Oregon Republicans Who Staged That Stupid Boycott Can’t Run for Reelection

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday that 10 Republican state senators have disqualified themselves from the upcoming election, after staging a record-long walkout last year to block bills on abortion access, transgender health care, and gun restrictions.

The 10 senators staged a six-week boycott last year, the longest in Oregon’s history, stalling hundreds of bills and paralyzing the legislature. Oregon’s secretary of state determined in August that the senators had violated a voter-approved constitutional amendment disqualifying lawmakers from the ballot if they have more than 10 unexcused absences.

The boycotters sued Secretary LaVonne Griffin-Valade, arguing they should be allowed to run in November. But the state’s high court upheld Griffin-Valade’s decision on Thursday.

Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved the change to the state constitution in 2022, after Republicans had staged similar boycotts the three previous years. The amendment states that if a lawmaker has missed more than 10 sessions, that lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.”

Democrats control the Oregon statehouse, but legislature rules require two-thirds of lawmakers to be present in order to pass legislation. The amendment’s goal is to prevent lawmakers from staging walkouts that gum up legislative works.

The 10 senators who walked out last year were primarily boycotting two measures: one that would have expanded access to abortion and gender-affirming care and another that would have cracked down on so-called ghost guns, or undetectable firearms. The legislative session resumed only after Republicans managed to extract concessions from Democrats on both these bills.

The boycotters argued in the state Supreme Court that they should be allowed to run for reelection in 2024 since their terms aren’t technically “completed” until 2025. They would then be ineligible in the 2028 election cycle.

But the justices pointed out that even if the amendment itself is ambiguous, the information provided ahead of the ballot initiative was not.

“Those other materials expressly and uniformly informed voters that the amendment would apply to a legislator’s immediate next terms of office, indicating that the voters so understood and intended that meaning,” the justices wrote in their ruling.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has plans to force a vote on another censure resolution against Representative Ilhan Omar on Thursday—except this time, Greene is attempting to punish the first Somali American legislator in Congress for words she never said.

Omar, who is also one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, has spent the better part of the week under fire by her colleagues across the aisle over a speech she delivered at the Minneapolis Hyatt Hotel on Saturday, celebrating an election in a region of Somalia. During the speech, she spoke in Somali about a dispute between Somalia and the breakaway republic Somaliland—but Republican interpretations of Omar’s language have been far from accurate.

Several Republicans have called for an ethics investigation, accusing Omar of being a “foreign agent,” while others, like wannabe House Speaker Tom Emmer, are demanding she “resign in disgrace,” condemning Omar for her “Somalia-first comments.”

According to the translation Republicans keep using, and the one cited by Greene’s resolution, Omar allegedly said that “the U.S. Government will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do,” and that she would “protect the interests of Somalia from inside the U.S. system.”

Greene and other Republicans also keep alleging that Omar said we are “Somalians first, Muslims second.”

But third-party translations of Omar’s speech, published in full by The Minnesota Reformer, reveal that Omar never actually said any of that. The Reformer commissioned two translations, and neither showed Omar saying, “Somalians first, Muslims second.”

“So when I heard that people who call themselves Somalis signed an agreement with Ethiopia, many people reached out to me and said I needed to talk to the U.S. government. They asked, what would the U.S. government do?” Omar said, according to the outlet.

“My answer was that the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do. That is the confidence we need to have as Somalis. We live in this country. This is the country where we pay taxes. This is the country that has elected a woman from your community. For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia and the United States will not support others who seek to steal from us,” she continued.

“So feel comfortable, Somali Minnesotans, that the woman you sent to Congress is aware of this issue and feels the same way you do,” she added.

In an email to the local paper, Omar noted that the attacks were “disingenuous attempts to malign my character and question my loyalty to my home, America.”

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is openly plotting revenge against the Republicans who ousted him.

McCarthy was unceremoniously booted from the speakership in October when eight Republicans, led by Representative Matt Gaetz, joined all Democrats in voting to vacate the chair. McCarthy left Congress in December, shrinking his party’s already narrow majority in the chamber.

Now, Politico reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources, McCarthy ally Brian Walsh is working to recruit primary challengers to those eight turncoats. The group is known on Capitol Hill as the “Crazy Eight” or “Gaetz Eight” (because the “hateful eight” was already taken).

McCarthy is ready to mobilize his still-sizeable donor network to mount primary challenges—focusing on three representatives in particular. His allies believe that Representatives Nancy Mace, Bob Good, and Eli Crane are the most vulnerable right now and are looking to recruit other Republican candidates in their districts.

“These traitors chose to side with Nancy Pelosi, AOC and over 200 Democrats to undermine the institution, their fellow Republicans and a duly elected Speaker,” Walsh told Politico in a statement. “There must be consequences for that decision.”

Mace’s turning on McCarthy must be especially bitter, because she was a member of his inner circle before voting to oust him. McCarthy reportedly encouraged her former chief of staff to resign and then run for her seat.

McCarthy’s revenge plans may continue beyond this election cycle. One member of the Gaetz Eight told Politico anonymously they had heard from a potential primary challenger who turned down recruitment attempts from a McCarthy associate. So the former speaker may keep pushing in future elections.

Of course, the biggest target is still Gaetz, who introduced the motion to vacate the speaker. Recently leaked private messages from Gaetz reveal the Florida Republican wanted to oust McCarthy because of the House Ethics Committee’s renewed probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex.

McCarthy has shown before that he has a vindictive streak. In November, McCarthy allegedly elbowed Representative Tim Burchett, another Gaetz Eight member, in the halls of Congress.

Burchett called McCarthy a “jerk” and accused him of having “no guts.”

“What kind of chicken move is that?” he demanded. “You’re pathetic, man, you are so pathetic.”

Donald Trump’s courtroom dramas are beginning to overwhelm his political ambitions.

The GOP front-runner’s reelection campaign spent millions more than it took in over the course of 2023, with the vast majority of expenditures going to Trump’s legal fees, reported Politico.

According to the outlet’s analysis of Trump’s campaign finance filings, made public Wednesday, the real estate mogul’s “web of committees”—which include his campaign, Save America, Make America Great Again PAC, his joint fundraising committee, and MAGA Inc.—tossed money back and forth between them, spending roughly $210 million during the last year. That’s $10 million more than it raised.

Perhaps even more writing on the wall for Trump: The former president used approximately $50 million in donations to cover his legal fees over the course of 2023.

Save America, Trump’s leadership PAC, spent more than $25 million on consulting and legal fees in the second half of the year alone—paying dues to more than 47 law firms and attorneys. That’s on top of some $21 million that the PAC spent on the former president’s mounting legal bill in the first half of the 2023. And the Make America Great Again PAC, which pulls most of its funding from Save America, put an additional $4 million toward Trump’s tab in the latter half of 2023, as well.

That reportedly left just $5 million in the tank for his leadership PACs, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, Republicans will need to be tightening their belts, as well, with recent filings suggesting that the conservative party wasn’t quite so fiscally minded last year. An end-of-year Federal Election Commission filing revealed that the Republican National Committee had just $8 million on hand, per The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.

Trump’s campaign is still in the green, however, thanks to a surplus in fundraising from previous years. But the high expenditures signal bad omens ahead for Trump as he grapples with not just the general election but also 91 felony charges across four separate, upcoming trials.

A Florida school district has drawn over the illustrations in multiple award-winning children’s books in its libraries after the chair of the local Moms for Liberty chapter complained that some of the characters were shown naked. One of the offending characters? A goblin who showed his backside.

Jennifer Pippin submitted multiple formal challenges in November and December to the Indian River County school district, Popular Information reported Thursday. One of the books she took issue with was the book Unicorns Are the Worst, which won a Florida state children’s literature award, because the main character (a goblin) is shown with its butt facing the audience. Here is the offending butt in question:

She challenged the book No, David! for the same reason (although the offending posterior in that book belongs to a young boy). Pippin also challenged In the Night Kitchen, a Caldecott Honor–winning book by Maurice Sendak. The protagonist, a young boy named Mickey, is sometimes drawn naked.

And she submitted yet another complaint about Draw Me a Star, by Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. In classic Carle style, though, very few features are actually distinguishable on the adults Pippin complained about.

After meeting with Pippin, school district officials suggested drawing clothes over the illustrations to hide their nudity. Pippin agreed that this would resolve the issue.

Pippin told Popular Information that she submitted challenges to these books because she felt that the depictions of nudity were “harmful to minors” under two Florida state laws. The first law relates to obscenity and prohibits showing minors any “nudity or sexual conduct.” The second law allows state residents to demand libraries remove any book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct.”

But the thing is, both of these laws specifically apply to sexual conduct, not just straight nudity. It says more about Pippin that she viewed these illustrations, which are intended to make children laugh, as inherently sexual.

David Flynt, whose children attend Indian River County schools, noted as much when he criticized Pippin’s challenges to the book. In an interview with Popular Information, Flynt asked why Moms for Liberty was “sexualizing” a drawing “of a goblin’s bare backside.”

The illustration “was not [included] to cause arousal, and was of a fictional character,” Flynt said.

He also pointed to Pippin’s challenge to the book Sofia Valdez, Future Prez.  Pippin claimed that the main character’s grandfather was shown wearing a pro-LGBTQ pin. While the illustration could be considered to include a pink triangle, an LGBTQ pride symbol, the drawing is so small that it could really be anything.

Pippin indicated in her challenge to Sofia Valdez that she has not actually read the book.

Florida has banned multiple books in the past year, for covering topics including race, gender, and sexuality. Pippin’s challenges are not the first time a school district has had to remove a book long considered innocuous. Recently, another school district removed editions of the dictionary from its library shelves because the reference text includes definitions of sexual conduct.