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Tag: leadership
Mike Johnson

Angry Republicans Already Considering Whether To Oust Their New Speaker

Just two and a half months into his job, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is leading a caucus of increasingly angered and frustrated Republicans, with some GOP lawmakers privately and even publicly attacking their new leader – after ousting their previous one.

Despite two possible federal government shutdowns looming – January 19 is the first deadline, followed by one on February 2 – House Republicans are furious that Speaker Johnson appears to be abiding by the law and a verbal agreement, one forged by his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, and President Joe Biden.

“Significant concerns growing about Mike’s ability to jump to this level and deliver conservative wins,” one “well-plugged-in” House Republican congressman told Punchbowl News. “Growing feeling that he’s in way, way over his head. As much as there was valid criticism and frustration with Kevin, Mike is struggling to grow into the job and is just getting rolled even more than McCarthy did.”

Punchbowl is calling this “Johnson’s Hell Week,” as the House will returns today “and Speaker Mike Johnson is set to get a very rough reception.”

“There has been a lot — and we mean truly a lot — of private griping among House Republicans about Johnson’s deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to lock in the Fiscal Responsibility Act for FY2024 spending.”

Count far-right Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) among those who are publicly griping about spending and about Johnson.

“The speaker’s office and everyone in town are trying to sell everybody a bill of goods. It’s not true,” Roy told the Washington Examiner, which notes, “When asked if he was referring to conversations about a motion to vacate and remove Johnson as speaker, Roy wouldn’t say.”

But he did say, “We’re just having the conversations we need to have about this continued failure theater.”

Monday night on CNN Rep. Roy was more forthcoming.

Asked if Republicans are going to try to oust Speaker Johnson, Roy denounced the spending bill then said, “I think there’s going to be some real conversations this week about what we need to do going forward.”

When pressed again about possibly ousting Johnson, Roy didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no.

“That’s not the road I prefer,” Roy replied. “I didn’t prefer to go down that road with Speaker McCarthy. We need to figure out how to get this all done together. But it isn’t good, and there’s a lot of my colleagues who are pretty frustrated about it, so we’ll see what happens this week.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Enraged By Leadership Failure, Some House Republicans Are Quitting

Enraged By Leadership Failure, Some House Republicans Are Quitting

House Republicans' razor-thin majority has ensured that not only is there very little chance of the party uniting around a candidate for Speaker of the House that 217 Republicans could support, but that the very basic components of governing are essentially impossible.

In a piece for The New Republic, writer Matt Ford laid out how the political morass that has effectively shut down the House of Representatives — with seemingly no end in sight following Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) for example, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) posted a statement to X announcing that she would not be running for reelection in 2024.

"I want to spend more time with my husband, my 94-year-old mother, my three children, and my five grandchildren," Lesko wrote. "Spending, on average, three weeks out of every month away from my family, and traveling back and forth to Washington, D.C. almost every weekend is difficult."

"Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken; it is hard to get anything done," she added.

In addition to Lesko, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) also signaled that she was at her wit's end following the chaos and dysfunction that have defined the House of Representatives even prior to the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California).

"I've done many very difficult things being one woman standing many times with many very long hours and personal sacrifices, but there is a limitation to human capacity," Spartz stated on October 2, several days before McCarthy was kicked out of the speaker's chair. "If Congress does not pass a debt commission this year to move the needle on the crushing national debt and inflation, at least at the next debt ceiling increase at the end of 2024, I will not continue sacrificing my children for this circus with a complete absence of leadership, vision, and spine."

Aside from the leadership vacuum, members of Congress are also dealing with a staggering increase in violent threats. According to a 2022 report in the New York Times, US Capitol Police found that violent threats made to members increased by a factor of ten between 2016 and 2021, with more than 9,600 incidents reported. It's likely this year will also see an increase, as some of those violent threats have come in recent days, according to House Republicans who opposed Jordan's bid for speaker.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

President Joe Biden Visits Fire Stricken Denver

Biden Shows Empathy And Support Following Natural Disaster--Unlike Trump

By Jeff Mason

LOUISVILLE, Colo. (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday visited a Denver-area community reduced to rubble last week by a rare winter wildfire, offering hugs and condolences to a handful of the thousands of residents whose homes were destroyed.

Two people were missing and feared dead after the wind-driven Marshall Fire incinerated more than 1,000 dwellings on Dec. 30-31, making it the most destructive Colorado blaze on record in terms of property losses. Human remains believed to belong to one of the missing were recovered on Wednesday.

The prairie grass fire in Boulder County, on the northern outskirts of the Denver metropolitan area, scorched over 6,000 acres and laid waste to parts of two towns - Louisville and Superior - as flames at times devoured football field-size stretches of drought-parched landscape in seconds.

Biden's trip to Boulder County marked his second as president to Colorado and his second focused on wildfires.

Under bright sunny skies, the president and first lady Jill Biden walked through a flame-ravaged Louisville neighborhood where blackened rubble and scorched tree trunks poked through a blanket of snow. They chatted briefly with emergency workers and families displaced by the blaze.

The president, pausing to embrace some residents and place a hand on the shoulders of others, was joined on the tour by Colorado Governor Jared Polis and at least three members of the state's congressional delegation.

"We lost everything," one man was overheard telling the president.

Biden has declared the scene of the latest blaze on the eastern fringe of the Rocky Mountains a national disaster, freeing up federal funds to assist residents and businesses in recovery efforts.

The normal wildfire season in Colorado does not typically extend into the winter thanks to snow cover and bracing cold. But climate change and rising global temperatures are leaving vegetation in parts of the western United States drier and more incendiary.

Insured losses from the fire are expected to run about $1 billion, according to catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark & Company.

Local authorities put the value of residential property damage alone at more than $500 million.

The president's primary legislative initiative, the Build Back Better Act, would funnel billions of dollars to increased forest management, firefighting and efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

The bill, opposed by Republicans, passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in November. It must still pass the Senate, where it has yet to secure the needed support of all of Biden's fellow Democrats.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Denver; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Keith Coffman in Denver; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Leslie Adler)

voice of leadership

Where Is The Voice Of Leadership Now?

We're traveling in a crowded subway car somewhere under Manhattan when, without warning, the car comes to an abrupt halt in a tunnel in between stations. The subway car is plunged into darkness, and our own growing anxiety, along with that of our fellow passengers, is almost palpable. After a while, a measured, authoritative voice comes over the public address system and calmly tells all us stranded, semiscared passengers a) what has happened; b) what is now being done to fix the problem; c) that we will be safe and on our way within a finite amount of time; and d) what we can do in the meantime to help the rescue process along. That is what the voice of leadership sounds like.

That was what Americans heard on Jan. 28, 1986, when their president, Ronald Reagan, spoke the seven names — Michael Smith, Gregory Jarvis, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka and Christa McAuliffe — of the astronauts who had perished in the space shuttle Challenger explosion: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for the journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

The president alone can speak to all of us and for all of us. After the failed U.S.-supported invasion of Cuba he had authorized, the president of the United States took sole responsibility for the failure ("I'm the responsible officer"), adding "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan."

Thus spoke John F. Kennedy, whose epitaph may have been best written by a young man who explained why he gave up two years of his life and volunteered to join the Peace Corps Kennedy created: "I'd never done anything political, patriotic or unselfish, because nobody ever asked me to. Kennedy asked."

Commanding five-star general of the victorious Allied forces in World War II that destroyed Hitler's Third Reich, Dwight Eisenhower warned against the militarization of America: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Ike refused to romanticize combat: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

President Gerald Ford, in hopes of healing the divided nation he had inherited and ending waves of political recrimination, ignored the political consequences and his own reelection prospects by pardoning his disgraced predecessor, the resigned Richard Nixon. That decision probably cost Ford the presidency, but he explained "The ultimate test of leadership is not the polls you take, but the risks you take. … Political courage can be self-defeating, but the greatest defeat of all would be to live without courage, for that would hardly be living at all."

Then we have the words of a president who, speaking to a nation aware that the mysterious and deadly coronavirus is changing the way they live and work, said: "So, if we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better." Another presidential statement: "There's a theory that, in April, when it gets warm — historically, that has been able to kill the virus." He has called the outbreak "a hoax" and blamed it on the Democrats and the press. You really miss the voice of leadership when you don't hear it.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.