House Members Clap for Joy at Matt Gaetz’s Absence

Matt Gaetz’s absence in the House of Representatives on Friday led to cheers from his Democratic peers. The 119th session, highlighted by the contentious speakership election, started with an announcement of new members from House Clerk Kevin McCumber. Once he got to Gaetz, he stopped.

“The clerk is in receipt from the Honorable Matt Gaetz of the state of Florida indicating he will not serve in the House in the 119th Congress,” McCumber told the floor. Clapping ensued, while Republicans looked on.

Gaetz was reelected for another two-year term in November. He then resigned his seat, however, when Donald Trump announced him as pick for attorney general, amid a House Ethics Committee investigation that found Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct.” Republican senators balked, and the nomination was scrapped. There had been some speculation that Gaetz might show up to the speaker vote on Friday.

If the first vote for House Speaker is any indication, even though Representative Mike Johnson was reelected Friday to lead Congress, his trouble keeping the gavel may be far from over.

Johnson nearly failed to win the first vote, with Representatives Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self voting for other candidates.

There were six additional Republican holdouts who declined to vote the first time around, including Representatives Andy Biggs, Michael Cloud, Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, and House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris. Eventually, each of those six swung for the Louisiana Republican—but the numbers are starting to add up on another problem.

Norman and Self changed their votes after speaking with Johnson on the House floor.

A new rule Congress is set to vote on as soon as a speaker is elected would raise the threshold for a motion to vacate. If the rule change is implemented, it would require a lawmaker from the majority party to be joined by eight other co-signers from that party to force a vote on removing the speaker.

Nine lawmakers united against the speaker, and they could choose to drop the trap door again anytime they please—so even though Johnson was reelected, his potential firing squad may be beginning to materialize.

This story has been updated.

House Speaker Mike Johnson nearly lost the first floor vote Friday to retain the gavel.

When the vote was unofficially called, a handful of aimless Republican votes for other candidates (who weren’t running for the House’s most prized position) appeared to make it mathematically impossible for Johnson to win.

Johnson had faced near-impossible margins from the jump: With a full House floor and a unified Democratic caucus, the speaker could only afford to lose one Republican on his path to 218 votes. Johnson ended the round just shy of the goal, with 216 votes in the pocket.

But three votes against his bid by Representatives Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self threw that into shambles. Massie voted for Representative Tom Emmer, Norman voted for Representative Jim Jordan (who quietly weighed running last week before dropping the bid), and Self voted for Representative Byron Donalds. Norman and Self ultimately changed their vote to Johnson, clinching the necessary 218.

Representative Chip Roy—a speculated holdout—also changed his vote at the last minute in favor of Johnson.

This story has been updated.

Those who worked tirelessly for President-elect Trump during campaign season may not get the coveted administration jobs they were promised, according to reporting from NOTUS. The lower-level roles that Trump has yet to fill were apparently supposed to go to the bureaucrats of Project 2025. But Trump’s strategic separation from the project put the future jobs of many of those bureaucrats in jeopardy.

Trump has apparently been unclear about what those jobs will even be, and incredibly slow at announcing them. “There’s growing frustration among the would-be’s,” an anonymous Republican told NOTUS. “There’s only three weeks left til inauguration and some people are trying to figure out what their future is going to look like with no clarity.”

The best way to actually get a job in the Trump administration is apparently to be in the right place at the right time. “You basically just blast around [a name] until you get a response, and then you make sure they apply on the inside, and then you follow up weeks later, and you keep on pushing,” a Trump loyalist told NOTUS. “I haven’t heard of a better way to guarantee anything.”

Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, claimed that there was likely a “terrorist connection” between Wednesday’s Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and the deadly truck attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve—but then admitted he’s just going off a feeling.

Fox News’s Sandra Smith pressed Homan for information during an interview Thursday where he repeatedly referred to a “connection” between the two incidents. Smith told Homan that law enforcement had presented no evidence tying them together.

“You said you believed as this investigation carries out in Las Vegas … they will find a connection. Do you have any other information? Or have you been privy to any other information, other than what we just directly heard from the police there in Las Vegas?” Smith asked.

“No, I don’t. This is a gut feeling,” Homan explained. “I’ve done this for three and a half decades, I just think there’s too many similarities, too much—too much coincidence.

“I think something down the road, they’re gonna show, there’s some sort of connection. Whether some same network, or where they got the tools to pull these terrorist attacks off. I just feel like there’s gonna be something down the road. And I could be wrong, just a gut feeling I have,” Homan said.

So Homan’s got nothing, and his appearance was simply an opportunity to politicize the deaths of 14 people in New Orleans; to fearmonger ahead of Trump’s administration and its plan to enact draconian mass deportations.

Homan warned that “the threats aren’t over,” quickly switching the subject to the southern border, even though neither event seems to have been related to immigration at all. Homan continued to insist that the Cybertruck explosion was a “terrorist attack,” despite Las Vegas authorities suggesting it was a suicide.

Homan also ranted about the “insider threat” from members of the military and federal service, because both Matthew Livelsberger, the Cybertruck driver, and Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabba, the driver in New Orleans, served in the U.S. military.