Johnson’s Hilarious SOTU Warning to House GOP Tells Us Everything

House Republicans needed a wrist slap ahead of Thursday’s State of the Union address, with House Speaker Mike Johnson privately pleading with party members to keep decorum during Congress’s annual visit by the president.

“He just said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum,’” one GOP lawmaker told The Hill on Wednesday.

“We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming,” the lawmaker added, referring to Democrats. “I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”

As sad and embarrassing as the classroom reminder is for the nation’s elected officials, it is, unfortunately, necessary.

Last year, Republicans launched a series of outbursts during Biden’s address, essentially becoming props in an unscripted call-and-response with the president. While Biden dissected the topic of immigration, lawmakers cried out “secure the border,” and when he explained the potential for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in talks on the debt limit, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a fur-trimmed white coat, shouted “liar.”

Still, it’s not completely clear if party members are willing to heed Johnson’s advice and resist the urge to interject.

“Will they do it? Somebody asked me that earlier and I said, ‘Does the Baptist Church got a bus?’ Of course they will because he’s gonna say some very offensive things, he’s gonna attack us,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Hill.

“I think we just need to try to be a little classy,” he continued. “Consider where we’re at, let the other side do that. You know, they did it to Trump, and nobody said boo, but when we do it we’re gonna get made an example of it.”

Apparently quoting Hitler isn’t enough for North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor. Mark Robinson also wants to take away women’s right to vote.

Robinson—a Hitler-quoting, LGBTQ-bashing, feminist-hating, conspiracy-pushing antisemite—won the Tar Heel State’s Republican gubernatorial nomination on Super Tuesday. Since then, a four-year-old video has resurfaced of him making yet more questionable comments.

During an event hosted in March 2020 by the Republican Women of Pitt County, Robinson, who was then running for lieutenant governor, mused on what would make America “great again.” He said someone had asked conservative activist Candace Owens which version of the U.S. was better: one where “Black people were swinging from cheap trees” or one where women weren’t allowed to vote.

“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Robinson said, apparently thinking that was an entirely normal and reasonable thing to say to a roomful of women.

According to Robinson, before women had the right to vote, “in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.”

The room was silent during Robinson’s comments, but apparently it wasn’t too off-putting to voters. Robinson went on to become lieutenant governor, and then he won his 2024 primary with 66 percent of the vote. Mathematically, some of those voters had to be women.

Robinson has long held other outrageous stances. He has said feminism was created by Satan, that feminist women are “fem-nazis,” and that feminist men are “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties.”

In December 2017, he wrote on Facebook that, “The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his.”

Robinson has also quoted Hitler on social media. In 2014, he cited the genocidal German dictator’s stance on racial pride. Then, at a Moms for Liberty event in July, he defended his desire to quote Hitler.

In other posts, Robinson has downplayed the Holocaust, compared abortion to murder, and called LGBTQ people “filth” and “maggots.”

On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee pushed forward with its impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, inviting his son Hunter Biden to testify in a public hearing on March 20. It is not yet clear if the younger Biden has agreed to the date.

Last week, Hunter Biden finally gave in to monthslong requests for him to appear before the committee in a closed door hearing. Over the course of six hours, Republicans found themselves targeted more than the president’s son, being roundly accused of ignoring evidence supporting the president’s innocence and pushing a double standard by refusing to examine the financial gains pocketed by President Donald Trump and his family off of their official White House positions, including a $2 billion deal with a Saudi crown prince and Trump ally brokered by the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, shortly after he left the White House.

So far, Republicans have failed to provide any witnesses or concrete evidence that show criminal wrongdoing by Joe Biden. The committee’s former star witness, Alexander Smirnov, served as the singular source for claims that Biden had profited millions off of his son’s connection to Burisma. But that angle, which House Republicans had believed was their best bet at nabbing the president, completely blew up in their face last month when Smirnov was indicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI. Since then, Smirnov has reportedly admitted to law enforcement that top Russian intelligence officials were involved in the smear campaign against the sitting president.

Meanwhile, all of the other witnesses that Republicans have called, claiming that their testimony will blow the case wide open, have instead debunked every single accusation against the Biden family.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says it’s OK that he hung out with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a couple times because he also was friendly with plenty of other questionable characters.

The independent presidential candidate offered the staggering defense during a Wednesday appearance on the podcast Flagrant. Kennedy has previously admitted that he had flown on Epstein’s private plane twice.

“I’m in New York for most of my life. You run into everybody in New York,” Kennedy said. “I mean, I know Harvey Weinstein. I knew Roger Ailes. I knew, O.J. Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house.”

Kennedy insisted that he wasn’t aware he was hanging out with a bunch of sexual abusers and an accused murderer. “You don’t know these people are swamp creatures until all this stuff comes out,” he said.

But at least with Epstein, who killed himself in prison before he could stand trial for sex trafficking minors, Kennedy said he “did see the creepiness immediately.”

But apparently not so immediately that he didn’t go on the disgraced financier’s private plane a second time.

The internet, of course, had jokes about Kennedy’s mind-boggling defense.

“Who name drops four rapists and a murderer???” one person tweeted.

Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer pointed out that someone seemed to be missing from the guest list.

“Never stop running for president, Bob,” another person quipped.

Kennedy’s presidential campaign has struggled to take off, and in recent weeks has been hit with some major mishaps. Kennedy ran a campaign ad during the Super Bowl that borrowed the iconic “Kennedy for president” jingle from his late uncle John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. Kennedy was forced to apologize to his other family members, who were outraged that the anti-vaxxer had tried to leverage the family name for campaign clout.

And on Monday, the Democratic National Committee accused a pro-Kennedy super PAC of violating campaign finance regulations.

But Kennedy appears to be slowly gaining support. While he notched no big wins on Super Tuesday, Kennedy did announce that he has gathered enough signatures to qualify for the New Hampshire and Nevada ballots in November.

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign officials were scrambling to find any means for the election results to work out in his favor, despite being unable to find actual evidence that he legitimately won the states that ultimately sent Joe Biden to the White House.

And it turns out, according to the Arizona state Attorney General’s Office, the campaign may have broken the law in the state.

In the past few weeks, people officiated with Trump’s campaign have received grand jury subpoenas from Arizona prosecutors as part of a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Politico reported. These subpoenas could help determine if some of Trump’s biggest allies in the state, including some who were fake electors in December 2020, will face criminal charges.

Arizona’s attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, is behind the latest move. It’s not yet clear if she will go after people in Trump’s national campaign, or if this investigation is focused on those in Arizona who tried to help Trump overturn the state’s election results. Mayes’s investigators have reportedly asked about Trump himself, his former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Trump’s attorneys John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro.

A recent document release from a lawsuit settlement reveals the deranged depths Chesebro went to in the search of ways to undermine the 2020 election results. 

Fake electors in other states like Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada are all facing charges for their efforts.