Kevin McCarthy Gives the Republicans Who Trashed Him Everything They Wanted

Kevin McCarthy owes his long-desired speakership to a group of 21 holdouts finally caving, all of whom have been rewarded for flipping with plum committee assignments.

McCarthy made no secret of his ambition to be speaker, apparently no matter the cost, and the California Republican made us all sit through 15 agonizing votes before finally making enough deals to win. But it seems that the many changes to the rules package were not the only concessions he made.

Representative Lauren Boebert kept her seat on the Committee on Natural Resources and received a new post on the powerful House Oversight Committee. She is joined there by Scott Perry, Anna Paulina Luna, and Paul Gosar. Gosar was previously stripped of all committee assignments after he shared an animated video showing him killing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden with swords.

Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz who, along with Boebert, were some of the most vocal McCarthy critics, will keep their seats on the House Judiciary Committee, along with Chip Roy and Dan Bishop. Byron Donalds, who at one point ran against McCarthy for speaker, will stay on the House Oversight Committee and has joined the House Committee on Financial Services. Many other McCarthy holdouts will keep their committee assignments.

McCarthy also rewarded his allies: Jim Jordan, who consistently voted for McCarthy even when the holdouts nominated Jordan for speaker, is the new chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Marjorie Taylor Greene spent months allying herself with McCarthy and urging her colleagues to back him. She, like Gosar, was stripped of committee assignments by Democrats for her inflammatory social media posts. Greene now sits on the Oversight Committee and the Committee on Homeland Security. Problematic king George Santos voted for McCarthy every time, and not only has the new speaker refrained from condemning the freshman congressman’s many lies but McCarthy also gave him two committee assignments.

James Comer is the new chair of the Oversight Committee. Mike Rogers threatened to withhold committee assignments from the holdouts and even nearly came to blows with Gaetz for refusing to vote for McCarthy. He now chairs the Armed Services Committee.

The White House slammed the assignments, with spokesman Ian Sams telling Axios, “It appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people.”

“Republicans are handing the keys of oversight to the most extreme MAGA members of the Republican caucus who promote violent rhetoric and dangerous conspiracy theories,” he said.

Ritchie Torres, former vice chair of the Homeland Security Committee, tweeted he was “horrified” by Greene’s assignment to the group.

George Santos has positioned himself as a proud, unabashed conservative—on social issues and all. He has expressed support for Florida’s regressive “Don’t Say Gay” law that bars teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in school. Accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom our kids,” Santos peddled right-wing talking points that equate discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with children with sexual abuse. Such talking points often go further, holding that drag shows, or even LGBTQ people generally, groom and abuse children.

It now appears Santos has participated in drag himself.

A 2008 photo from Brazil depicts Santos, known at the time as Anthony, in a drag costume under the moniker Kitara Ravache.

The photo comes from Santos’s old friend Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who spoke with journalist Marisa Kabas. According to their conversation, Rochard met Santos when he was a teenager, and they bonded over both being gay and enjoying drag. After Rochard had seen a news story about Santos, Rochard shared the photo to her social media to prove the old connection.

“Me with the American Republican deputy at the Niterói parade, as I had said he wouldn’t leave my house, there’s the proof for those who called me a liar,” Rochard wrote on Instagram (in rough translation from Portuguese).

To be clear, it’s great that Santos enjoyed drag and made a friend while doing it. And in any abstract sense, it doesn’t matter! What matters is that Santos has positioned himself among a political movement incredibly antagonistic toward drag queens and others who enjoy drag, one that stokes transphobia and hate toward all LGTBQ people. Santos will try to have it both ways—and Republicans who have decried drag as a moral crisis will too: Either drag truly is an existential threat to our children (wrong) and Santos should be removed from Congress (correct), or drag is absolutely fine (correct) and Santos should not be removed from Congress (wrong).

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s controversial nominee to lead the state’s highest court has been rejected. In a Wednesday hearing, the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee voted to prevent Judge Hector LaSalle from advancing to a Senate-wide vote, setting up a likely legal fight between Democrats in the state.

The final vote count was 2–10–7, with only two members voting in favor of totally advancing LaSalle. Ten members voted against LaSalle, while one Democrat joined the committee’s six Republicans in voting to advance LaSalle without recommendation. All in all, LaSalle’s advancement fails by a vote of 9–10.

New York Senate Democrats voted against LaSalle due to concerns over his judicial record on labor, abortion, and criminal justice. Hochul did not heed their earlier warnings, and instead promised to do “everything” in her power to push him onto the state’s Court of Appeals. The effort first began in December, when, just weeks after beating a Republican during a midterm election in New York by only five points, Hochul chose to nominate LaSalle, whose record has been criticized by liberals, progressives, workers, and abortion voters as being antagonistic to supposed Democratic values.

Instead of attempting to massage away the criticism, or just respond to it and renominate someone else, Hochul dug her heels in.

On January 9, Ironworkers Vice President James Mahoney criticized Hochul’s choice at a press conference, saying the nomination felt like being put “on the menu.” He felt this way, he said, particularly after he and other labor organizers worked so hard to elect Hochul in the first place. Afterward, Hochul allegedly revoked Mahoney’s invitation to her State of the State speech the following day.

On January 14, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tagged alongside Hochul at a Bronx rally to endorse LaSalle. He is “highly qualified to serve as the chief judge,” Jeffries said. “Period, full stop.” (Recall that Jeffries is House minority leader, and not House speaker, in large part thanks to the conservative majority on the state’s top court, which drew unfavorable district maps.)

Finally, in one of the most brazen and bizarre displays of commitment to the nomination, Hochul appeared at two New York City churches on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to rally support for her nomination.

“Dr. King called upon us to be just and to be fair and to not judge people. And that has not been afforded to an individual named Judge Hector LaSalle,” Hochul said. “My household knew the story of Dr. King.… When he was gunned down, assassinated, my family sat there and held hands and wept. How could this be? How could this man of God who taught us about nonviolence and social justice and change, and not judging people by the color of their skin, or one or two cases out of 5,000 cases decided.”

If the shocking use of her pulpit on such a day wasn’t enough, Hochul presided over the police removal of activist and church attendee Genesis Aquino, who stood up during Hochul’s appearance to say she was praying for Hochul to heed tenants and working-class New Yorkers, hoping she would withdraw LaSalle and support eviction reform that would enable tenants to sue landlords for extreme rent increases.

All Hochul’s efforts were for naught. But she may not be done yet. Despite the committee’s “no” vote, Hochul is reportedly hiring a litigator to stake a legal battle on the basis of whether a nominee can be voted down in the Judiciary Committee in the first place.

Do you want to own a piece of history?

No, we’re not talking about Donald Trump’s weird NFTs. Twitter is auctioning off 631 different items from its San Francisco office, ranging from furniture and decor to massive espresso machines, kegerators, and a meat-and-cheese slicer.

People are already going nuts for the sales. A neon sculpture of Twitter’s bird logo has a bid of $34,000 as of Wednesday morning. The antique-looking wheel slicer is going for $7,000. Even less interesting things, like sets of whiteboard room dividers, are going for about $1,000 each. The auction, which was quietly launched on Tuesday, ends Wednesday at 10 a.m. P.T. (1 p.m. E.T.).

While the auction is, on its face, absurd, it also paints a pretty sad picture of what’s going on at Twitter. The sales include what looks like the entire office’s worth of furniture: break-room stools, desks, workstation setups, extra chairs for meetings, even soundproof conference room pods. And it’s all further proof of the utter chaos that seems to be raging at the online platform.

Since Elon Musk assumed the Twitter reins in October, it seems almost conservative to say that all hell has broken loose. He immediately fired the entire board of directors, followed by most of the staff. The rest have been leaving in droves, while those who remain have reportedly been living in their offices as they work around the clock.

Advertisers have shunned Twitter en masse, scared off by Musk’s lax regulations and willingness to let Nazis run amok on the platform. The Tesla founder was already hard-pressed to come up with the $44 billion he agreed to pay for Twitter, and he has been open about needing to cut costs and increase revenue any way possible. One method to do so has apparently been to stop paying rent on office space. The landlord of the San Francisco office sued Twitter for $136,260 in unpaid rent earlier this month.

Musk has also rolled out the pay-for-verification subscription plan Twitter Blue. The plan is highly controversial because anyone can pay for verification, and thus legitimacy, including the Taliban. Between taking the extremist group’s $8 and selling off everything in the San Francisco office, it seems Musk will go to a lot of lengths to make a buck.

George Santos used to go by a Jewish last name to better scam donors to his made-up animal charity, according to a former acquaintance.

Gregory Morey-Parker, who said he and the New York representative were roommates for a few months, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Tuesday that Santos had gone by Anthony Zabrovsky at the time.

“He would say, ‘Oh, well, the Jews will give more if you’re a Jew.’ And so that’s the name he used for his GoFundMes,” Morey-Parker said.

As we all know by now, Santos appears to have fabricated the bulk of his professional résumé. He also seems to have lied about his personal background, including that he is descended from Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust. He has previously said his maternal grandparents changed their name from Zabrovsky to avoid persecution. Records indicate, though, that Santos’s grandparents were born in Brazil and that he has no Jewish heritage whatsoever.

Santos also claimed that he ran a nonprofit called Friends of Pets United, which worked on pet rescue (but seemed to hate cats). The IRS couldn’t find any records that the animal rescue charity Santos says he founded in 2013 held tax-exempt status, and neither the New York nor New Jersey attorney general’s office could find records of the organization being registered as a charity. CNN has found that Santos ran a GoFundMe campaign that no longer exists for a pet charity under the name “Anthony Zabrovsky.”

Santos has come under fire from both constituents and the Republican Jewish Coalition for making up Jewish ancestry (particularly with a Holocaust link) for clout. Pretending to be part of a community so you can get more money out of people is also deeply offensive.

The Republican congressman continues to defy logic and offend all sensibilities. He is facing multiple calls to resign, three ethics investigations, three criminal ones, and a fraud charge in Brazil, and yet he was still given committee assignments in the House of Representatives.