Day 21: Republicans Lose Their House Speaker Pick in Record Time

On Tuesday, the Republican caucus rallied and picked Majority Whip Tom Emmer as its next House speaker.

Also on Tuesday—just four hours later—Emmer dropped out of the race.

Emmer won the nomination Tuesday morning with 117 votes, while 26 Republicans voted against him. In the next few hours, Donald Trump came out against Emmer as speaker, even going so far as to text his brutal Truth Social post to the Republican caucus.

Several Republican lawmakers began to voice concern that Emmer would never win the nomination on the House floor. Representative Matt Gaetz, who voted for Emmer just hours earlier and started this mess by leading the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said, “It’s really important that the speaker of the House have a good relationship with the leader of our party. That’s Donald Trump.”

It’s clear that Emmer heard the criticism loud and clear. In a House Republican caucus meeting on Tuesday afternoon, he reportedly left the meeting without a word. News then broke that he dropped out.

It has been 21 days without a House speaker.

Senator Ted Cruz offended fellow Houston Astros fans Monday night—simply by showing up.

Ahead of Monday’s playoff game against the Texas Rangers, an outpouring of Astros fans begged the Texas congressman not to make an appearance in the stands, reported Rolling Stone.

“I appreciate that Ted Cruz, as a dad, loves taking his kids to the @astros games,” tweeted one fan. “But for the love of all things Houston, let Heidi take them! Send them with friends! It’s game 7 man. We can’t risk this. The whole city is asking you.”

Still, Cruz appeared, and they bombed, losing to the Rangers 11–4. Attendees were seen piling toward the exits by the sixth inning when the Astros were already down 10–2.

Cruz has spent a lot of time inadvertently pissing off Houston fans lately. So far in the MLB postseason, the Astros have lost all five home playoff games attended by the jinxed senator, reviving what locals dub the “Cruz Curse.”

“No matter which team you support in the all-Texas ALCS, you definitely don’t want @tedcruz near your team,” tweeted Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat running to defeat Cruz and nab his Senate seat, a week before Cruz attended two losing Astros games.

“For 7 years, Catherine & I have attended nearly EVERY Astros home playoff game,” Cruz tweeted in response to the controversy, calling Rolling Stone “lying hacks.”

“If they’re going to blame me for our recent home losses, pls also credit us for TWO World Series Championships & SEVEN consecutive ALCS’s—we were there cheering Stros on,” Cruz added.

Monday’s blowout loss wasn’t the first major loss attributed to Cruz’s curse. In 2018, losing fans pointed fingers at the senator’s courtside appearance during the Houston Rockets’s Game 7 loss to the Golden State Warriors, when the Rockets missed a record 27 straight attempts from three-point range.

Others have criticized Cruz for compromising their teams when he doesn’t seem to love sports in the first place. Fans seemingly haven’t forgotten Cruz’s blunder during the 2016 Republican primaries, when he referred to a basketball hoop as a “basketball ring.”

After weeks of failed attempts, Republicans have their latest nominee for speaker of the House: Majority Whip Tom Emmer.

Emmer won the majority vote in a series of quick-fire elimination rounds held Tuesday, ultimately garnering 117 votes.

Nine candidates initially raised their hands and crafted platforms for their speakership ahead of Tuesday’s proceedings—nearly all of them election deniers. Emmer, unlike the majority, voted to certify the 2020 presidential election results and railed against objections to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s election results, but it’s critical to note that he still worked to spread election falsehoods.

In the days preceding the January 6 Capitol riot, the Minnesota congressman was one of more than 100 Republicans who signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out Biden’s winning numbers in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Somehow, Emmer’s stance stands out against the opinions of his predecessors, Representatives Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, who both voted to overturn the results.

Emmer’s insider perspective and congressional experience were enough to earn key endorsements early on in his candidacy, including those of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Ken Buck, who led a holdout vote against Jordan’s failed candidacy last week.

It still remains to be seen if Emmer can hold onto his popularity until the House reconvenes for a floor vote, considering the splintering party’s razor-thin majority.

Donald Trump is already prepping to undermine the 2024 election: this time, by explicitly calling on his supporters to focus on harassing voters and election workers.

At an event in Derry, New Hampshire, on Monday, Trump told a crowd of supporters that rather than participate in the upcoming presidential election, “you gotta be careful, you gotta get out there and watch those voters!”

“You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting—we got plenty of votes,” Trump bizarrely said to his own supporters. (This would be a strange message in any state, but especially so in New Hampshire, where Biden is leading Trump, according to most recent polling.)

This isn’t the only time this week that the Republican Party’s front-runner has tried to preemptively undermine the 2024 election. On Monday, Trump reposted a meme on Truth Social threatening election workers.

Trump and his own group of mobsters are currently on trial in Georgia for interfering with the 2020 election, where their racketeering charges are directly linked to the intimidation and harassment of poll workers. So far, three former Trump lawyers (Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis) have flipped on the former president.

Trump’s attempts to turn up the heat on the pillars of our democracy, like free and fair elections and the people who run them, reveal his increasing desperation to win at any price.

A Jewish editor in chief of a science journal says he was fired from his position after sharing an article on the siege in Gaza from the satirical website The Onion.

Michael Eisen, who edits the Cambridge-based science journal eLife, on Monday shared the news of his dismissal on X (formerly Twitter).

Eisen, who is also a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, had shared an Onion article titled “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.”

“Every sane person on Earth is horrified and traumatized by what Hamas did and wants it to never happen again,” he clarified in a later tweet. “All the more so as a Jew with Israeli family. But I am also horrified by the collective punishment already being meted out on Gazans, and the worse that is about to come.”

To protest Eisen’s firing, fellow editor Lara Urban also announced her resignation on Monday afternoon.

Since the latest round of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began earlier this month, people who have advocated for Palestinian rights, statehood, or even a cease-fire have been subjected to intense criticism. The U.N. estimates that 1,400 Israelis and nearly 5,100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed.