WASHINGTON, D.C. — Conservatives on Capitol Hill still aren’t sold on Speaker Mike Johnson.

While Johnson won the support of the House Republican Conference behind closed doors earlier this month, he’s still got to secure majority support on the floor of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3.

“The speaker's got work to do. He's got work to do,” a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus, who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak candidly, told Raw Story. “There are members who are thinking about whether they want to support him or not. He’s not there yet.”

With razor-thin margins in the House, a protest from even a handful of Republicans could cause a repeat of the start of the 118th Congress in which it took 15 votes for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to secure the gavel.

While Johnson’s been spending more time with President-elect Donald Trump of late — including trips to Mar-a-Lago and attending a UFC fight with the former president — conservatives still aren’t convinced he’s the right GOP general to pass the party’s agenda.

“I wouldn't honestly put too much into that. I think that's just, you know, the president coming through on building goodwill with everybody, and I think that's a smart approach for him,” the Freedom Caucus member continued. “Honestly, I think it's more that members don't see somebody who's going to be strategic, make the right call, make timely calls.”

Former Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-VA) lost his primary this year, but as he heads for the exits, he’s encouraging his colleagues to replace Johnson.

“He’s been an abysmal failure,” Good told Raw Story. “Speaker Johnson has failed by every measuring stick, if you're a Republican, and so I think it would be a mistake to be voted in as speaker.”

Like many Freedom Caucus members, Good doesn’t have much respect for Johnson.

“Speaker Johnson will be a pawn and just do whatever he's told and whatever is in his best interest to be speaker. So he will do his best to be unified with President Trump's agenda, because he wants to be speaker,” Good said. “Unfortunately, what President Trump needs is a strong speaker, an effective speaker who can help drive his agenda through the House.”

This spring, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) joined Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in her failed effort to oust Johnson by triggering a formal motion to vacate — the procedural measure used to oust McCarthy — but Johnson was saved by Democrats.

In the wake of Trump winning the popular vote and House Republicans just barely maintaining their majority, Massie says Johnson failed the GOP.

“He failed to increase our majority in an overwhelming red wave. He just made it tougher on himself, and the way he failed was not because he didn't campaign enough, but because we didn't get anything done,” Massie told Raw Story.

“So you're not happy with him and his record?” Raw Story pressed.

“Well, that would be an understatement,” Massie said.

“So will you oppose him on the floor?” Raw Story asked.

“I don't know. There’s a lot of time between now and then,” Massie said. “He's gonna have to do a 180 on a bunch of crap he shoved down our throats. Ukraine spending, for instance.”

Still, many of Trump’s biggest supporters in Congress say they’re following Trump’s lead.

“I think Mike Johnson has the support from President Trump,” Rep. Trey Nehls (R-TX) — while wearing a Trump tie — told Raw Story. “Everything that Trump pretty much says right now, we probably need to follow word for word.”

With Republicans readying to run the White House, Senate and the House in the new year, Nehls speaks for many in the GOP when he says challenging Johnson on the floor in January would be a strategic mistake.

“I just don't know how that's going to benefit us,” Nehls said. “This is what we have to do. Donald Trump's going to need four years to fix the screw-ups that we have in our country. Doing it in two years is going to be hard, and if we don't behave and follow some guidance and advice in the Trump first agenda, the America first agenda, we could lose the House in two years, and then what do we have then? Have to be careful about that.”

The other problem, yet again, facing the far-right wing of the GOP is that as united they are in their frustrations with Johnson, they still don’t have a potential replacement in mind — at least not one they’re rallying behind publicly.

“I’m not going to curse anybody by saying their name,” Massie said. “Anybody who I would want would not want me to say their name.”

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Like more than 72 percent of Americans using community water systems, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) — an orthopedic surgeon, three-term senator and former host of the “Senate Doctors” show — has consumed fluorinated water.

“I grew up with it. Still have my teeth,” Barrasso told Raw Story while riding the tram underneath the U.S. Capitol this week.

Barrasso’s teeth may be politician perfect, but his grandkids — and yours — may not be afforded a seamless smile.

If President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is confirmed, health experts fear communities across the nation could eliminate fluoride in their water.

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While few know what Kennedy is planning, at his rallies Trump made one thing clear: “I’m going to let him go wild on health.”

That has health care workers — doctors to dentists — freaking out.

‘Pro-vaccine and anti-mandates’

Despite most Americans drinking fluorinated water, communities across America have increasingly been ditching fluorinating their water, with more than 150 towns voting to keep fluoride out of their public water since 2010, according to anti-fluoride group, the Fluoride Action Network.

Kennedy posted on X that a Trump administration would advise all communities across the county to stop using fluoride in their water, claiming that fluoride is “an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease.”

Medical organizations have called Kennedy’s claims unfounded. Fluoride has long been considered beneficial in strengthening teeth and reducing cavities.

Still, that and Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism hasn’t caused Barrasso, the incoming Senate Republican whip from Wyoming, to oppose his nomination—or that of Mehmet Oz, a celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon who previously pushed unproven theories about COVID-19 cures—to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“There's a lot to be said for the Trump administration putting in place people who are passionate and who have great interest in issues — that President Trump is making bold choices,” Barrasso said. “Every one of these nominees is going to have a hearing, a fair process and then a timely vote, and I think the hearings are going to be very instructive.”

Passion and policy are universes apart, though. And, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, passion has been winning out over long-established public health policies.

Like Bud Light, Sunday brunches, the NFL and even Pepsi, vaccines have become politicized, especially in conservative circles. And GOP leaders in Washington — whether they went to med school like Barrasso or not — are doing all they can to stay out of the fight.

Barrasso called himself “pro-vaccine and anti-mandates” and particularly praised Oz as “very qualified” given “his background in medicine” and experience as a “communicator.”

Raw Story reached out to every doctor we know of at the Capitol: 17 Congress members with medical degrees. We asked whether Oz or Kennedy’s controversial medical stances concerned them as healthcare practitioners.

‘Deeply concerned’: Democrats react to cabinet picks

Considering whether Oz and Kennedy are potential dangers to public health as trust in the media and Congress are hovering around historically low disapproval ratings, Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) — a former chief medical officer for Sacramento County — says yes.

“They both have some crazy ideas and seem to get caught up in some conspiracy theories, but Trump's gonna nominate who he’s gonna nominate,” Bera said. “This is what the country voted for. It's not as though Trump didn't say he was going to give a role to RFK Jr., so let's sit down and let's just see what happens.”

Bera told Raw Story that members of Congress in the doctors' caucus will need to “push back on a lot of this and at least try not to allow the spread” of such conspiracy theories or misinformation. But the damage has already started, with COVID-19 vaccine skepticism spilling over into skepticism of other vaccines for “dangerous diseases” like measles, which have started resurfacing and putting lives at risk, Bera said.

“The vaccine stuff, fluoride, those are pretty safely proven public health benefits. Vaccines have probably been the biggest advance in medicine in our lifetimes, and we saw how effective they were during the pandemic,” Bera said.

Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA), a pediatrician, told Raw Story that she is “deeply concerned” about Trump’s picks to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“I will try to reserve judgment and public comments until I see their actions,” Schrier said. “As a pediatrician who understands that vaccines are one of the most important developments — they have saved countless lives — I'm deeply concerned about those comments.”

Schrier said she is generally “very concerned about the perversion of science” but wanted to "reserve most of my judgment until I see what actually happens.” Still, the potential move to less fluorinated water alarmed her.

“As a pediatrician who understands that tooth decay is the most common disease in children, I am deeply concerned about these comments,” Schrier continued.

Raw Story did not immediately get responses from other members of Congress with medical degrees: Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Rand Paul (R-KY); and Reps. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN), Neal Dunn (R-FL), Mark Green (R-TN), Andy Harris (R-MD), Ronny Jackson (R-TX), John Joyce (R-PA), Rich McCormick (R-GA), Mariannette, Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Greg Murphy (R-NC), Raul Ruiz (D-CA) and Mike Simpson (R-ID).

In the new year, there’s chatter of an Obamacare overhaul if the GOP can muster the votes, though Congress is losing four of its current medical school-approved members.

Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX), a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology, Larry Bucshon (R-IN), a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), a podiatric doctor, all decided not to seek reelection. Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-CO), a pediatrician, conceded her reelection to Republican Gabe Evans.

Trump’s spokespeople didn’t respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

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WASHINGTON – Republicans on Capitol Hill are privately celebrating after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) withdrew his nomination for attorney general. Publicly, many won’t even say his name.

“So you don’t even want to talk about Matt Gaetz?” Raw Story asked the incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a cramped Capitol elevator.

“You all are so smart,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) replied to Raw Story.

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Like most of his Republican colleagues, Graham changed his tune on President-elect Donald Trump in recent years. But, like many of his GOP colleagues, that didn’t mean he was going to cheerlead for Gaetz.

With Gaetz out, Senate Republicans – at least the 10-plus Raw Story interviewed at the Capitol on Thursday afternoon – are eager to move on.

“Are you shedding any tears?” Raw Story asked just off the Senate floor.

“No,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) replied.

His Senate colleagues concur.

“If you got a non-Gaetz question, you’re first”

Since the nomination was announced, Senate Republicans have been inundated with Gaetz questions, so – even as he was the news of the day in Washington – they were eager to discuss anything but the man who was their party’s pariah throughout his four terms in Congress.

“If you got a non-Gaetz question, you’re first,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Raw Story.

“Interesting. So, you guys don't even want to talk about him anymore?” Raw Story asked. “You're happy to just move past him?”

“This is a process,” Tillis said.

“This was a short process, sir,” Raw Story said.

“I’d like to think of it as us demonstrating our efficiency,” Tillis quipped as he entered the Senate chamber.

According to CNN, Gaetz withdrew within an hour of the network asking the former congressman about a woman who said he engaged in sexual misconduct with her twice when she was a minor. The woman was 17 years old at the time and testified that the second sexual encounter, which only came to light Thursday, was a threesome with an adult woman.

The allegations didn't come as a shock to anyone on Capitol Hill, including Gaetz’s closest allies.

“I've known Matt Gaetz for a long time,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story on Monday. “I told him, I said, ‘Matt, I'm gonna vote for you, but if they prove something now, you're not gonna make it.’ He said, ‘Coach, I'm good. I've told the president, I'm good with this. They don't have anything.’”

Raw Story circled back with Tuberville after the latest allegations broke.

“You told me [Monday] that you had told Gaetz, ‘Hey, if stuff comes out, you're not gonna get it’ – do you know what stuff came out?” Raw Story asked.

“I don't know whether anything came out or he came up here and just didn't get a good feel to get confirmed,” Tuberville told Raw Story at the Capitol.

While Senate Republicans were light on details, many also didn’t care to stop and digest the latest in a string of Gaetz allegations.

Republican leaders are so over Gaetz questions

It’s not just the GOP rank-and-file. Steve Daines (R-MT), the outgoing chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee – who’s credited with helping the GOP win back the majority earlier this month – lavished lukewarm praise on Gaetz for bowing out.

“Is this good?” Raw Story asked.

“I respect this decision,” Daines replied.

“Was he a distraction for the agenda?” Raw Story pressed.

“I respect this decision,” Daines repeated as he walked onto the Senate floor.

Daines was not alone. Newly minted Senate Republican Leader John Thune (R-SD) didn’t even turn his head when Raw Story asked about Gaetz’s withdrawal.

The new GOP leader’s top general, Republican Whip John Barrasso (R-WY), seemed to have received the same memo.

“Are you glad that Gaetz is out?” Raw Story asked as someone bumped into the senator's aide, spilling the contents of her arms onto the marble hall.

“Your phone’s still on the ground — it’s still on the ground,” Barrasso told his staffer while breezing past Raw Story before turning to a reporter asking about Trump’s controversial secretary of defense nominee, Pete Hegseth of Fox and Friends Weekend fame.

“How did your meeting go with Hegseth?” the reporter asked of Hegseth, whose lawyer — to the surprise of Trump’s transition team — recently admitted the veteran settled a case with a woman who accused him of sexual assault seven years ago.

“Very productive meeting with the nominee,” Barrasso replied, ignoring Raw Story’s Gaetz question.

Gaetz may be gone, but the questions are far from over.

“He was not going to get confirmed”

A poor, haphazard vetting process seems to be plaguing Trump’s second term before he’s even officially back in the White House, but Republicans don’t want to discuss that as they try to portray a unified GOP heading into the New Year.

“Would you like it for the administration — or for the transition — to not pick someone who's accused of having sex with a minor for the next AG?” Raw Story asked one of Gaetz’s former Florida colleagues.

“So the — I can just tell you my experience with Matt was positive,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story. “I think Susie Wiles does a great job. I think Trump needs somebody that's going to do a good job, so I'm sure they'll go into it with the right mind.”

Democrats aren’t so sure, and they haven’t been since Trump dropped jaws with his initial Gaetz nomination.

“I told people that he would never make it through,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story while riding a Senate elevator. “And, obviously, he did not.”

While no one’s spiking the proverbial football, Democrats are breathing sighs of relief now that Gaetz is gone, for now at least.

“It was a smart call,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Raw Story while walking to the Capitol. “He was not going to get confirmed, so just make it easier on everybody.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is "excited" about his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing despite damaging information that could come out about him stemming from a yearslong House Ethics Committee probe.

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Gaetz to lead the Justice Department in a flurry of appointments that included a Fox News weekend co-host for defense secretary and a governor with little experience in homeland security to head that department.

Speaking to Raw Story on Tuesday, Norman said he "expected" the attacks on Gaetz, but "he can handle himself."

"Can he?" Raw Story pressed.

"Yeah. He's excited," said Norman.

The Freedom Caucus Republican added that the House Ethics Committee report was "just an opinion they want to get out there." He anticipates it will "actually help" Gaetz.

"The public opinion is going to be with him," claimed Norman.

Norman dodged the question when asked about the accusations the Congressman paid for sex with a minor.

Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.

"Look, they're after — they're gonna try and stop every one of 'em," he said. "Matt's just a poster child."

Fox weekend host Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual misconduct, which he also denies. In Hegseth's case, he asked the woman who accused him of sexual assault to sign a nondisclosure agreement and paid her an undisclosed sum. The police report that covers the accusation said a rape kit was done at the hospital and found evidence of a sexual encounter.

Hegseth claimed that they had sex, but it was consensual.

"It's not gonna work," Norman said about "going after" Gaetz. "They've been doing it for seven years."

The alleged encounters Gaetz had were during his first term in Congress between 2017 and 2019.

"I mean, some of the senators — I can't wait to see him get grilled," Norman said about Gaetz's confirmation process. "He can handle himself."

When Norman was asked about the Republicans who aren't fans of Gaetz, he said that some are still made aware of what happened to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the chair.

"Let 'em leak it, and we'll see how it turns out," Norman closed.

An alleged hacker already accessed the information about Gaetz and could release it before the House does.

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WASHINGTON — Some Republicans are trying to slow the rush to appoint President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet picks — particularly "Fox & Friends Weekend" host Pete Hegseth. Last week, Trump nominated Hegseth to serve as his Secretary of Defense.

Speaking to Raw Story on Monday evening, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) confessed that she has questions.

"They have to be vetted, and we’ll get to the bottom of it,” Ernst said. “We just need to have them thoroughly vetted.”

ALSO READ: Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

“We’re just gonna have to have a conversation."

While Ernst urges proper vetting, CNN reported last week that Trump's transition team isn't using the FBI to do background checks on the appointees, saying they believe that would take too long.Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) called Hegseth a "good guy," noting, "I know him well."

“Did you ever know about the past sexual assault accusation?” Raw Story asked.

“Come on now,” Tuberville complained. “Come on now.”

Raw Story pointed out that the Washington Post reported that Hegseth's accuser was paid and signed a nondisclosure agreement.

Also read: 'More normal': Dem claims there's a sane 'back-stop' on Trump's team — but for how long?

Hegseth's lawyer said that he paid the woman off out of fear he would be fired from Fox. Trump's transition team confessed that the scandal blindsided them.

Raw Story asked Tuberville: “Have you not heard about that?”

“No, I don't keep up with all that,” Tuberville replied.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) also admitted, “I know nothing."

“I’ll let the process play out," he claimed. "I don't know the individuals. I don't know the rumors. I don't know what’s being made of this."

Raw Story asked if Johnson had concerns about the vetting of the possible candidates.

“They'll be vetted,” Johnson promised.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) similarly assumed that the candidates would have a proper background check.

“I won't know anything until I see a full vetting,” Tillis said at the Capitol.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) called the allegations against Hegseth "serious" and urged an investigation be "pursued."

"That would require, I think, a very thorough FBI background that I think has to be done, and then he has to make himself available for individual questioning, and then a committee hearing that's open," the senator told Raw Story.

Trump's team has teased a recess appointment, which would allow his Cabinet picks take their positions without being confirmed by the Senate.

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that there will not be any recess appointments.

“The recess appointment is just terrible, and I think what it does is that — if agreed to — would forfeit our obligation to be a check and balance on the president[-elect]. A dereliction of duty," said Reed.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story that he found it "inconceivable" that "any senator would think of confirming so many people, including [Hegseth], who are unprepared for the job, unqualified for the job by experience or by past involvements. It’s offensive."

“All of these appointments that he's made are more about his petulance than it is about their qualifications,” Hoyer said. “The country is ill-served by this irresponsibility.”

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressman said Friday President-elect Donald Trump appears to have a "back-stop" on his team who is "more normal" than other people he's surrounded himself with.

But he worries about what happens if they leave — or get ignored.

Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) voiced many worries about the incoming Trump administration when he talked to Raw Story.

Among those is Gov. Kirsti Noem (R-SD) who is being tapped to run the Department of Homeland Services. Kildee called her "an amateur."

"Historically, not always, but generally speaking, these picks are a mix of some political, but mostly people with deep policy substance, especially on the national security front," he said.

"Not always on the other stuff, for sure. The other departments are a mix of politics and policy, but the national security stuff is life and death seriousness," Kildee told Raw Story while at the U.S. Capitol.

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He mentioned Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who was a moderate for a time until there was a radical shift toward the end of the first Trump term. She was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

"It's just weird," he said of her "transformation."

"It's a toxic combination of a lack of depth and a lack of conviction. That's a little scary."

But, he said, handling the day-to-day White House will be Trump's campaign manager Susie Wiles as the chief of staff — and he expressed hope that she might be a more sensible guiding force.

Kildee called her "more normal." But his concern is, "How long will she last, and how much influence will she have?"

"If there's a back-stop that's where it is. These guys are not going to be a back-stop," he said of the long-time Trump loyalists.

Kildee concluded that, "When [Trump] says he's going to do something, at least he's going to try. I don't think he bluffs on stuff like that when it comes to settling scores.

"But as much as he's blown up the norms and institutions, I think he could overreach."

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Capitol is now Trump country, but that doesn’t mean Republican senators want to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nomination, Matt Gaetz.

“I'm just not gonna spend my day talking about everything that happens,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) told Raw Story as he hopped a congressional tram Thursday.

The senior senator from Kansas is far from alone.

“I've got nothing for you on the president's nominations. That's for the next Congress, so I got nothing,” retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told Raw Story while speed-walking through the Capitol’s basement. “When I say I've got nothing, I mean I got nothing.”

That’s not because Romney doesn’t know who Gaetz is. Last year, the Florida firebrand angered Republicans across Capitol Hill when he orchestrated the ouster of then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That made him a MAGA star — but alienated the far-right, four-term congressman.

Gaetz has garnered most of the attention since Trump announced his nomination Wednesday, but the incoming president also tapped Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to be his secretary of state on Wednesday.

While they’re both Florida Republicans, the Sunshine State’s senior senator isn’t coming to Gaetz’s defense.

“I’m not going to be commenting on any of that stuff anymore,” Rubio told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol on Thursday. “I’ve got to get confirmed in the Senate.”

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“So it’s wise to not talk about Gaetz?” Raw story pressed.

“No, no,” Rubio said. “I have to work on the confirmation process, so I'm not gonna be commenting on anything.”

Gaetz resigned his congressional seat Wednesday evening after Trump announced the pick, a move critics said was meant to skirt a reportedly damning investigation into allegations of misconduct and drug abuse that the House Ethics Committee was wrapping up.

“Are you worried that Gaetz will distract from the agenda?” Raw Story asked.

“I just issued a statement. That's all I'm gonna say,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Raw Story as he walked along the tram track underneath the Capitol on Thursday.

“But, like, you seem annoyed to even be asked about it?” Raw Story pressed.

“You can ask anything you want to ask,” Graham replied. “Read my statement.”

Graham said in a statement Thursday morning that, “Every nominee will have to acquit themselves well during the confirmation process by answering difficult questions and having their actions scrutinized.

“Generally speaking, I vote for confirmation regardless of party or personal feelings because that is my Constitutional role as a Senator," the end of Graham’s release reads. "I will do the same for President Trump’s nominees. The American people have spoken loudly, and President Trump won decisively. I consider this matter closed.”

As many Republican senators avoid questions about Gaetz, they're not lining up to oppose him.

“My presumption is I’ll vote for all of the president’s nominees”

Last February, the Department of Justice ended a sex trafficking investigation into Gaetz, but that didn’t quiet the rumors of sexual misconduct with minors that have swirled around him for years.

Even though Gaetz is now gone, there’s a bipartisan push to release the findings of the House Ethics Committee investigation, which means the rumors aren’t going away.

“Do you think Gaetz is a good part of the GOP brand?” Raw Story asked the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“We're going to continue to work with President Trump. A great slate of candidates have been nominated,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Raw Story.

Other Republicans brushed aside the allegations.

“My presumption is I’ll vote for all of the president’s nominees,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters after voting Thursday.

“Are Senate Republicans a part of Trump's team?” Raw Story asked. “Are you part of his White House? Because you just said you'll support all of his nominees.”

“I’m speaking for me — that's my presumption,” Hawley said. “The reason for that is he's the leader of my party who just won resoundingly. He's got my presumptive support for all of his nominees.”

Hawley later added: “We're gonna go through the confirmation process. I'm not saying, like, I'm gonna skip the [confirmation] hearings, you know. And I think the hearings are really important. My starting position is I’m presuming I’m gonna support all his picks.”

Other Republicans said they still need to read up on Gaetz and other far-right nominations from Trump.

“I don't know enough to be concerned right now. I think it would be responsible for me to learn more about each of these nominees with whom I am not particularly well acquainted,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) told reporters at the Capitol on Thursday. “If you'd like to take a look at my social media feed, I've spoken to the quality of the nominees. I'm very excited to work with a number of them.”

Young has taken to social media to praise many of Trump’s cabinet picks — from calling Rubio an “inspired choice” at the State Department to predicting Rep. Elise Stefanik will be an “outstanding” ambassador to the United Nations — but he’s yet to comment on Gaetz.

“I need to learn more about him,” Young said.

"We know what we're gonna do"

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats said there’s not much more to learn about Gaetz.

Senators from the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party laughed — if trepidatiously — and said Trump made it easy for them to oppose many of his picks from the far-right wing of the GOP — particularly Gaetz.

“These first nominations are pretty telling,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story as she entered an elevator in the Capitol Thursday. “It’s gonna be really interesting to see what the Republicans do. We know what we're gonna do.”

But Democrats in states that Trump won have already backed some nominees.

“Some are serious and quality ones, like my colleague Rubio or Elise Stefanik is a solid choice,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) told reporters as he made his way to vote on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And then others are obvious kinds of trolls or flex[ing], and I didn't freak out, 'Oh my god. Oh my god. I can't believe you did that.'”

Fetterman warned his Democratic colleagues against obstructionism because Trump won the popular vote along with each battleground state, including his home state of Pennsylvania. The senator said hysteria over each Trump nominee is misguided.

“If clutching those pearls harder was helpful to move the needle, then we wouldn't be in the minority next time,” Fetterman said.

While Fetterman plans to support some of Trump’s nominees he said Gaetz's nomination crossed the line. When reporters asked if he was contemplating supporting Gaetz, Fetterman appeared offended.

“That's insulting,” Fetterman said. “Like, of course not.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — MAGA world is not happy about the replacement for Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as the Republican leader in the Senate, but at least one outgoing Democrat is breathing a sigh of relief.

Raw Story asked Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) whether Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — who was selected to become majority leader of the Senate Wednesday — was someone Democrats could work with.

She expressed her approval of the new GOP pick.

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Speaking to Raw Story just after the vote, Stabenow said that Thune would "be a good leader for the Republicans" because "he has good relationships across the aisle" with Democrats.

"We worked together on the Agriculture Committee," she recalled.

Meanwhile, MAGA's hardcore was furious at Wednesday's news, claiming the new majority leader was a man opposed to President-elect Donald Trump.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY) wasn't enthusiastic as he left the Hyatt Regency in Washington, D.C. where Republicans were meeting to hear from Donald Trump on Wednesday.

Members like Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) told Raw Story that the meeting with the caucus was great and filled with optimism. It wasn't like that for Massie, however.

He doesn't think that Speaker Mike Johnson has his vote "locked in" because "he failed to increase our majority in an overwhelming red wave. He just made it tougher on himself."

Also Read: Dysfunction on display: Republicans complain Speaker Johnson is no Pelosi

Massie thinks it all comes down to the "do nothing Congress." A Roll Call analysis showed that Johnson's session passed a mere 106 bills.

"At this point in the 117th, the running tally was 214 laws totaling 4,702 pages," the report said last month.

When asked if he was still "unhappy" with Johnson, Massie confessed it was "an understatement."

He isn't certain whether he'll oppose Johnson, saying there's a lot of time between now and the next session.

"He's going to have to do a 180 on a bunch of crap he shoved down our throats," Massie told Raw Story outside the Hyatt. "Like Ukraine spending, for instance, in order to support Trump's agenda."

"Here's what we should do and here's what's gonna happen," Massie continued. "We should just put Trump's agenda on the floor, one at a time, bill by bill, single subject. For instance, the [border] wall. He needs $30 billion? Put $30 billion in there. Put it on the floor send it to the Senate."

What Massie thinks will happen instead is that Republicans will "attach everything the swamp wants and then say, 'You don't support Trump if you don't vote for this swamp package!'"

"That's exactly what Mike Johnson is going to do, I'm afraid," said Massie.

He said that he hopes speaking to the press and predicting what will happen will help show people how it's unfolding. He has an alternative to Johnson, but he said he wouldn't destroy the person by saying the name.

Members voted in the meeting about who they wanted for the new speaker and Johsnon won the vote. But Massie said that such a vote in a hotel conference room dosn’t matter under the Constitution. Right now “everything’s all rigged. He gets to run the meeting,” said Massie.

BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. — Some Pennsylvania Democrats are freaking out over what they say is a lackluster field operation across the state by Vice President Kamala Harris, which one characterizes as “grossly incompetent” ahead of Election Day.

“Compared to past presidential campaigns, the Harris PA campaign has been dysfunctional and, frankly, incompetent. They’re grossly incompetent,” a senior Pennsylvania Democrat, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told Raw Story this week. “Really simple stuff that they've just dropped the ball on — a ton of stuff. And so everyone — literally every Pennsylvania Democrat I know — is complaining about the incompetence of the people running the Harrisburg, PA operation.”

Other Pennsylvania Democratic politicians and operatives echoed similar concerns to Raw Story, even as many say this year’s down-ticket races are going so well that they may be able to help the Harris campaign.

An example of the “incompetence” offered by one veteran Pennsylvania Democrat is when the Harris campaign sent two busloads of Chinese-speaking New Yorkers to a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia.

ALSO READ: Female Donald Trump' among New York Republicans — and Dems — running on 'law and order'

“And they sent the canvassers who speak Chinese, not to neighborhoods where there would be large Chinese speaking citizens, but instead sent them to North Philly,” they said.

They said the Harris campaign has also been unnecessarily ruffling feathers, like when former Rep. Bob Brady, chair of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party for the past 35 years, wasn’t invited to Harris’ vice presidential rollout after Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was announced back in August.

Rumor is, Brady’s been “pissed” since.

“Brady hasn't stopped b—ing about that since it happened,” Raw Story was told. “You didn’t hear that from me, but it’s 100% the case, though.”

Brady confirmed to Raw Story that there was a slight oversight, but he denies the rumors swirling around Democratic circles.

“I wouldn’t wait in line two hours for anybody,” Brady told Raw Story this week. “No chance. That’s not true.”

Neither the Harris-Walz headquarters in Harrisburg, PA, nor the Harris headquarters in Wilmington, DE, disputed the accounts Raw Story sent them.

But Brady tells the story this way:

“There was an event somewhere that I wasn't invited to for a moment, and then 90 people called me begging me to come. There was a mistake or something. Just some stupid event. No big deal,” Brady said. “Somebody was supposed to call me personally — they don’t send me an email or text — and they thought that I was getting a text from somewhere. And it wasn't a big deal, but once they found out the day before, they went crazy — 19 phone calls apologizing, ‘my mistake,’ ‘my mistake’ — no disrespect at all.”

Fears and accusations of incompetence aside, from his vantage point in Philadelphia, Brady says the Harris campaign has been putting in the necessary work on the ground. He’s even meeting President Joe Biden on the tarmac Friday before they rally the local sprinkler fitters union. But Philadelphia Democrats started this year’s contest with a handicap. There’s been a hole in the local Philadelphia organizing since former Philadelphia labor leader John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty was sentenced to six years in prison for embezzlement this summer.

But Brady denies Philadelphia’s Democratic get-out-the-vote machine has suffered, partly because the indictment first came down in 2019.

“Johnny Doc was a very, very, very small part. He didn't do much anyway. There isn’t that many electricians out there. They didn't do that much. The sheet metalers do more than Johnny Doc ever did. The carpenters do 10 times as much as Johnny,” Brady said. “But you listen to Johnny Doc, he did it all. And he’s my buddy, don't get me wrong. But there's no lull there.”

Taylor Swift rumors swirling

When asked about the accusations of incompetence in their statewide operation here, the Harris campaign sent Raw Story data on its expansive get-out-the-vote effort. Since Harris entered the race, the Pennsylvania operation has had more than 110,000 volunteers knock on close to 2 million doors — “including more than 700,000 in just the last week."

The Harris team also says they’re using “principal, surrogate, and community events to engage voters, gather their information, and mobilize them to volunteer for our campaign.”

Brady says that tracks with the energy he’s seen on the ground.

“They're crisscrossing all over. All the surrogates are all over. We're gonna have [Kamala Harris] in again on Monday night before the election, and I understand that there’s a rumor now that we’re gonna have Taylor Swift. Just a rumor,” Brady said.

With or without a Swift appearance, even Democrats worried about the lackluster Harris campaign in Pennsylvania are optimistic going into Tuesday.

“Democrats here are excited to turn out and to stop Donald Trump,” a veteran Democrat told Raw Story. “Democrats are highly motivated, also out of fear. A lot of Democrats I talk to absolutely fear what a Trump second term would be like, and fear can also be a high motivator.”

Former Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) retired in 2015. Still, this cycle, she’s opened her home for a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), has been doing outreach to the Jewish community, blasted her old supporters list for donations, and gone door-knocking for local Democrats.

The former congresswoman has seen nothing alarming with the Philadelphia get-out-the-vote operation, but Schwartz knows politicians' egos bruise easily.

“I certainly hope they worked it out because this is just too important to let personal hurt feelings get in the way,” Schwartz told Raw Story.

Schwartz was in office when former President Obama fought hard to win the state in 2008 and again in 2012, but she says the energy’s different this year.

“Everyone's quite nervous, but also quite engaged,” Schwartz said. “I feel a different sense of not just energy and enthusiasm for our ticket — you know, for Harris-Walz, for the congressional races, for state rep. races — there's also a deep sense of seriousness about this campaign that it feels a little bit different. It feels like so much is at stake, we cannot risk it.”

“Democrats are on the offense”

On a recent Saturday morning, just outside of Philadelphia in the all-import suburbs of Bucks County, a couple dozen volunteers crowded into a tiny office tucked inside a nondescript strip mall.

“How many of you are knocking for the first time? Okay, we got one. Alright, one. Hey, that's alright. Everybody has their first time knocking, so You usually get about 30 seconds at the door,” West Point graduate and former military helicopter pilot Ashley Ehasz told the room. “Sometimes you get someone who's really engaged — and those are lovely — but when you get them, it's usually 30 seconds.”

This isn’t Ehasz's first rodeo. The Democrat lost to now four-term Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) in 2022 by roughly 10%, but she was confident when she coached a room full of volunteers recently, especially when she discussed reproductive rights—and the lack thereof.

“Kind of the quick pitch is, ‘Hey, she grew up in a family that struggled. Served our country in the military’ — I personally served in Iraq — and then, for the love of God, make sure they know Brian Fitzpatrick voted for a nationwide abortion ban,” Ehasz said. ‘When we dig into it, that's what kind of gets voters, not only engaged in the conversation and kind of the issues of the day, but also shatters that illusion that Brian Fitzpatrick is ‘Mr. Nice Guy,’ ‘Mr. Moderate.’”

After the volunteers hit the pavement, Ehasz sat down with Raw Story in her unadorned back office where she explained how this year’s dynamics are different than the midterms — and not just because Fitzpatrick refused to debate her this year and has, largely, avoided the press.

“Democrats are on the offense now. We lost the House in 2022, so there's just a hunger to win that back,” Ehasz said. “So I think most folks are just really engaged with the congressional races in a way that they just weren't in 2022.”

Fitzpatrick’s campaign didn’t respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

The veteran and her team say there’s been more engagement this year, partly because of the presidential contest. But Ehasz says a lot has changed since then, including Republicans controlling the House in the least productive Congress in history.

“We have seen what a GOP majority will do, and it's to continually attack our reproductive rights,” Ehasz said. “Whereas in 2022 … there were still a lot of hypotheticals even then, but those hypotheticals have become reality. They have gone after IVF. They've gone after contraception.”

“These are some of our toughest races in the country”

About 45 minutes north in Allentown, Pa. is the 7th district where four-term Rep. Susan WIld (D-PA) is facing off against Republican state Rep. Ryan Mackenzie.

The presidential contenders from both parties have made stops in this all-important region, but the incumbent says she’s been focused on running her own grassroots organization. Even as her team coordinates with the Harris team on their canvassing operations and swap campaign literature, Wild hasn’t had time to worry about the Harris PA operation,.

And Wild says she feels good about her team’s get-out-the-vote effort in the Greater Lehigh High Valley.

“This is the ultimate swing district in the ultimate swing state, so I don't take anything for granted,” Wild told Raw Story. “We are going to be working right up to the last.”

The neck-and-neck contest has also attracted all the political royalty Washington offers, including congressional leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Because control of the House could depend on a handful of these tight suburban contests, House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark was recently in the region for an abortion roundtable with Wild.

“These are some of our toughest races in the country, and we also have such strong incumbents that I know they are going to work to the very end and I am confident they're going to be reelected,” Whip Clark told Raw Story after the event. “People do not want to go back. Susan Wild's opponent is already on record in the state house here in Pennsylvania as doing just that.”

Wild says grassroots local operations in her race — and across the commonwealth — will make all the difference, even if having all the big national names paying attention to the district has been energizing.

“It’s just a testament to how important our district is. It's not about me. They are literally coming in — on both sides of the aisle — because they know that the voters here in Pennsylvania 7th are going to potentially be the ones that decide who has the House majority,” Wild said. “The voters of Pennsylvania 7th may very well be the ones who decide who the next president of the United States is going to be, because you don't win Pennsylvania if you don't win Pennsylvania 7th.”

“Do you feel like voters understand that?” Raw Story asked.

“I talk about it at every single event I do,” Wild told Raw Story. “It's really like Katherine Clark's not coming in for me. Hakeem Jeffries didn't come in for me. They came in because they recognize this is the center of the universe, Pennsylvania 7th.”

NOW READ: This shouldn’t be a dead-even race

Matt Laslo was the Washington correspondent for WHYY, Philadelphia’s NPR station from 2014-2020.

ULSTER COUNTY, NY — Law and order is on the ballot nationwide this November, but with many Democrats fearful of another Jan. 6-like insurrection in 2025, it’s becoming a centerpiece in some of the most hotly contested congressional seats in the nation this cycle.

“I am not a traditional or career politician. I'm a cop,” Alison Esposito — who spent nearly 25 years in the NYPD — told the audience at a recent Ulster County Chamber of Commerce candidates forum. “That's who I am, that's what I am, that's kind of what I will always be. I have decided to throw my hat into this arena and go into government, but I will never be a politician. I'll always be a cop.”

Esposito’s challenging two-term incumbent Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) in their battle to represent the Hudson Valley in Washington next year.

“Candidates who claim to be for law and order supporting a convicted felon who incited insurrectionists to attack and kill law enforcement, I don't know how you rationalize that,” Ryan — a West Point graduate who served two tours in Iraq — told Raw Story after the two sparred on stage at their candidate’s forum. “I'll let her try to explain that. I got nothing for you.”

ALSO READ: To hell with Trump's voters

Similar dynamics are at play in Bucks County, Penn. except the roles are reversed, as West Point graduate Ashley Ehasz, a Democrat, challenges four-term incumbent Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), a former F.B.I. agent and federal prosecutor.

“He is someone who is in a deeply dangerous position of whitewashing the far-right extremist message — he takes it, he whitewashes it — so that way it becomes more palatable to voters, which is extremely dangerous,” Ehasz told Raw Story in her campaign headquarters recently. “He knows better and yet chooses to do wrong. He does the bidding of the Trumpists and the MAGA extremists.”

While political operatives have tried to focus the 2024 election on the economy, immigration and abortion, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is front and center in some tight races that could decide who controls Congress next year.

“It’d be charming to have a female Donald Trump”

In the Hudson Valley, Esposito is new to politics, but this isn’t her first rodeo. In 2022, she ran for lieutenant governor of New York on the losing ticket with former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY).

During her time in the NYPD, she was part of a group of officers sued by three Black women who argued they were wrongly arrested for shoplifting — a case Esposito lost, costing New York City taxpayers $95,000. She also lost a lawsuit for “allegedly arresting and assaulting an infant,” which cost taxpayers another $25,000.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, Esposito was a commanding officer in Brooklyn when protesters and police clashed across New York City. Esposito says she’s running because she “saw an attack on public safety, law and order.” Still, she hasn’t spoken much on the brutality unleashed on the law enforcement officials who protected the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“What do you make of what happened to the Capitol Police officers on Jan. 6, like them being attacked?” Raw Story asked.

“First of all, I condemn harshly any criminal activity, including anyone attacking a cop. Done and done,” Esposito responded before, in the same breath, changing the subject. “In the same way that I will harshly criticize the riots of 2020 that Kamala Harris was funding to bail out the perpetrators. People like [New York Attorney General] Letitia James and [Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg, instead of going after the perpetrators of the riots in New York City that were burning our city. They were going after the cops that were defending themselves.”

When the moderator asked who she planned to vote for in the presidential contest, Esposito demurred.

Her opponent, the incumbent Pat Ryan, says her response was telling. He was trained on West Point’s honor code — "a Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do" — and says Esposito’s proving she’s no leader.

“Toleration is a big part of the problem in today's Republican Party, certainly for my opponent, where she's locked behind them, hasn't said a single thing that she disagrees with on,” Ryan told Raw Story. “She had another opportunity today to do that. I gave her one in our last debate.”

While Esposito evaded the question of who she’s voting for in front of dozens of business owners from across the community, afterwards Raw Story pressed her on it.

“Are you gonna vote for Trump?” Raw Story asked.

“Am I gonna vote for Trump? Yeah. I'm not voting for Harris. I'm not,” Esposito said. “Absolutely. Yeah, I'm voting for Trump.”

That seemed pretty clear to voters in the audience who weren’t too impressed with all the ducking and dodging, even if they did leave the forum with a better understanding of the candidates.

“They both made a career out of not answering questions in there,” Chelsea, a small business owner who asked we not use her full name, told Raw Story.

Still, she says Ryan won her over.

“I disagreed on many points, but he is the best option, so that's who I’m gonna vote for,” Chelsea told Raw Story. “He's been outrageous about Israel, but he's like the hometown boy.”

As for Esposito’s tough-on-crime platform?

“It’d be charming to have a female Donald Trump, but, yeah, I just wouldn't do it,” Chelsea said.

“He deeply misleads voters”

Three hours south on I-87, another West Point graduate is locked in an intense battle in the all-important suburbs of Philadelphia.

If elected, Ashley Ehasz would be the first female West Point graduate ever elected to Congress. She says the military academy's motto — “duty, honor, country” — is partly why she’s forcing Fitzpatrick into this rematch of their 2022 contest.

Earlier this year, the Lugar Center and the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy named Fitzpatrick the most bipartisan member of the House for the fifth year in a row, but Ehasz isn’t buying the moderate veneer her Republican opponent presents to voters.

“It’s complete bulls—t. That's all it is,” Ehasz told Raw Story. “I'll keep coming back to pro-choice, pro-democracy leadership, and I think Brian Fitzpatrick is neither of those, and yet he deeply misleads voters into, frankly, trying to trick them into thinking he is.”

Fitzpatrick didn’t make himself available to Raw Story for this piece.

While Fitzpatrick voted to certify the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, Ehasz says it was smoke and mirrors because he later opposed the select Jan. 6 committee.

When it comes to GOP leadership, Ehasz also points out that Fitzgerald endorsed the speaker bid of far-right Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — who spearheaded the failed Biden impeachment effort this year — before Fitzpatrick joined his party in unanimously electing now-Speaker Mike Johnson, knowing he penned an amicus brief in support of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“That does not say moderate to me, does not say bipartisan to me, and does not say, ‘I'm gonna protect democracy’ to me,” Ehasz told Raw Story.

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HUDSON VALLEY, NY — The foliage is spectacular, but there’s little respite in upstate New York for people trying to escape this year’s elections. Yard signs are everywhere, and if you flip on a TV or YouTube, chances are you’ll hear ominous music before an ad accuses one member of Congress or another of being either a “sellout” or “so extreme, it’s dangerous.”

“I'm here today to cut through the BS that you see on television,” first-term Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) told local upstate New York business owners recently.

Good luck with that.

While there are lots of loud pro-Trump signs up here, the presidential contest is a sideshow even in rural parts of this blue state. The main event here is the fight for control of the House of Representatives, evidenced by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) once again crisscrossing the same sprawling upstate New York district Friday.

The two party leaders know their personal futures — and those of their respective parties, including potentially the presidency itself — are on the line in battleground districts like these from coast to coast. Still, the two leaders have been paying particular attention to New York contests of late, for good reason.

ALSO READ: Inside the grift that could cost Donald Trump the election

“The final battleground”

While this year’s Senate map is favorable for Republicans and gives them a solid chance of recapturing the chamber Tuesday, Democrats only need four more House seats to win back the majority. And as many as seven races are up for grabs across the Empire State.

Even Democrats who are all-in for Vice President Kamala Harris say that in the event her blue wall—Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—fails and Trump recaptures the White House, the House of Representatives is Democrats' last potential check on the twice-impeached former president and the GOP he’s remade in his populist image.

“They're really intense — ground game! They matter. It's the balance of power in the House,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — who many New Yorkers barely know is up for reelection this year — told Raw Story this fall. “We have to win the House because the House is the final battleground to prevent the horrible things that a Trump presidency would do.”

In 2020, Trump and his allies filed some 60 lawsuits after the election. This year, roughly a week ahead of Election Day, Democratic lawyer Marc Elias reported there were “199 active voting and election cases pending in 40 states,” and the conservative-leaning Roberts Supreme Court already ruled in Trump's favor on one of them challenging a last-minute purge of the voter rolls in Virginia.

With the Trump campaign suing early and often nationwide, challenging everything from mail-in ballots and state voter rolls to drop boxes and overseas ballots, Democrats argue their party needs the House majority back because they don’t trust Johnson in the speaker’s chair when the election is certified Jan. 6, 2025.

Democrats say that’s all the more true after Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, where former President Donald Trump hinted at an election secret—“...we will tell you what it is when the race is over…”—he shared with Speaker Johnson.

With the election mere days away, party leaders' final push in upstart New York is telling, but it may not be enough.

Embattled congressional incumbents across the region have been working hard to maintain their brand identities since the 2022 midterms, but the 2024 election cycle is testing whether moderates are now mere mythical creatures.

“They don't blame that on House Republicans”

During halftime at a recent home Mahopac High School football game, after a short speech, suitless Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) walked through a sea of his voter’s children, pausing for an occasional selfie in this exurb of New York City.

“Is that Mike Lawler?” a couple of giggling young girls ask.

“How are you?” Lawler replies.

“When six-year-olds know who you are, it’s like — it says something,” Lawler says through a fatherly, if slightly depressed, laugh. “I don't hide. You have to be present.”

And Lawler’s, seemingly, been everywhere. He’s held nearly 1,000 events across his district in the past 21 months. Children recognize him from all the ads he’s in these days, even as many parents know him for regularly appearing on local television or CNN, whether he’s speaking on behalf of the more liberal wing of his far-right party or, say, apologizing for wearing blackface in college.

Outside groups and his opponent, former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), have spent countless millions of dollars portraying Lawler as a rubber-stamp for Speaker Johnson, his colleague’s far-right agenda and Washington dysfunction. That’s precisely what Lawler doesn’t want his constituents to know him for, even as this Congress has been one big ball of GOP-fueled dysfunction.

Lawler’s party is in the majority, but it can’t fund the government without relying on Democrats. Lawmakers nearly defaulted on the nation’s debt last summer. And Republicans shut down Congress itself for some three weeks last fall as the party bitterly battled behind closed doors over former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s replacement.

“Like, what's your pitch?” Raw Story asked as the marching band took the field. “Because there's been so much dysfunction in the House…”

“You guys — the media — zeros in on that. That's not where people are. They're looking at the actual substance of the issues,” Lawler told Raw Story. “The affordability crisis? They don't blame that on House Republicans, they blame that on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The border crisis? They don't blame that on House Republicans, they blame that on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

While Republicans across the northeast used to inhabit the moderate middle, in recent years at the federal level most have evolved into something many New Yorkers barely recognize.

New York Republican’s Trumpian turn

Take Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). After winning in 2014, the conservative Club for Growth described her as “very much a liberal” because she advocated for things like conservatives leading on climate change. She was hailed as the youthful future of the GOP.

In 2015, she became the youngest female member of Congress in history (a record she relinquished to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2019). The Republican Policy Committee created a new Taskforce on Millennials for her to chair. And she’s risen in the ranks since.

She transformed in the first Trump administration, and then, in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Stefanik replaced former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in House GOP leadership. Climate change is now a curse to her, as she tries to curry favor with Trump by moving the Republican Conference even further to the right.

Earlier in this Congress, Stefanik teamed up with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) when the two introduced companion measures to expunge Trump’s impeachments (even as many legal scholars say that’s impossible).

While Stefanik represents a sprawling, seemingly safe rural seat bordering Canada, incumbent Republicans who live closer to New York City have also been turning heads this cycle by mirroring Trump.

From moderate to MAGA

While MAGA is en vogue in today’s GOP, following Donald Trump’s lead gets expensive real quick in the suburbs of New York City, where Trump made a name for himself on Page Six over the decades.

The Trump effect has played a big role in why Molinaro — the Republican congressman who promised to “cut through the BS” up top — has found himself locked in a roughly $38.4 million rematch with his Democratic opponent, Harvard-educated lawyer Josh Riley.

In 2022, Molinaro beat Riley by a mere 2%, and they’re neck and neck again. This is why both Johnson and Jeffries are spending Friday in New York’s 19th district as the race for the speaker’s gavel heats up in the final hours.

Molinaro is a former Dutchess County town executive known for being pragmatic, at least in the past. He gained respect statewide in 2018 for running for the state Republican Party and challenging then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a strong, if young, moderate conservative.

Molinaro held his own, in part by keeping Trump at a distance, like when he called Cuomo a “schoolchild” after the governor pressed him on Trump in their debate. Back then, he refused to say whether or not he voted for Trump. After two years in Washington, the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School named him the second most bipartisan House member.

But his critics say something changed this election cycle. The Molinaro running in 2024 is all-in on Trump. He now pushes the party line on immigration and policing.

But he really turned heads for refusing to remove his tweet on X that perpetuates the Springfield, Ohio migrant conspiracy, even after upwards of 30 bomb threats were called in to schools and government buildings in the formerly sleepy midwestern town.

Molinaro’s tweet on X spreading lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio that he’s refused to take down since posting it Sept. 9, 2024.

“Congressman, you've been criticized for amplifying unfounded claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were capturing and eating pets,” a moderator asked in their October debate. “What is your response to the criticism that your claims are both inflammatory and dangerous?”

“You've missed all of the year and a half of us arguing for real border security,” Molinaro replied. “I voted for the strictest border security policy in generations, and the president of the United States chose not to negotiate.”

“He wouldn't answer the question as to whether he stands by a dangerous and harmful conspiracy theory that he's been peddling,” Riley told the audience. “Maybe you're embarrassed about it. I would be if those words had come out of my mouth.”

That’s far from the middle-of-the-road conservative upstate New Yorkers knew when he first became a small town mayor. Still, that’s the Molinaro many residents remember — despite all the accusations flying in what’s become the 4th most expensive House race in 2024.

“These are our people. These are our people from our community, and they are present locally — they try and be present locally,” Jennifer — a regional executive who asked we withhold her last name to keep politics out of her business — told Raw Story after the candidate’s forum.

No place for bipartisanship in 2024 election

The record of incumbent Republicans in these parts is complicated.

The delegation was pivotal in forcing GOP leaders to let the House vote to expel former Rep. George Santos (R-NY). And they’ve teamed up with Democrats on locally essential measures, like cleaning up the Hudson River, which Reps. Lawler, Molinaro and Pat Ryan (D-NY) collaborated on.

But 2024 isn't about bipartisanship. It’s about winning and expanding the party.

“I certainly want a Democratic majority,” Ryan told Raw Story after he and Molinaro addressed the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce candidate’s forum. “Marc and I have worked together. Like, we are genuinely friends on the human level — we've taken our kids to Blippi shows together — but we disagree on a whole lot of stuff.”

While many GOP incumbents have tried to distance themselves from party infighting and the ensuing Washington dysfunction, Democrats have been making the case that moderate Republicans are extinct. But Ryan goes further and has been running against Speaker Johnson himself.

“I always try to remind people, one of the most — if not the most — important votes you take as members is who will be speaker. And we've seen [fmr. Speaker Kevin] McCarthy fail to deliver anything. Now we've seen Johnson — who represents the most extreme right-wing in the party — be selected as a speaker, the guy who authored the national abortion ban bill, was a legal architect of Jan. 6, attacked LGBTQ rights,” Ryan said. “When I tell people that they almost sort of sit up.”

For their part, the GOP has painted upstate New York Democrats as far-left radicals. Ryan’s been criticized for campaigning with Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), especially after he — gasp! — hugged her at an October event.

The Democrat brushes the barbs aside, in part by regularly bragging about standing up nationally to the Biden administration on, say, immigration while also pushing back locally against Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) on unpopular measures like congestion pricing in New York CIty.

What presidential contest?

That doesn’t mean the incumbent wants to talk about this year’s Democratic presidential nominee, as the audience learned at the candidate’s forum.

“You’re all smart, educated, informed people, I’m not here to talk about the presidential race,” Ryan said. “In a pretty unusual way, I’ve been willing to stand up and speak truth to my party in a way that doesn’t happen that often these days in our politics.”

“This is the difference between speaking one way and actions,” his GOP challenger, former NYPD officer Alison Esposito, replied. “The congressman has been a rubber-stamp for the failed Biden-Harris administration on many levels.”

“I’m actually not gonna unpack it mistruth by mistruth, what I am gonna remind everybody is, my opponent didn’t actually answer the question whatsoever,” Ryan replied. “I am gonna vote for Kamala Harris.”

While Esposito didn’t tell the audience who she was voting for, in the hall afterward, she told Raw Story she was backing Trump.

“I'm not voting for Harris, I'm not. Absolutely, yeah, I'm voting for Trump,” Esposito told Raw Story. “[Ryan] has no policy to stand on, so he needs to make this election about MAGA, Trump, abortion — existential threats.”

MAGA’s on the ballot

In the campaign's final week, Speaker Johnson also has events scheduled with a candidate in New Jersey, a candidate North Carolina, a candidate in Virginia and a fundraiser with a Connecticut candidate (who’s thought to have no real chance of winning, wealthy friends and all).

After traversing his home state, Minority Leader Jeffries is heading to Alabama to help former Obama aide Shomari Figures try and pick up the newly redrawn Black-majority seat that resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting a GOP drawn electoral map last year. Then Jeffries is off to Michigan where three seats are in play.

With its staggering seven seats in play, New York has been, basically, one-stop shopping for both parties since the midterms, but with this year’s razor-thin polling margins, the Empire State is now the epicenter of Election 2024.

“If Trump wins, is your pitch to voters, we need the House to be a check on him?” Raw Story asked.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) told Raw Story on the campaign trail recently. “No matter what happens at the top of the ticket, we need the House.”

But more so, Democrats have come to see the House as the fount of extremism in today’s Washington, as it’s been the chamber legitimizing and magnifying Trump’s message, conspiracies and all. And they especially don’t trust today’s conspiracy-peddling House majority in charge when the House is tasked with certifying the election on Jan. 6, 2025.

That’s why across the northeast — once the land of clear-headed, if brash, political titans dotted throughout U.S. history — voters are being told America needs them.

“We’ve had a do-nothing Congress that is also one that has true extremism in its leadership,” Clark said. “The so-called moderates go along with the most extreme parts of that agenda, so winning the House is absolutely crucial to continuing to put solutions before the American people and not just MAGA extremism.”

NOW READ: Fox News is the reason the race is close

KINGSTON, NY — Former President Donald Trump’s upcoming Madison Square Garden rally is a joke, if a “depressing” one, to many New York business owners.

Tuesday, as the sun was still rising on a brisk, windless fall morning at the Wiltwyck Golf Club, down-ballot congressional candidates made their clunky pitches to local business owners, who sometimes found themselves more fixated on the buffet of eggs, bacon and quasi-fresh fruit laid out for them than on the politicians at the lectern.

The otherwise unremarkable event is memorable for showcasing the contortions of Democratic and Republican candidates alike this election cycle as they try to distance themselves from their party’s presidential candidate in this highly nationalized election cycle.

However, maintaining distance from the top of the ticket is increasingly impossible in the Empire State, partly because Trump keeps inserting himself into his (former) home state politics.

“We just rented Madison Square Garden,” Trump said to cheers at his Scranton, Pa. rally last Wednesday. “We’re going to make a play for New York.”

ALSO READ: Signs of what will happen on Election Day are everywhere

While thousands are now signing up to attend—though it’s unclear if anyone’s bought the $924,600 "Ultra MAGA Experience" package yet —Trump’s last-minute announcement of an Oct. 27 rally at the iconic home of the New York Knicks and Rangers has been met with many eye rolls across this blue state.

“He’s mentally ill”

Once the candidates stopped talking and just as the golfers started swinging, Raw Story caught up with local business leaders on the man who paints himself as the ultimate businessman.

“Do you think Trump thinks he can win New York?” Raw Story asked.

“No, there’s no chance,” Chelsea, a small business owner in Ulster, NY, who asked Raw Story not to use her full name.

“But he thinks he does?” Raw Story pressed. “Or why’s he doing a rally at Madison Square Garden?”

“Because he’s mentally ill,” Chelsea said through a nervous laugh.

Others in this bipartisan, hyper-pro-business crowd aren’t laughing.

To many here in the state Trump called home until 2019 when he declared Mar-a-Lago his primary residence, this is just par for the course.

“Do you think Trump has a chance in New York?” Raw Story asked the chairman of New York’s Ulster County Regional Chamber of Commerce.

“No,” Al Roberts matter-of-factly replied.

“Then what’s his fascination with it?” Raw Story pressed. “Why’s he keep coming back here?”

“It’s his home,” Roberts told Raw Story. “It’s where he came from.”

“What do you make of him doing a rally at Madison Square Garden?” Raw Story asked.

“It’s who he is. He's an entertainer. A celebrity. Where else are you gonna get that kind of attention?” Roberts said. “If nothing else, he is a good marketer. And he knows his brand and doesn't change from it, as much as people want him to do it. It's worked, so he's gonna keep doing it.”

While his fellow business leaders may dismiss him as an entertainer, Trump’s brand is appealing to many in large rural swaths of this sprawling state.

Some younger Republicans see a path for Trump

A couple hours south of the historic country club — a ride replete with dozens of proudly pro-Trump signs on main thoroughfares and backroads alike — the Trump buzz is tangible, which makes news of a Madison Square Garden rally electrifying.

“I like that,” Dayton Leone — a junior in high school in an exurb of New York City — told Raw Story. “I like that.”

“Do you think he can win New York?” Raw Story inquired.

“I do,” Leone said. “I think he can win.”

Youthful optimism aside, Trump’s appeal outside of New York City is something many Republican congressional incumbents — even ones who’ve avoided his previous New York rallies — are banking on this cycle.

“I wouldn't say the state is in play for Trump, but in the districts that will determine control of Congress, he's doing very well in,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) told Raw Story at a high school football game in Mahopac, NY earlier this week. “That should send a big red flag to Democrats across the country that like, where there is actually competition is a very different dynamic than what they're projecting.”

“What's changed?” Raw Story pressed. “Like, is Trump just like an ethos now, or Dems doing such a poor job…?”

“It's the substance of the issues,” Lawler said. “So whether people like him or not, it's almost irrelevant to the point that what they don't like is the disaster at our southern border. What they don't like is that they're paying through the nose for groceries, gas, housing and Kamala Harris wouldn’t change one thing — like, ‘Oh, everything’s great.’”

Everything’s not great, especially among independent-minded voters who are sick of the tens of millions of dollars in lies blanketing their screens these days.

“It’s so depressing”

Back at the country club, as robotic golf caddies hum as they skirt across the manicured greens outside as they pull the heavy, clanging clubs of today’s lazy golfers, inside many New York business leaders are fretting.

“Do you think Trump thinks he can win New York?” Raw Story asked.

“No, I think that’s just a show. Everything about him is a show,” Jennifer — an Upstate New York credit union executive who asked we not use her last name for professional reasons — told Raw Story. “I try to ignore him, because he’s gotten so depressing. It’s so depressing.”

ALSO READ: Not even ‘Fox and Friends’ can hide Trump’s dementia

WASHINGTON — Democrats on Capitol Hill saw a ghost during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, or at least they wish they did.

Once the debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate — and Sen. J.D. Vance — former President Donald Trump’s right-hand man — wrapped, Raw Story texted 15+ Democratic members of Congress with a simple question: “Is Vance more of a threat than you thought going into the debate?”

Only four of the more than 15 Democrats we reached out to replied. Just two on the record; the others asked not to be named so they could speak candidly, if sheepishly.

“On background…,” one Democratic member of Congress responded to Raw Story’s inquiry about Vance’s blue-eyed performance. “Yes.”

ALSO READ: The NYT just set itself on fire

In replying to Raw Story, another sitting Democratic member of Congress also expressed a desire not to be named after witnessing the often cringeworthy vice presidential debate.

“Not for attribution?” another Democratic lawmaker replied to Raw Story’s inquiry of whether they now see Vance’s casual, smirking political style as a threat. “He’s a sociopath who should never be anywhere near the nuclear button or the White House.”

“On the record: J.D. Vance used tonight to campaign for himself for 2028 rather than defend his running mate,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) texted Raw Story. “But even then, the slick Yale venture capitalist lost the two big exchanges of the night: Jan 6 and abortion.”

Still, other Democrats are resting in the fact that the V.P. debate and Vance—or so they hope—are now behind them.

“He’s slick. Walz is folksy and relatable,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) texted back to Raw Story’s inquiry. “In the final analysis, VP debates are interesting but irrelevant. I can’t think of one that moved the needle in a presidential race.”

While he’s not a Democrat — even if he has left the Republican Party, he was a proud member while serving in Congress — former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) said Tuesday’s vice presidential debate was illuminating because he now sees Vance more clearly.

“He lies better and is much more manipulative than Trump,” Riggleman texted Raw Story. “He is MAGA’s future.”

Riggleman doesn’t know why all these Democratic elected officials are distracted by Vance’s performance.

“He has a critical weakness though: He can’t separate himself from Trump and his recorded comments and blatant misrepresentations are imprinted on so many,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “Trump is still top of the ticket. Vance will always be the boy who attached himself to the most vile POTUS of our generation.”

ALSO READ: The Senate hasn’t missed J.D. Vance — especially Republicans needing ‘a timeout’

WASHINGTON — Democrats are bracing for Jan. 6, 2025, which is why many are making post-election security a central plank in their pitch to voters ahead of November’s elections.

Even before vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance refused to say if he would have certified the 2020 election in this week’s debate, Democrats on Capitol Hill were raising concerns that House Speaker Mike Johnson could, once again, try to interfere with the election results.

“Have you thought much about Jan. 6, 2025?” Raw Story asked at the Capitol.

“Yes,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) told Raw Story last month.

“Do you have fear if Johnson’s in the chair that day?” Raw Story pressed.

ALSO READ: The menstrual police are coming: Inside the GOP's plan for total control over women

“It won't be good,” Cohen said while exiting the Capitol. “But I think we'll have a new speaker by then.”

During the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House, but if Republicans maintain their majority this fall, Speaker Johnson—or his party’s choice to replace him—will oversee the House on Jan. 6, 2025.

While reclaiming the gavel and the power that comes with being the majority in the House of Representatives is Democrat’s top concern this cycle, many in the party are increasingly raising concerns about the specter of Speaker Johnson being in charge during the official counting of the Electoral College results in the House.

That’s why Democrats are braced, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

Raskin says Democrats must win and then “defend the election.”

“Are you worried about a Bush v Gore redux?” Raw Story asked Raskin about the 2000 Supreme Court case that tilted the election to former President George W. Bush.

“Democrats have two main objectives,” Raskin told Raw Story on the Capitol steps in September. “One is to go out and win the election, and the second is to defend the election.”

ALSO READ: The NYT just set itself on fire

Before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan publicly unsealed the latest court filing from special counsel Jack Smith this week, Trump was looking impenetrable from the nation’s courts, according to Raskin.

The constitutional lawyer says the Supreme Court’s pro-Trump rulings on three pivotal Jan. 6 cases have likely only emboldened the former president.

“We understand that Donald Trump thinks he's on a winning streak in the Supreme Court,” Raskin said. “The justices he named overturned abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. They pulled a rabbit out of a hat and invented a new doctrine of presidential immunity from prosecution. And undoubtedly, he thinks that the Supreme Court will save him from the fact that he doesn't have anything remotely resembling a real presidential campaign.”

Speaker Johnson pushing “delusional” claims in 2024

After the attack on the Capitol three years ago, a bipartisan coalition updated the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Lawmakers spelled out that the vice president can’t reject electors sent to Congress by the states because the role is presiding over the proceedings is “solely ministerial.”

Now, one-fifth of Congress—in both the House and Senate—would need to agree before an objection to state electors can be heard. The changes were hard fought but didn't go as far as many progressives wanted. Jan. 6 select committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) says that an extra buffer is important.

“As you know, we did revise the Electoral Count Act to prevent mischief,” Lofgren told Raw Story while walking to the Capitol last month. “But all laws envision people abiding by them.”

“So, are you nervous?” Raw Story pressed.

“I don't want to say ‘nervous.’ I am mindful the majority of the Republicans voted to overturn the election — destroying the fabric of the American constitutional system,” Lofgren said.

In 2021, some six hours after the Capitol was stormed, 147 Republicans — including now-Speaker Johnson — voted to object to the legitimate slate of electors Pennsylvania sent to Washington.

But even before the failed insurrection, Johnson — a constitutional lawyer by training — wrote a brief Trump and other Republicans used to bolster their false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Heading into November’s election, critics fear Trump and Johnson are already laying the groundwork for a challenge by pushing falsehoods about noncitizens voting.

“Which is obviously delusional,” Lofgren said. “Well, let's just say the law is clear, and I'm prepared to vote to certify the winner, whomever it is.”

“What you swore an oath to do,” Raw Story said.

“That’s exactly right,” Lofgren replied.

A handful of Republicans have already vowed to join Democrats in certifying whoever wins in November. While many of them have also raised concerns about the integrity of American elections, these Republicans are also seen as a counterweight to Trump and Johnson’s claims about election interference.

“It does happen, but the reality, over the long haul, is that our elections are secure,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) told a gaggle of reporters on the Capitol steps a couple of weeks ago.

Like most elected Republicans these days, Lawler still claims there were “issues in certain states” with the results in 2020. Still, in September, Lawler joined a bipartisan coalition of “31 Members in launching a new unity commitment to respect election results.”

“At the end of the day, this will be determined by the American people,” Lawler confidently predicted of November’s election results, despite the rhetoric from his fellow Republicans.

“Then you just have to hope and pray…”

There’s broad agreement that the security situation in the nation’s capital will be stouter on Jan. 6, 2025, than it was in 2021, which gives Democrats some solace.

“My sense is that Capitol Police would be much better prepared,” former ambassador Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told Raw Story at the Capitol recently. “The National Guard would be on standby, and we won't have a Pentagon that says, ‘Don't go.’”

Still, like many of his Democratic colleagues, Beyer’s on guard against Republican interference.

“It's a very real worry,” Beyer said. “Then you just have to hope and pray that a lifetime of education of American values and history kicks in and they don't ignore the Constitution and the law.”

“Do you have faith in that after last time?” Raw Story pressed.

“There were many disappointments last time. The big disappointment was after the assault and so many voted not to certify. It was very discouraging, just in terms of their love of country,” Beyer told Raw Story. “Walking away from the fundamental constitutional structure of the country, that's corrosive. That's power for power's sake.”

NOW READ: He’s a sociopath:' J.D. Vance has Congressional Democrats freaking out

WASHINGTON—Many House Republicans are experiencing buyer’s remorse, yet they’re saddled with Speaker Mike Johnson for the foreseeable future. The feeling seems mutual.

Johnson still smiles for the cameras, but his future as a speaker is uncertain. Rank-and-file Republicans say he’s not a fighter like those running atop the GOP ticket this fall.

“The public is thirsty to fight for something,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told Raw Story after voting against a measure averting a government shutdown Wednesday. “You don't have to win every fight, but you got to fight. We’re just not fighting.”

This week, after 11 months of overseeing bruisingly embarrassing internal GOP squabbles, Johnson could hardly wait to gavel the House of Representatives into an extended recess through Election Day, which he did Wednesday after canceling this Thursday and Friday’s planned legislative days on Capitol Hill.

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The GOP is just looking sloppy heading into this election, which has some Republicans comparing Johnson to his predecessors.

“Mike is the leader right now, and he's got a tough job,” Norman said. “Nancy Pelosi knew how to operate in the realm of — she understood leverage. And she understood how to get it passed.”

Johnson has learned that to get things passed, he must reach across the aisle and rely on Democrats. This was on display this week when 209 Democrats helped Johnson and the GOP do the basic work of Congress and fund the federal government through the election. On the GOP side of the aisle, 82 Republicans opposed the measure.

"I share the anger and frustration, and I don't think Republicans deserve to be re-elected to hold the majority," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said Thursday. "And it's a double-edged sword, and here it is."

It wasn’t me…

Leaning on Democrats to run the House only enrages Johnson’s right flank even more. They’re itching for more fights while hoping their ranks of rabble-rousers grow this November.

“How do you go home and say, ‘send me back, we know how to govern’?” Raw Story asked members of the far-right Freedom Caucus on the Capitol steps as lawmakers rushed to catch their flights out of town. “What's your pitch to voters?”

“Well, I do my job. I can't speak for the rest of everyone else,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) told Raw Story before hopping in her awaiting car. “Well, I fulfilled every single one of my campaign promises. So I think if I was talking to voters nationally if you're frustrated, stop sending us more of the same old.”

As Republicans headed for the exits yesterday, many were bemoaning GOP leadership and the lack thereof.

“America always loses when these clowns,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) vented Wednesday to reporters on the Capitol steps.

“Did you see what just happened right now? They all applauded because we're leaving a day early. ‘Oh, we get to go home a day early,’” Roy said. “The hardworking average American out there doesn't usually leave a day early. They need a government that's not incompetent.”

Roy, now on his third term, and other relatively newer members of the GOP feel they were sent here to upend Washington, including their own party.

“It is a difficult task when you've got a twin problem, which is radical progressive Democrats who will work with us on virtually nothing and then Republicans who kind of keep going around each other, you know, chasing our tails, and you got to reform what you might pejoratively call the uniparty or the swamp,” Roy explained.

As for Roy’s personal appeal to voters this fall?

“My pitch is actually pretty easy. We moved the ball way down the field. We've had many more amendments than we’ve been able to have. We've exposed a lot of the votes that were being closed that were being clamped down by leadership by opening up the process,” Roy said. “The reason we couldn't go further is you've got Chuck Schumer and the Democrats who literally won't work with us. They haven't passed a single bill. So I can make that pitch.”

“We don't really have a working majority”

The bomb throwers may be the loudest in today’s new right, but complaints from veteran Republicans are starting to grow louder.

“I think this is kind of extraordinary. They hate everything, you know, and so that means we don't really have a working majority,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) told Raw Story, walking to vote in the Capitol this week.

Last week, 14 Republicans opposed a different version of the government funding measure — a.k.a. the continuing resolution or CR — even though it included former President Donald Trump’s SAVE Act, which would, redundantly, require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

“I’m like, ‘What the hell do you want?’ We could have at least golfed it over to the Senate, and they would have had to deal with it or strip it out — or something — and send it back. And then, okay, then that'll be a terrible bill you can all vote against it,” LaMalfa complained of his fellow Republicans. “At least move the bill and continue discussion in the Senate. So that's what my frustrations are.”

LaMalfa says Republicans are missing an opportunity to reach voters with the very reins of power voters handed the party in the 2022 midterms.

“We passed some good bills here and there, and we've kept the place going. I think we've curbed spending to a degree that would not have happened otherwise,” LaMalfa said. “We were able to put some brakes on some things, but do people want to hear ‘putting brakes on some things’ or do they wanna hear great new things?”

Even though he’s a conservative, LaMalfa knows the contemporary GOP must offer voters more than gridlock.

“That’s what they wanna hear, especially the voters we’re trying to talk to right now in the presidential election,” LaMalfa said. “You wanna say, ‘Who are these joy voters? What are they gonna want to hear?’ That we put the brakes on things or they wanna hear aspirations and things like that, like Kamala talks about? Some of these voters, you have to say, ‘This is what we’re doing. These are the positive things we’ve done.’ That’s a little harder to grasp in this malaise or muddle or whatever you want to call it that’s been going on.”

What’s that portend for the GOP if they maintain control of the House in 2025?

“Unless we add a lot to our majority and there's a pretty big lineup change amongst us, it probably, you know, it could look similar or the same,” LaMalfa said. “But if we blow the majority…”

That’s a terrifying prospect to Democrats.

Johnson is Democrats’ speaker, too

From the embarrassing and drawn-out 15 rounds of ballots it took for the GOP to elect then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy last January to the 21 days the House was leaderless after McCarthy was ingloriously ousted last fall, Democrats have spent the entire 118th Congress watching a GOP civil war engulf the party.

“From the standpoint of, I'm in the minority and, therefore, playing defense, they make it pretty easy to play defense,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told Raw Story outside the Capitol this week. “Even when they pass bills that I vote against in Ways and Means [Committee], they never even make it to the floor, much less to the Senate.”

While Beyer and other Democrats often chuckle at Johnson’s inability to rein in his own, the four-term Louisiana Republican owes his speaker’s gavel to them.

“Was one of the harder votes you took this Congress supporting Speaker Johnson?” Raw Story asked the former ambassador.

“It wasn't that hard, only because we saw the chaos,” Beyer recalled of Democrats rallying behind Johnson after the House went three weeks without a leader last fall. “It wasn't done out of affection or respect for Speaker Johnson, but rather a respect for the institution. To throw it into chaos once again and to have another three or four weeks where nothing happens, it's just crazy.”

The vote was only made easier after Kevin McCarthy reneged on a budget deal he’d negotiated with President Joe Biden earlier last year.

“I think many Democrats, including me, felt that Speaker McCarthy was so unreliable that you couldn't trust what he said from one day to the next,” Beyer said. “And that Speaker Johnson, even if you disagree with him, at least he was consistent.”

It’s gotten so bad in the House under Johnson that even Democrats are missing McCarthy these days.

“They’re a dysfunctional party,” former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story while riding an elevator in the Capitol Wednesday. “Choosing a leader who had no experience and getting rid of a leader, frankly, who had been able to navigate a lot of rough waters, there’s a large group of people who do not care about doing the work of Congress.”

That’s made House Democrat’s pitch to voters relatively simple this election cycle.

“If the American people, if they want a productive Congress — if they want Congress to be able to do things that will make the country better — than they need to elect us, just based upon performance,” Hoyer said. “We had the same majority they had. We passed everything we wanted. Four votes, and the reason being because our people were productive.”

When political watchers try to compare the far-right Freedom Caucus to progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her so-called Squad, Hoyer stops them.

“People say, ‘Well, what about the Squad — is it like the Freedom Caucus?’ Not at all,” Hoyer said of the progressives who were thorns in Democratic leader’s sides when they were in the majority. “They’re people who want to do things. The Freedom Caucus doesn't care about getting things done and believes stopping Congress working is a victory.”

If stopping congressional action is a victory, House Republicans are winning. But they’ve failed to advance their agenda of unwinding the administrative state, to name but one issue area in which they’ve made no progress on their campaign promises.

The Trump-sized elephant in the room

According to former high school history teacher and 13-term Rep. John Larson (D-CT), all of this is relatively new even for a Washington that’s been gridlocked for decades now.

“I don't think they're overly concerned about governance,” Larson told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol Tuesday. “They're struggling to pull things together.”

While Speaker Johnson is attracting most of the criticism, he’s far from the only puppet master in today’s Trump-tinged GOP.

“You go all the way back to [former Speaker] John Boehner and the Tea Party, when this all started to happen, has now even become more solidified under Trump,” Larson told Raw Story. “Because he places a whole other set of parameters around what they can do, threatens people with consequences. And you can tell that it's rattling a number of their own members.”

In November, we’ll all find out whether all the dysfunction resonated or rattled Republicans out of their newfound positions of power in the House of Representatives.

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WASHINGTON — John Roberts may have a robe. Still, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has no clothes, according to Democrats who are outraged to bewildered by new reporting that paints the nation’s most potent jurist as a masterful MAGA manipulator.

Congressional Democrats are accusing Roberts of bending, twisting and contorting the Supreme Court — along with the Constitution he swore an oath to — to fit former President Donald Trump and the allegedly illegal actions he took that have kept him tied up in state and federal courts alike since he left the White House four years ago.

New illustrious, behind-the-scenes reporting from the New York Times reveals Roberts personally directed the court’s three historic Jan. 6, 2021 rulings, including the one granting presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their “official acts.”

Democrats are now redoubling their efforts to make the high court a centerpiece of this year’s elections as they continue their uphill battle to pass meaningful ethics reforms to try and rein the high court in.

“Chief Justice Roberts exudes much more of an establishment aura about him, but he really has been a crucial force behind the degradation of constitutional jurisprudence on the Supreme Court,” Rep, Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a Constitutional lawyer and law professor by trade — told Raw Story after digesting the illuminating new reporting.

According to the scoop-strewn NYT piece by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, Roberts authored a Feb. 22 memo to his eight colleagues “that radiated frustration and certainty” regarding the monumental cases winding through lower courts centered on efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While revelatory, sadly, the new reporting on the Roberts Court isn’t surprising to Raskin.

ALSO READ: The simple yet powerful way Tim Walz just exposed Donald Trump

“It's what anybody can see in reading their decisions. We know what's going on there. They're not textualists — they completely ignored the text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Raskin said. “They're not originalists — nobody even made an originalist argument about why the president of the United States should be immune from criminal prosecution for felonies he commits under the cloak of office. And, you know, they have really drifted a long way from any recognizable constitutional jurisprudence of interpretation.”

The carefully manicured image of Roberts as a moderate is now melting away. It’s left Democrats on Capitol Hill debating how to restore public confidence in a Supreme Court many in the party and the public have lost faith in.

“Very short-term thinking”

It’s more than just Chief Justice Roberts moving in the shadows to orchestrate this year’s three seemingly pro-Trump Jan. 6 rulings. Accusations of corruption are also in the air.

Coupled with the estimated $4.2 million in gifts Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly openly accepted from Republican megadonors over the years, as first reported by ProPublica, many Democrats now fear this Supreme Court has been weaponized by the far-right.

“His court's going to go down as the most corrupt in history and, honestly, the most political in history, too,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) — a former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein — told Raw Story on the Capitol steps this week.

Then there’s the luxurious all-expense paid fishing trip Justice Samuel Alito accepted from billionaire Paul Singer, which he publicly defended in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Not to mention the politicking. There’s the upside-down American flag that proudly flew outside the Alito’s Northern Virginia home in the wake of the 2021 attack on the Capitol and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flapping in the ocean breeze outside the Alito’s New Jersey beach house, both of which the justice blames on his wife, Martha-Ann.

As for Thomas, he refused to recuse himself from the monumental J6 cases even after his wife Ginni — and the string of conspiratorial text messages she sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — was found to be central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the last presidential election.

“It might not be illegal, but it certainly should scare the hell out of every American that somebody with that kind of access and power and proximity to a Supreme Court justice can be pushing that type of nonsense," former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) — who served as a technical advisor to the select Jan. 6 committee — told Raw Story back in 2022. “The text messages validate that many elected officials believed it.”

Critics are left questioning where the high court ends and the RNC begins.

“I'm naive. I was raised to think that the justices were there to look at the Constitution and the law and work together to find the best decision for the American people. Now they're a function of the Republican Party, which the court never was before,” Don Beyer said. “Very short-term thinking. If we look at our 40-some-odd presidents, only one would it apply to.”

The five-term congressman says Supreme Court justices — especially the chief justice — need to open their eyes because, to him and an expanding chorus of critics, there’s nothing partisan about Democrat’s fears.

“There's no other Republican president I would have worried about,” Beyer said. “Not George Herbert Walker Bush or Ronald Reagan or Gerald Ford — certainly none of our Democratic presidents — but this one. It isn't like he's conferring an advantage on the next Democratic president who will do whatever he wants — no.”

The nakedly political and grossly unethical turn of the Roberts Court weighs on the 74-year-old.

“Incredibly discouraging. I've been discouraged by Justice Roberts for a long time,” Beyer said. “I know the judiciary’s independent — I don't ever want to interfere — but the fact that he could let the ethical abuses go on and on, no treatment whatsoever, which is, I mean, the greatest discouragement.”

Last year, after months of punishing press coverage, Roberts reversed himself and signed off on a new, if unenforced, Supreme Court Code of Conduct. It was unanimous.

These days, the signatures of all nine Supreme Court justices also make the document almost worthless, at least to many lawmakers across the street at the Capitol.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

Throughout this session of Congress, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee in the Senate have relentlessly tried to impose mandatory and enforceable ethics rules on Supreme Court justices—basically, the same ones that apply to every other federal judge in the nation. Republicans have been united in blocking every such effort.

Senate Republicans have the back of the conservative majority on the Roberts Court, much like Roberts has advanced the agenda of congressional Republicans.

“If you go back and look at the most anti-democratic decisions of the Supreme Court — the immunity decision being one, but the little array of insurrection decisions, of which it was a part of in the threesome that's in this article — you see a lot of backstage maneuvering by the chief justice,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story as he walked through the basement of the Capitol. “It reminds me of the backstage maneuvering by the chief justice that brought us Citizens United.”

The former Rhode Island attorney general and U.S. attorney is the second highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he’s been pushing the SCERT — or Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency — Act, which would place a binding code of conduct and mandatory disclosure requirements on the justices.

Ethics reform is one thing. Unlimited corporate funding is another corrosive element of contemporary American politics altogether.

Democrats are still smarting from Citizens United and the floodgates of political spending it unleashed. The chief justice also deftly moved behind the scenes to manipulate that 2010 ruling, Whitehouse readily recalls.

“Remember, [Roberts] had to restructure the case. He changed the question presented. He set up the case so that there would be no record — actual record,” Whitehouse recalled. “He changed the standard.”

That was a bipartisan complaint in that Senate of a bygone, if recent, era. The ruling led then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who co-authored the McCain-Feingold law that Citizens United decimated — to publicly and personally call out Chief Justice Roberts.

"I am more disappointed in him than any of the other four that voted to overturn McCain-Feingold," McCain said back in 2012.

Republicans beg to differ

Roberts indeed has allies. Lots of them. Powerful ones. And they’re laughing in Democrat’s faces.

Republican Party leaders, like former Senate Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) — who’s running to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — basically just avoid critics and critical reporting, like the New York Times just dropped, these days.

“I think I saw the headline — that's about all,” Cornyn told Raw Story while hopping a tram under the Capitol.

Before arriving in Washington in 2002, Cornyn served on the Texas Supreme Court. He says Roberts shouldn’t even entertain what his senatorial critics have to say.

“He's got lifetime tenure,” Cornyn said through a laugh. “I wouldn't be taking advice from members of Congress on how to do my job if I was him, either.”

Just as they have with Justices Thomas and Alito — no matter the latest eye-popping revelation — today’s Republicans have united around the Chief Justice, as if they are one.

“Even without having read it, I think extremely highly of him and believe him to be a person with the utmost integrity and dedicated to the independence of the courts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story as she walked through the Capitol Wednesday.

Collins must not have gotten the memo from her Democratic colleagues.

The ‘court packing’ myth

Many pundits hailed Roberts for opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in the Dobbs decision, he lost out to the five Republican appointees on ‘his’ court who are seemingly even further right than he is.

Many progressives weren’t buying the righteous, caring and politically aloof version of himself Roberts portrayed back then, and they say this latest reporting shows they were right.

“That's interesting how there's sort of this story out there that Roberts was like a moderate and mediator. And the [NYT] story would suggest that’s not really necessarily the case,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) told Raw Story after voting on the Senate floor this week.

While Republican rhetoric paints all elected Democrats — from the top of the party’s presidential ticket on down — as wanting to expand, or ‘pack,’ the court, only three Senate Democrats have formally endorsed a progressive measure to expand the size of the court, as Raw Story reported last month.

Smith and Massachusetts Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are the three who’ve publicly endorsed Markey’s measure to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s it.

Even with all the negative press, Smith says other Senate Democrats haven’t approached them about their measure to expand the size of the court.

“I haven't heard any,” Smith said.

That doesn’t mean her colleagues aren’t discussing the Roberts Court.

“There's a lot of conversation about the court and challenges to the court,” Smith said. “Once we get through this election and we have a better understanding of what the landscape is, we'll talk more about it.”

Or maybe they won’t.

“We're not going to get expansion”

Some Democrats have already basically, shut the door on the conversation of expanding the court. Many just don’t see it as a practical solution.

“We're not going to get expansion,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) told Raw Story on his way to a vote in the Capitol Wednesday. “There's a lot of downside to expansion — we expand, they expand — and it politicizes it.”

As President Joe Biden proposed back in July, Welch and most congressional Democrats now support instituting an 18-year term limit for the nation’s justices.

“First of all, that's a very substantial term, and they're inside, so they have the benefit of protections,” Welch argued. “And then number two, every president is going to have an opportunity to appoint two members, so that means the American people get to weigh in indirectly by choosing the president. I think it would really take the extreme politics out of the court.”

As for Roberts, Welch is no fan of the jurist he’s predicting historians will frown upon.

“He’s very skillful and, unfortunately, a driving force, I think, in the radical redirection of the court,” Welch bemoaned to Raw Story. “The court has got an extreme radical majority. It's lost public respect.”

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WASHINGTON —While most Republicans are now fanboys of former President Donald Trump, talk of the former first lady’s nude modeling makes many in the GOP contort, even if she started the conversation on social media this week ahead of the release of her new memoir, “Melania” (Skyhorse Publishing).

“Why do I stand proudly behind my nude modeling work? The more pressing question is: Why has the media chosen to scrutinize my celebration of the human form in a fashion photo shoot?” she tweeted on X this week.

While many in the media shared her post, some of her husband’s party members weren’t so keen on joining the conversation.

“I don't know how to answer that”

“How much do you appreciate the beauty of the human body?” Raw Story asked a confused Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). “That's a question Melania Trump asked.”

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“The human body?” Tuberville asked.

“Have you seen her new book?”

“Nuh-uh,” Tuberville replied.

“I guess her biography’s coming out, but she goes out on Instagram and defends her nude modeling in the past,” Raw Story informed the senator.

“I guess a lot of people…” Tuberville replied before stopping himself. “I don't know how to answer that.”

Tuberville may not have heard of Melania Trump’s new social media ad campaign, but conservative Mormon Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) had.

“Are you gonna read Melania Trump's book?” Raw Story asked.

“Oh, no,” Romney told Raw Story as he rushed to catch a train after casting his last vote of the week Thursday. “Probably won’t be able to fit that one in, I’m afraid.”

“Did you catch her Instagram about her former nude modeling?” Raw Story asked.

“I heard about that,” Romney said as he shut his car door. “I didn't see it.”

“It might be the last time I speak to you…”

Over on the House side of the Capitol, things got a little awkward when the former first lady’s nudes were mentioned.

“Are you gonna be reading Melania Trump's book?” Raw Story asked the newly minted chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), Thursday.

“I have kind of a lot of stuff on my plate right now,” Harris told Raw Story as he was walking back to his office after voting.

“You hear about her call though on Instagram?” Raw Story pressed. “She asked the media if we appreciate the human body over her nude photos.”

“I have my plate as plenty full without worrying about that,” Harris said as he abruptly turned to take questions from another reporter.

While Raw Story quietly walked ahead of Harris and the other reporter, waiting for them to wrap up, we looked over our notes from the previous day when Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) recalled when Harris forced nudity onto the docket when the two served on opposite sides of the aisle in Maryland’s state Senate.

“He thought people were getting addicted to pornography,” Raskin told reporters on the Capitol steps earlier in the week. “But I said, ‘I didn’t think that people were getting addicted to pornography because of movies that were being shown in frats, and if he wanted to cut off all funding for the internet and computers, that might be a more effective way to accomplish his objective.’”

“I’m gonna ask [Harris] about Melania Trump,” Raw Story quipped.

“What did she do?” Raskin asked.

“She’s out on Instagram defending her nude super modeling, which seems like a good question for Andy Harris.”

“Oh wow,” Raskin replied. “Yeah.”

So when the new Freedom Caucus wrapped up his impromptu interview Thursday, Raw Story followed up with Harris on his thoughts on nudity in general.

“Curious, Jamie Raskin mentioned when you guys served in the legislature, you tried to defund [the University of Maryland] because one of the fraternities showed porn?” Raw Story asked.

“It wasn't a fraternity. It was actually in the Student Union, and it was an X-rated movie. Correct,” Harris said.

“Is there any correlation or just apples and oranges with Melania Trump?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about with Melania Trump,” Harris said. “I mean, I just told you, I have no idea.”

“You don’t?” Raw Story pressed Harris on the famous model of a former first lady.

“You don't believe me?” Harris scolded Raw Story. “Don't ask the same question twice. Come on. I have so much better things to do. It might be the last time I speak to you if you ask stupid things.”

What ‘freedom’ caucus?

When Raskin first learned Harris was tapped as the new leader of the Freedom Caucus, he was surprised.

“He’s already been elected? Wow,” Raskin told reporters before offering some free advice.

“I think it’s time for them to change the name of the Freedom Caucus,” Raskin said on the Capitol steps. “Because they’re not supporting the freedom of American women at all. They’re not supporting the freedom of tens of millions of American women who now can’t get health care and are locked into Handmaid's Tale states across the country. They’re not supporting freedom in Ukraine.”

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WASHINGTON — Democrats have grown accustomed to Donald Trump's lies, distortions and conspiracies, but they say the former president crossed a line in Tuesday night’s debate when he blamed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

“He’s crazy,” Pelosi told Raw Story while entering the Capitol Wednesday.

The former speaker didn’t elaborate. Many of her powerful—and studied—Democratic colleagues did, though, in exclusive interviews with Raw Story, as they dissected and dismantled Trump’s false claims, like that the speaker of the House controls the National Guard.

“He lied,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) — who chaired the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol — told Raw Story at the Capitol Wednesday. “That's not the law, and he [was] president of the United States — he's commander-in-chief.”

It’s not just Trump’s lies that worry Democrats who have watched Republican congressional leaders ditch conservatism and contort before conforming to Trump’s rhetoric despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Apparently she's not denied that she's the one who turned down the extra security posture, which is a major issue,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) — flanked by his security detail — told Raw Story as he entered the Capitol Wednesday. “The Capitol would have been secured in a completely different way if that didn’t happen.”

While Scalise has been majority leader since the 118th Congress kicked off two years ago, he doesn’t seem to have reviewed the historical record, according to Thompson.

“I'm not aware she rejected the National Guard. When did that happen?” Thompson said. “At that point, you know, the [National] Guard has to get permission to come on the Capitol grounds. Revisionist history.”

Twisting facts is one thing; playing fast and loose with reality in the wake of a national tragedy is beyond the pale though.

“They know that's bulls—,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) told Raw Story after voting on the House floor Wednesday. “They know that's bulls—. It is a continuation and extension of the ‘Big Lie.’”

Trump and his GOP allies in Congress are “talking out of both sides of their mouths,” according to Escobar, who calls Trump out for promising to pardon the J6 prisoners.

“Because if Donald Trump thought it was wrong and thought that either the speaker or the mayor should have taken action, then why is he saying he wants to pardon them? It doesn't even make sense,” Escobar said. “He's trying to have it both ways, and we can't let him get away with it.”

Escobar was one of a couple dozen House lawmakers left trapped in the House gallery during the 2021 attack on the Capitol. She says GOP rhetoric misses reality — a nightmare forever seared in her mind and thousands of others — but she says that discord is what Trump wants, especially now that he was found guilty on 34 counts by his New York neighbors in May.

“Hugely offensive but not at all surprising,” Escobar told Raw Story at the Capitol. “We know what happened, those of us who were here. Law enforcement knows what happened. The surviving family members of the Capitol Police know what happened. Nothing that he does will rewrite that history as much as he tries. What can you expect from a criminal? Of course, he's going to embrace other criminals.”

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) was tapped to be an Impeachment Manager in Trump’s second Senate trial. He says the former president’s argument sounds familiar — and, once again, deflated.

“So Trump is a liar,” Lieu told Raw Story just outside the House floor Wednesday. “The overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate rejected Trump's arguments. There were 57 bipartisan votes to convict Donald Trump. His team brought up that issue, and people didn't believe it.”

According to Lieu, it's important that voters remember Trump “calling people to come” to Washington on January 6th before sending them to the Capitol.

“He didn't send them to the Lincoln Memorial. He didn't send them to the Library of Congress. He sent them to the Capitol because he wanted to disrupt the certification of his loss,” Lieu told Raw Story. “And the notion that somehow this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault when Nancy Pelosi wanted the certification to happen is just an absurd claim.”

CHICAGO — Local Democratic leaders from coast to coast have largely been left to fend for themselves in combating Moms for Liberty, as the far-right group continues its book-banning march into school districts small and large alike nationwide.

As Raw Story first reported last summer, some powerful Democratic leaders in Washington were — and, as we found out covering this year’s Democratic National Convention, continue to be — ignorant of the group that’s been labeled an “extremist” organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center Center.

“The group Mom's for Liberty — how much are they on your radar these days?” Raw Story asked outside the hall floor of the DNC.

“I’m not familiar with them,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) told Raw Story here in Chicago last week.

That means local leaders in Peters’ home state — like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) who complained to Raw Story last June about the group’s successful outreach in mosques in her district — are left cut off from the clout and resources only a U.S. senator controls.

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But it’s not just Michigan. This election cycle, just as during the 2022 midterms, Peters’ is chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (or DSCC), which means the tens of millions of dollars the powerful senator ultimately dispenses — along with the most expensive PR firms, targeted polling and voter databases controlled by the DSCC — are also cut off from Democrats combatting the far-right group on the front lines.

While local Democrats have recently beaten back school board challenges from Moms for Liberty in places like Florida—where the group was founded in 2021—in just over a year since Raw Story first reported on the group flying under the radar of national Democratic leaders, it expanded from having chapters in 44 states to now claiming a presence in 48 states, sans only libertarian Vermont and religiously conservative Utah.

“Here's what I've learned from my experience in life, no freedom is safe. You always have to be vigilant with these folks that want to take us backwards,” Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) — the former two-term mayor of West Palm Beach — told Raw Story at the DNC. “We're keeping our eyes open.”

“Democratic Party leaders — because they're more on the local, local level — it kind of feels like it's off their radar,” Raw Story pressed. “Talked to Sen. Peters and he said he didn't even know who they are, and he’s running the DSCC.”

“I think we learn a lesson: every level of government's important. You can do a lot of damage with the school boards,” Frankel said.

While that seems to be news to Democratic leaders, it’s also common knowledge in the GOP.

Moms for Liberty is hosting its “Joyful Warriors” summit in the nation’s capital from last Thursday through this Sunday. On cue, former President Donald Trump headlined the now-annual affair.

Last year, at the group’s Philadelphia summit, Trump vowed, if given a second term as president, to eliminate the Department of Education and endorsed the direct election of public school principals by parents.

“In school board races, PTA meetings and town halls across the nation, you have taught the radical left Marxists and communists a lesson they will never forget: Don’t mess with America’s moms,” Trump told attendees at last year’s summit. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to America.”

Trump isn’t alone. It seems the Supreme Court’s also sympathetic to Moms for Liberty’s argument of late.

Earlier in August, the nation’s high court handed Moms for Liberty and other conservative organizations a major win when, by a 5-4 vote, justices shot down an emergency request from the Biden administration to keep some of its new Title IX protections for LGBTQ students in place.

Historically, Title IX protects against sex discrimination. Still, for the first time President Joe Biden extended it to gender identity and sexual orientation, which Moms for Liberty, many Republican attorneys general and the group’s far-right allies have challenged in court.

While Moms for Liberty and their GOP friends keep marching forward in the courts, school boards and in local libraries nationwide, they seem to continue flying off the radar of many Democratic Party leaders in Washington.

“I’ll have more to say about them later on after the convention’s over,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told Raw Story as he and his entourage made their way to the DNC stage ahead of his speech last Wednesday evening.

Jeffries may not have a talking point handy on the group, but the top female in House Democratic leadership knows Moms for Liberty and says her party’s broader strategy to combat the formerly fringe right encompasses the likes of them too.

“They have a very bleak view and a very restrictive view of the First Amendment and our constitutional rights,” Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) — the House minority whip — told Raw Story at Chicago’s United Center during the DNC. “I think we're going to be successful against them like we are going to be defeating extremism in November.”

But how does a political party defeat an entity many party leaders hardly know exists? The party’s rank-and-file has some ideas.

“I have legislation on book bans, so obviously I'm very concerned about these bans on our bodies, bans on our hair and bans on our books. It’s an assault on our intellectual freedom,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — a member of the so-called Squad — told Raw Story.

“Are you worried that Democratic leaders in Washington feel a little insulated from what's really happening at the local level?” Raw Story asked.

“Well, all I know is that book bans sit at that intersection of the most marginalized communities that are targeted by Republicans. They attack women authors, anti-Black authors, LGBTQ representation in our books,” Pressley said. “That's why I'm focused on it, and I do think it's a resonant issue with people. It's one of the things, when I raise it, that gets one of the biggest reactions in the room.”

That message may resonate in left-leaning Massachusetts, but Moms for Liberty itself is resonating in red and battleground states alike, especially because of the attention they get from Trump and other top GOP officials coast to coast.

“Yes, they're very active, particularly in some of the districts outside of Austin. They've run some really disgusting campaigns,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) told Raw Story at the DNC.

While national Democrats hope to flip Texas blue in coming years, Moms for Liberty and its ideology is taking root locally in the Lonestar State.

“In Texas, we have them attacking our school boards, and then we have our governor determined to destroy public education by giving all the money to private religious academies and recently added that we have to teach the Bible in school,” Doggett said. “It really is coming in all directions from people that don't believe in public schools.”

Doggett says the hyper-local focus of Moms for Liberty is what makes it such a danger.

“It is a resurgence of right-wing criticism of public education, and the only thing we can do is turn out better,” Doggett said. “Some of these right-wing foundations are spending tens of thousands of dollars in what are normally minimal campaign budgets. So I’m very concerned about it.”

“Do you think the grassroots can combat that?” Raw Story asked.

“I do, but I think, you know, it's much more glamorous to focus on Congress, the Senate, the presidency,” Doggett said. “And what's happening to our public schools is being determined by those trustees, and so it's vital to have more people involved there.”

Still, Democratic powerbrokers along the nation’s coasts are banking on their party’s overall messaging, beating back the slow creep of book bans and school board packing schemes from the right.

“People feel like this book-banning agenda is part of what's weird and creepy about the Republican Party,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story just off the floor of the DNC. “I mean, [Gov.] Ron DeSantis never even got a second look nationally because the Moms for Liberty agenda in Florida was a non-starter even in the Republican Party.”

While Trump and other top Republican leaders continue rewarding, emboldening and, ultimately, building Moms for Liberty into a formidable national — if hyper-local — organization, Democrats continue to doubt the creep of Moms for Liberty, no matter how ‘creepy’ they are to the likes of the left.

“It's a real loser of a fight for them if they're trying to build a 50% plus one coalition nationally,” Murphy told Raw Story. “People, you know, want safe schools. They want schools with good teachers. They don't want schools where the focus is on bullying gay kids and banning books.”

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WASHINGTON — Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) is a seemingly safe, even bland, Democratic vice presidential pick.

And that has many Democrats cheering.

Walz will face down GOP vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, and Democrats who served with Walz during his 12 years in Congress say the two-term Minnesota governor is ready.

“You've got somebody who's nuts and bolts, who's meat and potatoes, and that's the governor, Gov. Walz,” Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) told Raw Story in a phone interview. “And you've got Mr. Vance, who's a young guy who talks a lot, who, you know, has interesting ways of expressing himself, and then you got a guy who's just plain vanilla, meat and potatoes, roll up your sleeves, let's get the job done.”

Like Correa, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) overlapped with Walz in the U.S. House of Representatives, and she’s calling him “an exceptional choice for the vice presidential nomination.”

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“He’s battle-tested, has years of legislative and executive experience, and is an unwavering champion for working people,” Gillibrand said in a release. “This pick will only add to the energy and momentum behind the Democratic ticket, and I’m more optimistic than ever that the Harris-Walz ticket will defeat Donald Trump and deliver victories up and down the ballot.”

Even some Republicans who served with Walz only have good things to say.

“Amiable, good guy, easy to get along with,” former Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA) texted Raw Story.

“Vanilla?” Raw Story asked.

“Normal,” Costello replied.

Walz, for his part, has spent the better part of the past few weeks attempting to paint both Trump and Vance as “weird” — something that delighted the nascent Harris campaign.

As the saying goes, there are show horses and work horses in Washington, and Walz was known as someone who worked diligently behind the scenes on both the Agriculture and Veterans’ Affairs committees.

“A guy who really didn't grab headlines in Washington, but who is a veteran, did a great job on Veterans’ Affairs [Committee] and is now governor of Minnesota,” Correa said. “He is connected to what people want on Main Street, and that's what you want. A no nonsense guy.”

While other committees — like the Armed Services or Energy and Commerce Committees — are known for attracting Washington’s lobbying class and their checkbooks, Correa says Walz stands out for dutifully working to help veterans, even though most aren’t wealthy donors.

“If you really want to move the needle, if you really want to do things that make a difference for our nation, make a difference for those that have served our country, the Veterans’ Affairs Committee is where you want to be,” Correa said. “And you may not raise a lot of money there, but I got to tell you, when you go to town halls, when you invite veterans to come talk about their issues, you are the most popular guy there. This is good stuff.”

Correa says he also remembers Walz as an open-minded policymaker, especially when Correa and others on the Congressional Cannabis Caucus started telling him about the medicinal benefits of cannabis for veterans suffering PTSD.

“I conveyed that message to him and we had a lot of discussions about this, and what stood out to me was: ‘let's help veterans.’ That was his message, ‘let’s do what we can for veterans,’” Correa said.

While Congress never relaxed marijuana restrictions for veterans, last year Walz signed into law a bill making Minnesota the 23rd state in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana.

Now, Correa and other members of Congress, such Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are seeing success in their effort to relax restrictions on psychedelics like psilocybin — think “magic mushrooms” — or MDMA, or “Molly” — for veterans suffering PTSD.

“We didn't quite get the first base on cannabis for veterans, but we're doing a hell of a better job on, you know, getting the pathway for psychedelic treatments for veterans. This is moving a lot faster than cannabis has ever moved for veterans,” Correa said. “Open-minded and willing to try and help veterans in ways that were innovative. He was open to thinking out of the box for the sake of our veterans.”

Correa expects Walz to bring that same attitude to other issue areas if elected vice president, which is why he’s been ecstatic since the pick was first announced.

“My first reaction is: I know this guy — he's a great pick!” Correa told Raw Story. “When it comes to vice presidents, you couldn't have picked a better guy, if you want to send the message: I'm here to get the job done, I'm here to take care of business and I'm here to take care of the taxpayers of this great country. I think that's what this pick sends a message of.”

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans say they can hardly imagine former President Donald Trump trying to stay in power for a third term if he’s reelected for a second in November — even after Trump has twice suggested he’d become a president for life.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) told Raw Story. “I'm sure it's not as worrisome as some of you guys are making it out to be.”

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Trump recently told attendees at a Turning Point Action event in West Palm Beach, Fla.: "Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."

Last week, when given repeated chances to correct the record with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump tripled down.

“I said, ‘vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again.’ It’s true,” Trump told Ingraham.

Even Trump’s closest allies in the Senate — and Raw Story exclusively interviewed 10 Senate Republicans on the topic in recent days — were left stunned when we ran the former president’s own words by them.

“What do you make of Trump saying, ‘vote for me once and you’ll never, ever vote again’?” Raw Story asked.

“I’ve got no comment on that,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story. “I'm sure that's out of context.”

The disbelief teeters toward confusion for many.

“I didn’t hear it,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story. “I’ll have to look.”

“Democrats are worried he’ll never release the reins of power,” Raw Story pressed.

“I don't think that's true,” Scott said. “I didn't see it, though.”

‘Sounds preposterous’

Even the Republicans who did catch Trump’s comments are confused.

“I don't understand that statement,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story. “I personally want every voter to vote in every election.”

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“Democrats say, ‘Look, this is proof that he wants to pull a 2020 again and not give up the reigns of power,’” Raw Story said.

“I don't think you can conclude that,” Collins said.

Still other Republicans were left asking Raw Story to parse the former president’s comments.

“No, I didn't. I saw it in a headline,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Raw Story. “What did it mean? What did he say exactly?”

“I don’t know. I can’t interpret him,” Raw Story replied. “But it’s: ‘vote in November and you never have to vote again.’”

“Like, ever in your whole life?” Murkowski inquired.

“That's kind of what he implied,” Raw Story said.

“I'm assuming what it must mean is ‘you'll never have to vote for me again, because I'll be termed out,’” Murkowski said.

“Maybe, but that's an assumption your Democratic colleagues don't give after what happened in 2020,” Raw Story replied.

“Oh, no, no. Come on. He's served once, and if he’s successful and he serves twice, there are those that think that he would find a way to give himself a third term?” Murkowski asked.

“Yeah,” Raw Story replied as the senator’s face contorted with constitutional confusion. “So that sounds preposterous to you?”

“Yes. It sounds preposterous to me,” Murkowski said. “Yes.”

Assuming the best

Just like Senate Republicans did throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, most now refuse to publicly contemplate the worst from Trump — and instead just assume the best from the party’s standard bearer.

“You know, I don’t try to interpret what President Trump means. I assume he just means, get him in there and he’ll fix all the issues,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told Raw Story. “If you take things literally with him, you're always gonna need interpretation.”

And plenty of Republicans are interpreting Trump’s comments in the best light.

“It sounded to me like he was saying, ‘I'm not gonna be on the ballot again, so you don't have to vote for me again,’” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told Raw Story. “So, you know, I didn't see the full context of it, but I don't take it seriously.”

Other Republicans take Trump seriously, if not literally.

“I caught it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) acknowledged to Raw Story. “When the president gives speeches and answers questions and interviews, he often adopts a stream of consciousness model, and I think that was just part of his stream of consciousness.”

“Is that one where the media — we take it too literally?” Raw Story asked.

“With President Trump, you can't take everything literally,” Kennedy said. “He's very forthcoming in terms of answering questions, and there's both risk and reward to that.”

Even after being passed up as Trump’s running mate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is still quick to defend his fellow Floridian.

“It’s being taken out of context like everything else he says,” Rubio told Raw Story. “He doesn't speak in the dialect of Washington.”

While Rubio failed to illuminate what the former president meant, Democrats say, in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, instead of making excuses for Trump, their Republican colleagues should start listening to him and then take him both seriously and literally.

“Here's a president who doesn't just joke about undermining our democracy but has taken actions to do that with … his decision to stop the certification of our last election,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story. “So when he makes jokes like that they have a chilling effect on our nation, and I think it's really problematic.”

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans weren’t ready for former President Donald Trump to wade into the realm of Vice President Kamala Harris’ race and ethnicity while speaking Wednesday to a room of Black journalists.

But Trump did. And now the GOP is dealing with the fallout.

In Chicago, Trump told attendees of a National Association of Black Journalists convention that Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was "Indian all the way" until “she became a Black person” in recent years. (Harris’ mother is Indian and originally from India, her father is Black and originally from Jamaica.)

So Raw Story took Trump’s claim to 10 Senate Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

‘What?’

“Is Kamala Harris Black?” Raw Story asked Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) about Harris, who served in the U.S. Senate from 2017 to 2021.

“What?” Tuberville exclaimed.

“That came up for debate yesterday by the head of your party,” Raw Story explained.

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“I don’t get in those debates,” Tuberville said. “Is she an American — that's what I don’t know. Is Trump an American? If they’re both Americans, naturalized citizens, hey, they get an opportunity to run for president.”

“Are you convinced that she is?”

“A citizen?” Tuberville asked. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Some people are saying Trump's comments yesterday are a throwback to birtherism under Obama.”

“I don't get in that debate. Come on,” Tuberville said. “We need to talk about policies.”

“Curious — is Kamala Harris Black?” Raw Story then asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) after he voted in the Capitol on Thursday.

“Yes, we know what her ancestry is. She's half Indian, half Jamaican,” Johnson replied.

“Do you need to educate the former president on that?” Raw Story asked of Trump. “Or do you think he knows that?”

“He's just pointing out that she's kind of claimed different heritages at different times in her political career. That's true, isn't it? He's pointing out the truth,” Johnson said. “You can question whether that was the smart thing to point out, but he's just pointing out what the truth is.”

Trump made GOP leaders — present and next gen — squirm

“Senator McConnell, is Kamala Harris Black?” Raw Story asked the Senate minority leader and he and his security detail made their way to the Senate floor. “It seems to be up for debate in your party.”

McConnell — who’s announced he’s stepping down as the Republican Senate leader after the November elections — smiled and, per the leader’s usual, said nothing as he walked onto the Senate floor.

The next generation of Republican leaders weren’t so stoic.

“Is Kamala Harris Black?” Raw Story asked McConnell’s former right hand man, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who’s vying to replace him.

“I can assume we're all a combination of different genetic gene pools, so I don't know,” Cornyn told Raw Story. “I think we're all sort of a mixture.”

McConnell’s current number two appeared annoyed by the question.

“As far as I know,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) — who’s also running to replace McConnell — told Raw Story. “I'm focused on the issues.”

The third Senate Republican running to replace McConnell came with a proverbial doctor’s note.

“Is Kamala Harris Black?” Raw Story asked as an elevator took Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) up to the Senate floor for a vote.

“I didn't hear the comments,” Scott told Raw Story.

“He said ‘she turned Black recently,’” Raw Story noted.

“I’m always talking about issues,” Scott said.

Another reporter interjected: “Do comments like that make you feel uncomfortable in any way?”

“I didn't see the comment,” Scott replied.

“Do you avoid TV and the paper just to not have to talk about Trump?” Raw Story pressed.

“Actually, I don’t watch enough TV,” Scott said as he laughed. “Actually at the time I was giving a speech on the Senate floor.”

“Yeah?”

“I really was,” Scott said.

“Saved by the bell.”

GOP war on Democrats’ identities

But Democrats fear this bell has only begun to ring as Harris and Trump — and their revved up bases — now sprint toward the election.

“I assume so. She says so,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told Raw Story while walking to his office after voting. “I think she's Jamaican-American, right? And Indian.”

“What’d you make of that exchange yesterday?” Raw Story pressed.

“Here's what I think. My issue is not how she describes herself or her heritage — that’s totally up to her — my issue is what she says she’s going to do as president," Hawley said. “It's with her policies, which I think are insane.”

“Some people say it’s Trump stoking Charlottesville — ‘they will replace us’?” Raw Story said, referencing the racist Unite the Right demonstrations of 2017 that left one woman dead.

“Well, you will never convince me that Donald Trump is racist,” Hawley — who infamously revved protestors up by raising his clenched fist on Jan. 6, 2021 — said. “I don't think he's racist at all.”

Hawley continued: “I thought he was needling her a little bit and that racial identity politics are just inherently malleable. And, frankly, absurd. I mean, yes, she's an Indian-American. She's a Jamaican-American. Most Americans are multiple — something-American. And, you know, they've got ‘White Dudes for Kamala’ and ‘Asian Pacific Islanders for Kamala.’ I mean, the whole thing is just, most people look at this, like, ‘this is ridiculous.’”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) — who views the entire exchange as “careless politics” — let out a squeak of laughter when asked, “Is Kamala Harris Black?”

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“Well, she's a woman of color,” Cramer replied. “And she said — and she's a — from what I know and what I read — she's a Black. Part Black. She's part Indian. And both are wonderful.”

Cramer continued by offering that “when identity politics play a role — or racial identity — plays a role in hiring practices or nominating, you can hardly complain about it if that's the credential that got you the job. In her case, I think what … President Trump's intent was, she's the one that wasn't Black in her own mind —- not in anybody else's — and then when it's convenient, she becomes Black. That's his point.”

Cramer added: “I've seen interviews of some other people of color that were really good, because what I think happens is … I think, it's already baked in to those people. To other people who don't want color to be the reason that people look at them as successful, they're offended by her,” Cramer said. “But again, it's not that he's necessarily wrong. As entertaining as it is, there's no need to do it.”

As for Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), she, too, said she wasn’t that familiar with Trump’s take on Harris’ race.

“I didn't really see it. Obviously, it's been in the news,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told Raw Story. “I think sticking to the policies is the better strategy here. And so I'll leave it at that.”

Outside the Senate chambers Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) trashed Harris’ record as vice president and highlighted her connection with Biden.

“She and Joe Biden have spent four years undermining our friends and allies and showing weakness and appeasement to our enemies, which has led to endless wars and chaos abroad,” Cruz said.

“Is she Black?” Raw Story asked Cruz of Harris.

Cruz didn’t reply as he walked away onto the Senate floor to vote.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans have all but given up on governing this year.

So they’re off to go campaign the rest of the summer despite — in the recent estimation of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — the nation being mired in “crisis” and “decline” over issues squarely in Congress’ purview, ranging from immigration to inflation to international relations.

After Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other Republican leaders embarrassingly had to pull four funding bills from the House floor this summer over internal party disagreements, this week GOP leaders just decided to pull the plug on legislating and start their summer recess early.

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“They're the party of chaos and dysfunction,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) — the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus — told Raw Story. “They don't know how to govern. They're not here to put the American people first. They focus more on political games and brinksmanship — pitting communities against each other — than they are solving problems and moving our country forward.”

Republican-on-Republican brawls

It’s not just Democrats.

As frustrations grow, Republicans are also pointing the finger at other Republicans.

“Oh, I totally and completely agree,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Raw Story. “I mean, as the majority, we can't pass bills, because of the different arguing.”

Earlier this week, Republican leaders unexpectedly pulled the party’s annual energy and water funding bill after internal GOP disputes over its price tag. Unresolved amendments further imperiled the typically uncontroversial measure.

“Why can’t you guys pass spending bills?” Raw Story asked.

“Talk to the speaker about that,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) told Raw Story.

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While these holdouts from the far-right wing of the Republican Party are making it look like the GOP can’t govern, they don’t care.

“Well, we’re over funding the government, in my opinion,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — one of the eight Republicans who dethroned former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — told Raw Story.

This week, conservative complaints over the funding levels and that abortion restrictions were stripped out derailed the Agriculture and Financial Services funding measures. And last month, Republicans pulled their funding measure for themselves, the legislative branch, because some members were upset that it blocked a scheduled pay raise for lawmakers. (Most members of Congress have earned $174,000 annually since 2009.)

GOP leaders cancel floor fireworks

Next week seemed destined to feature political fireworks.

The Republican Party was scheduled to tackle the House’s Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill, which already included nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Department of Justice (think action against the “Deep State”).

It also cuts 11 percent from the budgets of U.S. attorneys’ offices, while also cutting salaries and expenses in the Department of Justice by 20 percent.

But that wasn’t good enough for former President Donald Trump’s fiercest allies in the House.

Party leaders rejected additional cuts demanded by the far-right: defunding special counsel Jack Smith, for example.

For her part, Greene was one of at least three Republicans who were prepared to offer amendments defunding special counsels.

Even though Senate Democrats and the Biden White House were all but certain to strip any of those measures from the final spending bill, Greene says the amendments are more than mere politics.

“They’re incredibly important, because people need to be fired,” Greene told Raw Story. “And that's one of the problems in the federal government, that doesn't happen. Private industry, private companies are successful all the time, because not only do they produce the budgets that produce a profit but they also fire people when they're not doing a good job. I mean, we can go through the list, but I don't think these people deserve their paychecks.”

Earlier this month, two days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, Boebert dropped a measure to “prohibit the use of Federal funds for the salary of the Director of the United States Secret Service.”

She’s been claiming a win since Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned earlier this week. But Boebert and other Republicans still want to exact a few pounds of flesh from another law enforcement agency — the FBI.

“I don't offer amendments or legislation that I don't feel is important,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) told Raw Story. “This is something that I want to get to the bottom of. And also, you know, this FBI who has failed us on just about every level and is now responsible for the investigation of the assassination attempt on President Trump and I don't trust it.”

Speaker Johnson only has three votes to spare in his party, given the tiny majority Republicans hold over Democrats. Efforts such as slashing funding for the FBI make these spending measures unserious to Democrats, who won’t vote for them across the board.

But Boebert — no friend of Greene but allied on these issues — says they’re vital.

“Our FBI has been weaponized and should not have increased funding. It should not even be funded at the level that it is. It shouldn't be staffed at the level that it is,” Boebert said. “And, you know, I think that we could have done a better job throughout this Congress in getting to the bottom of the weaponization of our federal government.”

Democrats complain their GOP counterparts are weaponizing something themselves — the legislative process.

“This is crazy,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) — a “Squad” member who recently lost his primary bid to a more moderate Democrat — told Raw Story. “The people who support them support the chaos. The destruction of the federal government and the defunding of the federal government and all of that, that's what it seems like, you know, their base, you know, gut Roe v. Wade, get rid of DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] stuff, like, ‘Trump is our champion.’”

Veteran Republicans bemoan infighting

Some veteran congressional Republicans admit it’s crazy, too — at least when they’re not being quoted, by name and for the record, for Raw Story news stories..

Otherwise, they’re claiming mini-victories for moving all the annual spending measures out of committee and passing five of the 12 on the House floor.

They’ve put on happy-enough faces now that Republicans have derailed Republicans’ plans to do what they ran on when they recaptured the House in 2022 and pass the nation’s 12 spending bills.

But failing to pass the other seven spending measures weakens the GOP ahead of inevitable negotiations with Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden.

“It does help in the negotiations if you can pass the bill on the floor. When there's a small number of Republicans that don't want to vote for other Republicans’ bills, it weakens Republican’s position in negotiations,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) — an 11-term lawmaker who’s a senior member of the spending, or appropriations, committee — told Raw Story. “But ultimately, we're still going to have to negotiate.”

As for House Republicans failing to live up to what they promised voters?

Like GOP leaders, Diaz-Balart is banking on the American people not paying attention to the party’s high-stakes stumbles as Democrats and Republicans fight for control of Congress during the November election.

“It's inside baseball. This is inside baseball,” Diaz-Balart said. “It's always frustrating when you can't get Republicans to support Republican bills, but your average voter doesn’t look at this process.”

Other Republicans from the party’s far-right are using the spending battles and party’s inability to even defund the government as another chance to sell a second Trump administration to voters, because they see House Speaker Johnson and retiring Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as a part of the problem.

“A lot of that will go away when we have real leadership,” Greene told Raw Story. “And we just don't have it right now.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says congressional Democrats’ public complaints about President Joe Biden’s age have become a bigger problem for the party than the age itself.

“I think that the way that our party conducts itself in public contributes just as much to our political challenges as any facts on the ground,” Ocasio-Cortez told Raw Story on her way to vote at the Capitol Thursday. “And so, to me, that is something that I encourage my colleagues to think about, because these things don't happen out of thin air.”

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez said, the party needs to focus on recent sweeping Supreme Court decisions, especially former President Donald Trump’s immunity case.

“The Supreme Court just issued rulings recently that have transformed the legal landscape in this country, and set the stage to, basically, crown Donald Trump the king,” Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive phenom who’s amassed a larger social media following than her party’s congressional leaders, said.

On Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. While that move is expected to go nowhere in the GOP-controlled lower chamber, Ocasio-Cortez argues it should be the focus of the Democratic Party right now.

“That has created — it is a horrific and destabilizing development — that has also created a window for us, and instead that is being used and that window is being forfeited in a disorganized public response,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The third-term progressive says Biden and his administration continue failing the far left, but added any issue she has with Biden's demerits have nothing on Trump’s desire for unfettered power.

“I think it is completely legitimate for a progressive person, a young person, etc. to have objections, reservations, concerns about President Biden,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What I'm focused on, truly — and ... I also think a lot of progressive and young people are — is that many of us are prepared to join a Popular Front strategy in order to defeat the fascist threat that is Donald Trump.”

Ocasio-Cortez argues now is no time for party — or progressive — purity.

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“It doesn't mean that we approve of the president's policy in Gaza. It doesn't mean that we've approved of any number or any one of the decisions, even if we find them completely and morally objectionable,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What we also see is putting that choice in the context of the larger threat that Donald Trump is to American democracy.”

While Ocasio-Cortez prides herself in pushing the party, including President Biden, further to the left on measures like the Green New Deal, she says November’s election needs to stay focused on the presidency, not perfection.

“So I think, really, it's a question of scale. I think as a progressive, there are moments we’re on the offense and there are moments where we have to mitigate challenging times,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I think my strategy has always been being as honest with people as possible. I'm not here to delude anyone or anything like that. What I am here to say is we got to work with what we're working with.”

That’s why Ocasio-Cortez is cautioning calm in her party’s ranks in the wake of Biden’s disastrous first presidential debate this cycle.

“It's not to delegitimize anyone’s stances on this current situation or moment,” Ocasio-Cortez told Raw Story. “But how we express that and how we conduct ourselves in turbulent times is a big part of what determines our strength.”

WASHINGTON — The cycle continues: Clarence Thomas has former President Donald Trump’s back, Trump has Senate Republicans in his back pocket and Senate Republicans, in turn, have Thomas’ back.

No matter how much financial dirt journalists and watchdog groups dig up on Thomas, and no matter how much Democrats single Thomas out for what they consider his shameful jurisprudence, his legend only continues to grow within conservative circles.

And those conservatives are striking back.

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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other Republicans on Capitol Hill say they have no plan to drop their blockade of Democrat’s proposed ethics reform package for the Supreme Court as long as Thomas’ gaggle of prominent detractors continue lambasting his for what reform organization Fix the Court tallies is more than $4 million in gifts from wealthy benefactors.

Last July, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the SCERT Act —Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act of 2023 — which would force the court to adopt an ethics code, establish an enforcement mechanism and increase transparency. Just last month, Senate Republicans brought their blockade to the Senate floor where the GOP quashed the measure.

“There's like a Clarence Thomas story every week. I'm sure next week it'll be something else. I mean, they're just hounding the poor guy. They want to hound him off the court,” Hawley told Raw Story before the Senate left town for senators' two-week long July Fourth recess.

“But none of them have been good headlines,” Raw Story pushed. “He admitted to... ”

“Well, of course not,” Hawley replied. “They’re like oppo research for the campaign. I mean, of course, they're not good headlines. They’ve been trying to discredit him. They tried to do this from the moment he got on the court.”

‘OK with felons’

Democrats aren’t surprised.

“Well, I think you have to understand that the little billionaire elite that put these people on the court is also heavily, heavily, heavily funding the Republican Senate political operation. So they have strings everywhere to pull,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story. “Do the math.”

Democrats are increasingly frustrated, though. And they don’t get the GOP’s blanket immunity from every unseemly accusation flying Thomas’ way, including that the upward of $4 million in gifts he accepted is “nearly 10 times the value of all gifts received by his fellow justices during the same time,” according to the Democratic majority on the Judiciary Committee.

“I think it's unacceptable. I’m stunned that he did not think this would undermine not just the view of his impartiality but will undermine the institution itself,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Raw Story.

But Booker says Democrats aren’t merely singling Thomas out, particularly with a Supreme Court that has regularly ruled in Trump’s interests. One such ruling dropped Monday, when the conservative majority led a 6-3 ruling that gave Trump (and future presidents) significant, if not absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.

“There's no way to objectively look at this other than showing that the highest court in the land is descending into some of the lowest examples of, I think, unethical behavior that points to horrendous influence of people who have issues, matters and, frankly, strong beliefs about which direction the court should go in,” Booker said.

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Other Democrats say the problem is the ethical standards — and lack thereof — on the right have been upended in this Trump-era.

“You have a Republican Party now that their presumptive nominee is a felon, so I guess that's, you know, where Republicans are now. They're OK with felons running for high public office,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) told Raw Story.

While Raw Story tried to press Peters — who is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — on the politics of the court ahead of November, Peters refused to go there.

“We have to have a court that is respected by the American people, and when things like this happen, people start losing respect for the court,” Peters said. “And the court’s power is based on the respect of the rule of law and the integrity of the justices. If you damage that, you damage the court.”

Some Republicans won’t go there, either.

Many point to the code of conduct Chief Justice John Roberts announced last fall. While it laid out some specific instances when justices need to recuse themselves — like, say, if a justice or their relative is tied to a case — it falls short of requiring recusal. And there’s no enforcement mechanism.

Still, that’s good enough for many of today’s Republicans.

“The Supreme Court has developed its own code of ethics, and I have not reviewed that,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Raw Story.

“Did you see that Clarence Thomas got $4 million in gifts?” Raw Story asked. “What do you make of that number?”

“I really haven't been focused on it,” Collins said as a “Senators Only” elevator closed on Raw Story.

‘Getting pressured’

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been focused on it, yet they’re whistling a similar tune.

“I’m all for getting the Article III branch to update, modernize their disclosure requirements and ethics rules, but please spare me this,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Raw Story. “I’m trying not to call out the individual members, but believe me we’ve got a rap sheet on every single one, both sides. And they should really come together.”

For one, Tillis is thinking of the disclosure that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accepted four tickets to see Beyoncé, an estimated $3,700 value.

While $4,000 and $4 million are worlds apart, it’s still unseemly to Tillis and others. That’s why he’s hoping the court just adopts its own stout ethics standards already.

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“They’re vulnerable,” Tillis said. “And, quite frankly, I’d like for the new ethics standards to get done when we have a majority conservative Supreme Court, and they can’t say it’s just because they’re getting pressured.”

Other Senate Republicans seem to have also outsourced their thinking on the Supreme Court to the court.

“Look, I trust the chief justice,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) — who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — told Raw Story.

The American people generally don’t.

Back in 2009, 61 percent of Americans approved of a then divided Supreme Court, according to Gallup. These days, Gallup shows a mere 41 percent approval rating for the nation’s high court.

This is nothing new.

A decade ago, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced the Supreme Court Ethics Act of 2013, which would “require the Supreme Court of the United States to promulgate a code of ethics.”

“It's extraordinary that there's not more outrage. This seems to be a pretty simple grift,” Murphy told Raw Story. “Maybe we have to wait until there's some scandal with a Democratic appointed judge before anybody on the right cares about it.”

Most Republicans raise constitutional doubts about Congress’ power to write ethics rules for a separate branch of government. Still, some, like Hawley of Missouri, agree with the thrust of Democrat’s ethics proposal.

“Don't get me wrong, it would be helpful to everybody, if they had firm rules that they don’t accept gifts,” Hawley said. “They shouldn’t take gifts. I’m opposed to the gifts. They shouldn't take tickets, cruises, planes — they shouldn't do it. That's my view. They haven't asked for my opinion, but that's my view.”

“We don't have power over them. They’ve got to do it, but I think they should. I think it'd be helpful if they would just say, ‘we're not gonna do that,’” Hawley told Raw Story. “I don't think they should own stock either. Just like I don’t think members of Congress should. It’d just be cleaner. Like, ‘we don’t own stock. We don't take gifts.’ That'd be better for everybody.”

Overall, Hawley remains dubious of Democrats.

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“I just think that they should just adopt their own ethics code and it ought to mirror, as much as possible, what Congress and the executive branch do,” Hawley said. “And honestly, if that were to happen, they'd still be attacking Justice Thomas.”

As of now, the left is promising to continue highlighting the lavish life Thomas lives at the expense of the wealthy donors who’ve taken him under their private wings, and they are showing no signs of letting up.

Progressives in the House of Representatives have been frustrated with their Senate counterparts for not doing more, like deploying filibuster reform to expand the size of the court.

And now, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for one, is angling to impeach Thomas and potentially his fellow conservative justices as soon as the U.S. House returns from recess.

Still, over in the Senate, most Democrats are resisting those calls from the party’s left wing. Instead, they’re promising to remain steady in their effort to expose this Supreme Court, so voters know the true choice facing the nation this November.

“You continue the investigation,” Whitehouse told Raw Story. “You continue the persistent pressure. Continue working with the judicial conference, which has been quite productive.”

WASHINGTON — If Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) is on a mission from God, as he maintains, someone might want to tell God already.

Since Virginia voters cast their Republican primary ballots on June 18, the two-term incumbent who chairs the far-right Freedom Caucus has been trailing his opponent, state Sen. John McGuire, by upward of 300 votes out of just over 62,000 ballots cast.

Good’s demanding a recount. He’s also trying to pray away “the forces of evil” conspiring against him.

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“I think it’s owed to the 31,000 people in the district who voted for me, and there's those true conservatives in Virginia and across the country that are outraged at the forces of evil that tried to influence this race — that did influence this race — and we owe it to them to make sure that it's right,” Good told Raw Story after voting in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

By “forces of evil,” Good doesn’t mean former President Donald Trump or even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — both of whom backed McGuire.

To Good, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is evil incarnate. That feeling has seemed mutual since Good and seven other House Republicans ingloriously, if historically, ousted McCarthy last year.

Good is a graduate of and former fundraiser for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Arguably, his biggest critic contends he’s blinded by his own light.

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“He can't win a real primary, because he's insane,” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), who Good defeated in 2020, told Raw Story. “There's no such thing as ‘forces of evil.’ Listen, stupidity and evil look very similar. And I think that's where he gets confused, because he's stupid.”

As is easily surmised, Riggleman — an ex-intelligence official who worked as a data analyst for the select Jan. 6 committee — is no fan of Good.

Good ended Riggleman’s time in Congress in part because he made an issue out of Riggleman officiating a same-sex marriage for a former staffer the year earlier. Good and officials in Virginia’s Republican Party also forced an in-person convention — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic — of the party faithful, instead of conducting a Republican congressional primary.

In the wake of this year’s primary, Good is calling for changes to the rules. He’s especially bemoaning the commonwealth's open primary system that allows independents and Democrats to vote in GOP primaries (as well as allowing Republicans to weigh in on Democratic ones.)

“That absolutely should be changed. We should have party registration in VIrginia. We should have closed primaries, or we need to go back to conventions and not allow Democrats to choose our nominee in primaries,” Good said. “There’s no question we would have won a convention.”

Good contends he won the hearts and minds of his party.

“I know we got the majority of Republican votes. The other side had to reach out and did reach out to Democrats crossover votes. It's an unfortunate reality in Virginia that our system allows Democrats to vote in Republican primaries, and we are certain that there were certainly more than 300 or 400 people who voted in this election for my opponent,” Good said.

A request for comment from the campaign of McGuire, a former Navy SEAL, wasn’t returned.

Riggleman dismissed Good’s griping.

“‘Forces of evil’ — so you're telling me that a primary that's actually fair, rather than a convention where they could limit the number of voters to beat me means that the people are the forces of evil?” Riggleman said. “That's somebody who's mentally unstable.”

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Riggleman added: “Yes, he said he could win in a convention. Because the convention is anti-American. A convention is for those who can't win a primary, which we just saw with Bob Good.”

The Virginia Board of Elections has yet to call the race, even as the chair of Virginia’s Republican Party, Richard Anderson, congratulated McGuire for winning earlier this week.

Good currently trails by 0.6 percentage points,, which means he can call for a recount according to state law, though he’s got to come up with a way to pay for it.

Regardless, he says he’s all in.

“There's some things that are concerning and that need to be reviewed, and we're going to do that. And I'm not going to be particular about that process,” Good said. “I’d rather be 300 votes ahead than 300 votes behind.”

But he’s currently behind: Something for which Good blames McCarthy.

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“It’s money that was wasted. It should have been spent in November to defeat Democrats. It's a race that never should have happened,” Good said. “It was a challenge based on lies by a dishonest opponent and funded by the former speaker whose mission in life seems to be to get revenge on those he holds responsible for him not being speaker.”

But Good says it’s not about payback.

“I'm not really concerned about that. We're just gonna do our best to win this recount,” Good said.

To Riggleman, there’s no pleasure watching these two Republicans digitally knife each other over his former seat.

“McGuire’s crazier than Bob Good. Think about that,” Riggleman said. “You're seeing a fight of crazy against crazy. Nobody's the good guy. No, nobody’s the good guy here. This is just people who want power and payback. It has nothing to do with the American people. It's about their own personal self-aggrandizement and power trips.”

Riggleman, in noting he wasn’t conservative enough for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, mused that Good — one of the nation’s most conservative lawmakers — might also not be conservative enough.

“That's what's crazy about this election,” Riggleman said. “I think Bob represents Christian nationalism. He represents a decision making methodology that's not based in facts; it's based in fantasy. And I think that really is a lure to a lot of GOP voters, that there's this good against evil battle going on out there and they're on the good side, regardless of facts.”

WASHINGTON — If you’re embarrassed or queasy after President Joe Biden’s performance in last night’s presidential debate, you’re in good company.

Dems are deflated. Of the 27 mostly current and a few former Democratic members of Congress Raw Story texted for reaction — all typically responsive — only three readily replied with thoughts on Biden’s performance.

That’s abnormal. Consider that after a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts in his Manhattan fraud trial, the same lot of Democrats quickly responded to Raw Story’s inquiries with giddy — if sanctimonious — texts, even responded to questions from halfway around the globe or promptly called us back. They all had lots to say.

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Not Thursday night. The Democratic Party is now debating how to right the listing SS Biden — or consider its scuttling.

Reached late Thursday, one powerful congressional Democrat demanded, “ON BACKGROUND ONLY,” so they — a duly elected public official who’s slated to net a key committee chairmanship if Democrats recapture the House in November — could speak openly, if anonymously.

“This was awful,” the lawmaker replied. “While Biden got better as the debate went on, the horrible start is what people will remember.”

Biden looked feeble. His hand tremors are visible. He froze, or lost his train of thought, or stumbled over his words time after time during the 90-minute debate.

The debate should have been a bad night for Trump — the former president antagonized anti-abortion supporters, lied about his presidential record and grossly rewrote the history of Jan. 6, 2021 — except Biden’s debate doldrums overshadowed matters.

Based on Raw Story’s unrequited texts to a smattering of key area codes — including 313 (Michigan), 330 (Ohio), 804 (Virginia), 305 (Florida) and even progressive 925 (California) — the painful performance is rippling through Democratic circles coast to coast.

And now, with national polls effectively tied, and Trump enjoying a slight overall edge in key swing states, the Democratic side of the great political divide is disheartened. Dispirited. Dismayed. They’re also flummoxed by their arch enemy — a man they once defeated at the polls and impeached twice, because they truly believe he’s the embodiment of anti-American ideals.

On Thursday night, Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) didn’t want to talk much about Biden. He focused his comments on Trump.

“I can’t believe how good Trump is at misstating and making it up as he goes,” Correa texted Raw Story. “Biden started slow and then picked up … We got straight talk from Biden. We got very little straight talk from Trump. Need to fact check Trump.”

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When Democratic members of Congress see Trump, they also see doom. And they want the public to see what they see.

“I was here Jan 6th., Trump really sidestepped this,” Correa said of Trump’s debate answers to Jan. 6-related questions from moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. “And Trump did not say if he’d accept the election results for 2024.”

Democrats still love Biden the man. Some just wish he’d convalesce away from the national stage, it seems.

One Democratic lawmaker provided a motherly-to-scholarly scolding for Raw Story interrupting her personal debate viewing party.

“I’m not answering questions,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) from the all-important Philadelphia suburbs texted Raw Story just over an hour into the slow moving debacle of a debate. “I’m listening.”

Raw Story circled back after the debate for a comment. Dean did not reply.

Right at midnight, one last Democrat replied to two Raw Story questions:

1.) Do you still trust Biden as your party’s standard bearer?

2.) Are you more nervous-to-worried now than you were this morning?

“No,” former Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) replied. “And yes.”