Today’s notice: We’ll never lie to you about a government funding bill, but our leadership is somehow also questioned constantly.
‘This Town Is Trying to Eat That Man Alive.’
By every indication, Mike Johnson’s long-suffering spending plan is about to go up in flames. Unfortunately for Johnson, that’s not the only thing taking heat.
“I think he’s cooked,” one GOP lawmaker texted NOTUS.
Johnson has endured similar criticisms of his speakership since the outset. But as a new Congress approaches, the speaker will have to answer for his year atop the conference if he wants to keep leading the House GOP. For conservatives opposed to short-term spending bills, this latest showdown might be the last straw.
“I don’t think that this [CR] is the catalyst,” Cory Mills told NOTUS Tuesday night. “But I’m sure that, for some, they are tallying this into their considerations of how they actually vote next election.”
“There’s a lot of disappointment in how he’s handled the job,” Paul Gosar said. “There’s been opportunities, that’s for sure.”
Most lawmakers recognize Johnson is in a tough spot. Without buy-in from rebels within his conference, he doesn’t have the votes to show the Senate he means business or pass much legislation at all. When his bill almost certainly fails today, he’ll once again be left relying on Democrats to keep the government open.
Clay Higgins, the author of Johnson’s package, told NOTUS the speaker has earnestly worked to get the bill over the finish line. But with both conservatives and Democrats working against Johnson, Higgins concluded: “This town is trying to eat that man alive.”
As Austin Scott told NOTUS, Johnson had been handed “an extremely difficult set of cards, just as Kevin McCarthy was given an extremely difficult set of cards with a very small margin.”
“Mike’s set of cards is probably actually a little more difficult,” Scott said.
But as McCarthy learned, even with plenty of allies, it only takes a few enemies to derail a speakership.
—Riley Rogerson
NOTUS Dive: An ‘Institution in Crisis’
You may have missed an unusual story this July coming out of the powerful Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission inside the Southern Baptist Convention (it turns religious rulings from Baptist leaders into political action). After all, a lot was going on that month. In short, Commission Chair Brent Leatherwood called President Biden’s abandoning his reelection bid “a selfless act,” and nearly immediately, it was announced he had been fired. But it turned out he actually wasn’t, and the guy who originally said he was then resigned.
Haley Byrd Wilt and Ben T.N. Mause peeled back the layers of all that and found a fascinating story of how the MAGA era of politics continues to try the unquestionably conservative SBC. The political factions dividing the Republican Party are at play here, but in a deeply personal way among these close-knit Baptist leaders. What that sounds like: Leatherwood is defended in part by James Lankford, another strong conservative who had a chaotic summer after MAGA declared his immigration compromise bill political heresy.
Read the story here.
Canada Goes to Virginia for Inspo
Canada’s got a team of lawyers in town to watch the DOJ’s blockbuster antitrust trial against Google this month, one of the attorneys told NOTUS while waiting for some overpriced, under-brewed coffee in the Alexandria courthouse food court on Tuesday.
In a statement to NOTUS, the Canadian Competition Bureau confirmed they sent officials down as they “closely follow the work of our international counterparts” but declined to elaborate. Canada’s antitrust watchdog has its own investigation underway against Google’s ad services but hasn’t brought charges thus far.
The DOJ laid out its case for why Google maintained an illegal monopoly on ad sales Tuesday via a Google software engineer who gave a lot of “I do not recall” on the stand re: emails and reports he wrote (he told the court he had six sessions with Google’s attorneys to prep for the day).
Google’s lawyers weren’t quite as chatty as Canada’s. NOTUS waited outside the neighboring Westin functioning as Google’s trial HQ to try to get Karen Dunn’s take on the hullabaloo on the Hill over her dual role advising Harris’ debate prep and defending Google against the Biden-Harris DOJ. She gave a quick, “I’m not doing any press.” Republican Hill staffers told NOTUS they haven’t heard back on their request for a briefing by Sept. 24 on alleged “conflicts of interest.”
—Claire Heddles
Front Page
- Harris Acknowledges Polling Slippage With Young Black Men: Black leaders aligned with her say if her campaign doesn’t act fast, she could cede more support to Trump.
- Senate Democrats Taunt Trump on IVF: “I doubt that Donald Trump even knows what the acronym ‘IVF’ stands for. Heck, I’m not even sure half the time that he can spell IVF,” one said.
- ‘It’s a Crying Shame’: Harris Goes After Trump for His Rhetoric on Haitian Migrants: “We’ve gotta say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the President of the United States of America, engaging with that hateful rhetoric,” she said.
Harris’ Black men problem
When Trump held a rally in the Bronx in May, he was trying to capitalize on poll numbers showing his campaign making significant inroads with Black voters, especially young Black men. Bronx Democrats scrambled to counterprogram, warning that the polls felt real to them on the ground.
Several lifetimes’ worth of news cycles and one Democratic nominee later, leaders say the challenge remains for Dems. Harris acknowledged it in Tuesday’s sit-down with NABJ member journalists, and Calen Razor reports on new Dem-aligned efforts to court these voters in the homestretch. It’s “a battle between two camps,” the executive director of BlackPAC, Adrianne Shropshire, told Calen. “There is a question of what is the Harris-Walz campaign doing to reach these young men? And then there’s the other question of what has the Trump campaign done to undermine Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party?”
Read the story here.
Number You Should Know
44
GOP senators voted against the Democrat-led IVF protections bill. Chuck Schumer leveraged the vote to turn up the heat and force senators on the record about a tough campaign issue. Things played out according to plan, and NOTUS’ Oriana González reports that Democrats are having a blast twisting the knife.
“I doubt that Donald Trump even knows what the acronym ‘IVF’ stands for. Heck, I’m not even sure half the time that he can spell IVF,” Tammy Duckworth told reporters.
NOT US
NOTUS reporters kill it, but some of our other favorite stories this week were published by … not us.
- ProPublica found that at least two Georgia women died after they could not access legal abortions.
- Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s use of coded messages have helped him evade Israel, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- The Nevada Independent explores how candidates in a hotly contested Senate race are navigating the top of the ticket.
Be Social
Jasmine Wright, who’s covered Kamala Harris for more than five years, shared reported insight into Harris at a Countdown to Election Day event at NOTUS’ offices in Georgetown Tuesday.
“If you think about the policy she’s already rolled out, it is not a wholesale reimagining of the economy, which I think a lot of voters want,” Wright said. “It’s little droplets around here, because at her base — something we don’t talk about enough — at her base, Vice President Harris believes in incremental change.”
Tell Us Your Thoughts
If not Mike Johnson, who are you putting money on as the House GOP leader’s next leader?
Send your thoughts to newsletters@notus.org.
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