Spending Deal Debacle Threatens Johnson’s Tenuous Hold on His Job
The New York Times
A Republican backlash to the speaker’s plan to temporarily fund the government has sparked new talk of ousting him, and highlighted the challenges he will face if he manages to keep his job.
Speaker Mike Johnson spent months doing everything he could to hang on to his job come January, most notably a concerted charm offensive to keep President-elect Donald J. Trump placated and in his corner. It took just a few hours on Wednesday for it to all go bad.
The Louisiana Republican this week got a taste of what life could be like in the second Trump era beginning next month as he was mercilessly undercut on his complex year-end legislation by Mr. Trump and the president-elect’s exceedingly influential ally Elon Musk — that is, if Mr. Johnson is the speaker at all.
“We’ll see,” Mr. Trump told NBC News on Thursday when asked about his confidence in Mr. Johnson.
The speaker’s fate was thrust into question after House Republicans exploded in anger over the fully ornamented legislative Christmas tree he rolled out to fund the government into March, a 1,500-plus-page grab bag of year-end priorities and policy changes.
House Republicans, who have spent the weeks since the election talking about how they are going to remake the government in concert with Mr. Musk and cut all sorts of agencies and spending programs, were suddenly confronted with a bipartisan big-ticket measure that looked a lot like business as usual.
Mr. Trump demanded that Mr. Johnson jettison the deal he had cut with Democrats to keep the government open and, for good measure, raise the federal debt ceiling before Mr. Trump takes office. The speaker spent Thursday contorting himself to try to fulfill those demands, and by late afternoon had hatched a plan to do so, but it failed to pass a House vote in the evening.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.