up for folks in the military who feel like they're being purged? How do we ensure that if there's a passage of a farm bill, it includes things like work requirements? And all we got was a handful of ‘Howdy’ and a mouthful of ‘Much Obliged.’"
"So we do not want to be here at this moment," said Gatez. "We would prefer to have a unity of purpose. But we will not continue to allow the uniparty to run this town without a fight."
"There's very little difference between Nancy Pelosi and her California delegation-mate that seeks the gavel," he added.
When asked by a reporter if he would be kicked off of committees because of his opposition to McCarthy, Gaetz said, "We were threatened by my committee chairman, to be on the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Rogers, that if we did not vote for Mr. McCarthy, we would be removed from committees."
"I'm not here to participate in some kind of a puppet show where we pass a bunch of messaging bills, send them to the Senate, watch them die, refuse to use leverage, and don't hold the Biden administration accountable," said Gaetz.
"I don't want to relive the Benghazi experience where it is just theater pretending to be oversight," he said. "We can do better than that and that is our purpose."
Liz Cheney Exits Congress 6 Years Later and Millions of Dollars Richer
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) will vacate her congressional seat on Tuesday after becoming a wealthy woman during her six years of serving Wyoming.
Cheney, who lost her Republican primary by nearly 40 points in August, will depart Congress on January 3 and return home as a defeated 56-year-old never Trumper.
Cheney will not depart Congress empty-handed. During her six years in Congress, she has become very wealthy. Breitbart News reported in August that Cheney’s net worth ballooned from an estimated $7 million when she first took office in 2017 to possibly more than $44 million in 2020. Depending on the specifics of her latest financial disclosure form, Cheney’s net worth could have skyrocketed up to 600 percent in Congress.
According to her 2020 Personal Financial Disclosure form, Cheney declared a net worth between $10,422,023 and $44,140,000, stemming from assets valued between $10,432,024 and $44,155,000. She reported no earned income, gifts, or transactions. She did, however, declare she held three posts, including a trustee position at the University of Wyoming, membership of a holding company, and what appears to be a position in her family’s trust.
Cheney’s wealth and social status are enhanced by her husband, Philip Perry, who is a partner at Latham & Watkins law firm in Washington, DC, which has advised Chinese companies. Since 2017, the year Cheney joined Congress, Perry has maintained “equity ownership” in the firm worth between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000. Breitbart News reported:
Perry’s firm has advised a Chinese Communist Party-linked technology company named TME and Exelon Corporation. The State Department in 2019 dubbed TME a tool of the Chinese government. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2011, Exelon Corporation agreed to provide consulting and training services to an arm of the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). The state-owned CNNC’s president and vice president are appointed by the highest administrative position in the Government of China, the Premier of the People’s Republic of China. The CNNC supervises all facets of China’s nuclear programs.
While Perry’s law firm has serviced Chinese clients, Cheney sat on the Armed Services Committee with many powerful subcommittees dedicated to national security. Cheney worked with House Republicans’ on producing a 2020 report on Communist China entitled the “China Task Force Report.” The report states, “[T]he greatest generational challenge we face today is the threat of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
Cheney’s forced exit from Congress does not mean she or her family will depart Washington, DC, and return home to Wyoming. Technically, She represented her home state of Wyoming for six years. But her lack of appearance in the state during the GOP primary become a point of contention for many Cowboy State voters. Instead of campaigning in Wyoming, Cheney appeared to prefer dwelling in the D.C. area, soaking up the spotlight on the January 6 Committee.
Born in Wisconsin, Cheney moved to Wyoming with her family as a young woman. They divided their time between Wyoming and Washington, DC, to suit former Vice President Dick Cheney’s political aspirations. In 1996, Liz Cheney graduated from the University of Chicago’s law school. She then worked in the Bush administration while her father was vice president. In 2014, she ran for the Wyoming State Senate and lost. A few years later, she won Wyoming’s U.S. House of Representatives seat.
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney (C) sits with his daughter US Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R), R-Wyoming, during the opening of the 115th US Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, January 3, 2017 (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images).
Cheney’s congressional career entailed some successes. In 2019, she was elected the third most powerful House Republican as GOP House Conference chair. She was later displaced by Trump-endorsed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) by a vote of no confidence in 2021, the same year she accepted a position on the January 6 Committee.
Cheney’s participation on the committee appeared to seal her political fate in Wyoming. Viewed as a partisan witch hunt, the committee failed to sway 89 percent of the public. Moreover, the committee’s final report did not produce any legally binding results. Adding insult to injury, the committee officially withdrew its subpoena on Wednesday for former President Donald Trump to testify before Congress.
As a new political cycle begins Tuesday, Cheney has not definitively stated what her future plans entail. She has said her forward focus is blocking Trump from winning reelection in 2024. But it is unclear how she will do so without the vice chair pulpit or the January 6 Committee. She has floated the idea of potentially running for president in 2024, but critics doubt she will gain enough Democrat votes or Republican support in either primary.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Migration 2022: Republicans Step Towards the Center as Democrats Open Borders
Republican legislators successfully killed multiple amnesties and job-outsourcing bills in Congress during 2021 and 2022, but Democrats used their power in federal agencies to maximize the inflow of legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants.
“All efforts in Congress to push past immigration limits failed [because of Republican legislators, and that] reinforced the administration’s commitment to creating their own immigration system through executive fiat,” without regard to Congress’s annual caps on immigration, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Through the year, Democrats increasingly favored migrants above Americans — even though roughly six million working-age American men have fallen out of the workforce since 2000.
So Democrats in Congress helped Democrats in the White House smuggle roughly 2.2 million southern migrants over the southern border, and also to supercharge the transfer of legal migrants and visa workers into U.S. jobs. “The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” labor secretary Marty Walsh said in December.
That partnership allowed at least 3.3 million legal, illegal, and quasi-legal migrants into the jobs, schools, careers, and housing that are needed by the 60 million adults and parents who earn less than $1,000 a week. The inflow is so huge that it added roughly one migrant for every American birth during the year.
This elite-created migration also helped to spike inflation — especially for housing. The result is that migration-spiked inflation outpaced wage growth, and median wages fell by 1.4 percent for 150 million Americans in President Joe Biden’s cheap-labor economy.
The establishment media — such as the TV networks and the New York Times — hide the scale and economic impact of Biden’s migration from most Americans.
But the migration inflow is shifting national opinion against migration, according to YouGov polls that ask Americans if the migration makes America “worse off” or “better off.”
In September 2019, the “worse off” number was just 19 percent, and the “better off” number was 43 percent. In July 2022, a 35 percent plurality in a YouGov poll said immigration makes the United States “worse off,” while 31 percent said immigration makes the U.S. “better off.”
That result is matched in polls funded by business groups and by progressives, such as an August poll by NPR, which showed that most Americans describe Biden’s migration as an invasion.
CNN’s 2022 exit poll showed a 53 percent to 39 percent “help” vs “hurt” result.
The public reaction is even more hostile when Americans are offered an excuse to reject Democrat party demands or the establishment’s 1950s fake narrative that America is “a Nation of Immigrants.” In December, for example, four out of five Americans said they wanted to keep the Title 42 anti-migration barrier.
The rising opposition to migration is especially high among Republicans. In November, one in six Republicans — 16 percent — said their top priority is immigration policy.
Four weeks later, the House GOP caucus joined with some Democrats to reject the EAGLE Act.
The EAGLE Act was a migration giveaway to coastal investors and Fortune 500 companies. It would have spiked the inflow of low-wage, no-rights foreign workers into the white-collar careers sought by many skilled Americans. The bill passed the House easily in 2019 and everyone expected it to pass because the GOP is normally favorable to the business and investor groups that have been pushing the bill for several years.
The EAGLE Act was blocked in December because the Republican legislators increasingly distrust the coastal investors that fund the Democrat party — and that also fund myriad progressive groups that demand more migration, mandatory diversity, transgender claims, radical schooling, extreme environmentalism, and much else that damages the civic rules which ordinary Americans need to manage their communities.
Republican legislators also blocked a huge amnesty that was touted as decent aid for a few million younger migrants, and they blocked a farmworker amnesty that would have devastated rural towns by allowing agriculture employers to hire unlimited foreign workers in exchange for tickets to citizenship. Midwestern GOP Senators also recognized how migration hurts their heartland communities — and so they blocked a bill that would have allowed Fortune 500 companies to hire myriad foreign workers for a vast range of midwestern jobs sought by U.S. graduates.
GOP leaders shut down a plan to expand the inflow of Afghans into American society.
Republican legislators also shut down Biden’s major amnesty bill that would have created a national amnesty for at least 12 million illegal immigrants. That bill would have also accelerated the inflow of chain-migration migrants, so shrinking wages and spiking inflation.
The amnesties failed partly because impatient agency officials opened the border to a rising flood of migrants, said Krikorian. “The border is such a disaster that it is made the kind of measures that business wants radioactive to not just among Republicans,” said Krikorian. “Even a lot of Democrats probably don’t see any need to take more chances politically,” he added.
GOP leaders are also more skeptical of the business donors that provide vast funding to Democrats and their networks of progressive groups, he added. “If they called for something 15 years ago, maybe Republicans would have jumped and helped them out,” said Krikorian, adding:
But nowadays, they’re not likely to get a warmer reception from a lot of Republican offices than they get from Planned Parenthood or the AFL CIO … Big corporations, but not only in tech, are now part of the left’s coalition. So do you so why would Republicans cater to them?
The Democrats were bound to make gains in 2021 and 2022 — they controlled the Senate, the House, and the White House.
This allowed congressional Democrats to block spending curbs on Biden’s off-the-books immigration system. So Biden’s deputies admitted roughly 2 million southern migrants, plus 250,000 Afghans and Ukrainians, plus 25,000 refugees. This huge inflow pushed the foreign-born population up to one in six of the population — and is effectively replacing the millions of American children not born because of economic pressure on American families.
Democrats also converted more migrants into legal residents and citizens. For example, they converted 1.5 million migrants into Democratic-leaning citizens before the 2022 mid-term election — so helping to defeat numerous Republican candidates in the 2022 elections. In January 2021, all 50 Republican senators lost their jobs as members of the majority when immigrant voters helped elect two Democrat senators in Georgia.
Democrats are backed by major investors and donors who want to expand the inflow of migrant workers, consumers, and renters.
In turn, the investors’ deputies in the TV and newspaper industry ensure that corporate-employed reporters can only produce very favorable coverage of migrants’ concerns. The result is that establishment media push the “Nation of Immigrants” narrative to hide the elite-backed policy of “Extraction Migration” which pulls poor people from poor nations into the U.S. so they can spike corporate revenues and Wall Street stock values.
The investors also fund a huge network of astroturf groups that are filled with ideologically and emotionally motivated advocates that are eager to help the elites divorce themselves from ordinary Americans. “It’s been a tumultuous year for immigration but I want to close it out by expressing my gratitude to everyone who’s helped move forward the cause of immigrants’ rights,” said a December 31 tweet by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council. “In a world that can often be harsh to the stranger, embracing those who are different than us is a noble goal,” he tweeted, without regard to the impact on his fellow Americans — or the massive death toll of migrants.
Republicans stopped the multiple amnesties — but it did not stop the Democrats’ extraction of roughly 3.5 million legal, quasi-legal, illegal, and temporary migrants for jobs, apartments, homes, and careers throughout the United States.
But the Democrats and their business allies have triggered a multi-national rush of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants, into American society — and there is little sign they can control the rush in 2023 and 2024.
Biden and his deputies claim they are managing the migration, Krikorian said, but “its all [political] damage control.”
The question now is whether Republicans can be pressured by voters and led by reform politicians to side with votes and develop a coherent plan to stop the mass migration that divides and impoverishes America outside the elite enclaves along the coast.
That plan would try to win over the increasingly skeptical swing voters with arguments about pocketbook damage, investment, jobs, and wages — as well as drug crimes and chaos. A March 2021 report by a business-backed group urged progressives to make emotional arguments and to downplay economic claims for more migration:
It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.
But any GOP focus on pocketbook aspects of migration would anger the investors who want more migrants to fill jobs and housing that would otherwise go to young Americans. The donors are eager to slam illegal migration during political campaigns — Chaos! Crime! Illegal! Drugs! — but oppose any policy promise that would help Americans by reducing immigration.
The result is Republican rhetoric that is intended to not appeal to many swing voters — but just to boost turnout by GOP loyalists and to show support for local business elites.
“The thing I am most concerned with is a terrorist possibility of folks coming over,” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) said at a July 25 press event at the border. “I’ve met with my farmers and ranchers two days ago, and they’re going ‘Tony, there’s thousands of [illegal migrant] people coming through our sector, but yet I can’t find [immigrant] workers to help in the fields.’”
“The Republicans have yet to make a case why they’d make any difference,” Mike McKenna, a political consultant in Virginia, told Breitbart News in July:
I don’t think [congressional Republicans and Democrats] are all the same, but if they’re going to vote the same, and if they’re going to talk the same, then yeah, normal people are going to conclude they’re the same and ask, “What’s the point of voting?”
“I’m not holding my breath [waiting for a GOP] pro-employee argument against immigration,” said Krikorian, adding:
More people are making that argument. So that is a positive sign, and the new Congress is going to have some high-profile members like [Sen.] JD Vance (R-OH) and others who will bring a pro-worker element to their critique of Biden’s immigration policy. That’s at least a move in the right direction. But I don’t expect [GOP leader Rep.] Kevin McCarthy [R-CA] or [Rep. Elise] Stefanik [R-NY] to be making that kind of argument.
Still, McCarthy has declared his opposition to a “comprehensive” amnesty deal migration and is touting a bill that would tie the hands of Biden’s pro-migration homeland secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
“Maybe I’ll be surprised — I hope I’m surprised,” Krikorian added.
McCarthy Proposes Gutting Office of Congressional Ethics in Bid for Speaker
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. attends a portrait unveiling ceremony for Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the U.S. Capitol on December 14, 2022. Credit - Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spent the first two days of the new year trying to shore up GOP support for his bid to be Speaker by releasing a series of proposals aimed at winning over hard-right detractors who stand to torpedo his ascension.
The part of his proposed changes to House rules that drew the most attention was allowing just five House members to call for a vote at any time on ousting the Speaker; that would render McCarthy beholden to the most extreme members of his caucus, should he get on their wrong side. But buried in the text was another provision that could be highly consequential for the new Congress being sworn in on Tuesday: language that would effectively gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), as the independent panel faces pressure to investigate lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Most significantly, McCarthy’s proposal would require OCE to hire its staff for the 118th Congress within 30 days of the resolution’s adoption, a requirement that sources familiar with the process tell TIME would make it exceedingly difficult for the office to have the resources it needs to conduct its investigations, given how long it takes to hire candidates for roles in the federal government. The proposal would also block OCE from hiring new employees over the next two years if someone leaves their position, sources say.
“Republicans get to take control of the House, and on their first day in Congress, they are not trying to take a hammer to the OCE—they’re being a little smarter about it—but they’re taking a scalpel to it,” a Hill source familiar with the ethics process tells TIME.
The resolution would also impose eight-year term limits for members of OCE’s eight-member board, which is composed of four Democrats and four Republicans. The move would result in three of the four Democrats being forced to vacate their seats effective immediately. While the new Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, would be able to appoint replacements, the changes could still significantly slow down the panel’s work and zap it of valuable institutional knowledge.
“This could easily kill the only body that’s investigating ethical issues in Congress,” says Kedric Payne with the Campaign Legal Center. “There’s no investigations in the Senate. And the only investigations that happen in the House of any significance are done by the OCE.”
“This is a very smart way to do it,” adds Payne, a former OCE deputy chief counsel. “Because it looks as though the office still lives, but, in fact, it doesn’t.”
This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to dismantle the Congress’s independent ethics panel. In 2017, the House Republican Conference took steps to curtail the power of the OCE, but the proposal was opposed by then-Speaker Paul Ryan and even McCarthy.
This time around, circumstances have changed. A handful of ultra-conservative lawmakers, including Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, have vowed to vote against McCarthy for speaker. With the Republicans’ slim majority, the California legislator can only afford four defections.
Some of the defectors also happen to be among the lawmakers who stand to benefit the most from a castrated OCE. Last month, more than 30 former members of Congress of both parties requested the ethics panel to investigate the lawmakers who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a move that increases the spotlight on OCE and which investigations it chooses to pursue in the new Congress.
The OCE was also expected to investigate George Santos, the Republican Congressman-elect from New York who appears to have fabricated large swaths of his biography, including his employment history, his educational credentials, and even the circumstances of his mother’s death.
On Monday, as details of McCarthy’s proposal drew more attention, the good-government watchdog group Public Citizen called on him and the next Congress to get rid of the provisions that would weaken the OCE, saying in a statement Monday that the panel “has a proven track record of enhancing transparency and enforcement of ethics rules and has gained widespread support among the American public.”
McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment.
The Office of Congressional Ethics was established in 2008 by then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi after a wave of Democratic victories in the 2006 midterms and after corruption scandals that sent multiple members of Congress to jail. The panel was intended to be an independent body separate from the House Ethics Committee, which advocates have long criticized as ineffectual and lacking in transparency.
But the two work hand-in-hand. When the OCE finds evidence of misconduct, it sends a report of its findings to the House Ethics Committee, which then chooses whether to censure a member for a violation.
While the OCE lacks the subpoena power of full House committees, it has been effective at probing wrongdoing by lawmakers of both parties. Shortly after its inception, it found that then-Rep. Charlie Rangel, a New York Democrat, improperly accepted trips to Caribbean islands as gifts from a nonprofit group. The entire House later sanctioned Rangel for violating 11 House ethics rules. In 2017, it was the first entity to investigate then-Rep. Chris Collins, a New York Republican, of insider trading. He later pleaded guilty to insider trading and lying to federal investigators. (Trump pardoned Collins in 2020.)
The OCE was poised to have a full plate over the next two years, with a heavy emphasis on the members who participated in the Jan. 6 attack. It’s a scenario that leads Congressional watchdogs to suspect that McCarthy is offering to debilitate the agency of resources and institutional knowledge to shield his members from scrutiny in order to hold onto power.
“Today’s Republican Party is rife with ethical transgressions,” says Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen. “And it is now trying to make it much harder to hold members of Congress accountable to the standards of decency we expect.”
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