Speaker Johnson is perhaps not ready for prime time.

And if you think that’s stupid, flaming idiot and Western Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke today introduced a bill proposing that Palestinians be expelled from the United States. This is his idea for Keeping America Safe From Terrorism. The actual effect of this would be to hang a big neon sign over America saying “Bomb Me.” More here.

“This is the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen and it’s well deserved,” Zinke said in a statement that conflated all Palestinians with Hamas.

As justification for this racist immigration overhaul, Zinke in a press release quoted articles from as far back as 2019 that have nothing to do with Palestinians or even threats to America, as well as articles from conservative outlets The Daily Mail and Fox News.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the co-sponsors, naturally.

In other news: Secretary of State Blinken released a nearly tearful statement practically begging Israel to stop bombing civilians and allow for a humanitarian pause. Netanyahu promptly rebuffed this. No cease fire, no fuel, Netanyahu says. Israel “took credit” for bombing ambulances near a hospital today. The Biden Administration may have to explicitly break with Netanyahu. Palestinian lives do not matter to Netanyahu’s government.

The Right likes to ceaselessly chirp that Israel has a right to defend itself. But I don’t see anyone saying that it doesn’t. The real question is whether what Israel has been doing in Gaza is effective self-defense. Israel has managed to lose the moral high ground even faster than the U.S. did after 9/11 and likely is fueling the fires of future terrorism. This is not smart self-defense. Fight smarter, not harder.

And this puts the United States in a precarious place.  I think on the whole the Biden Administration has walked a fine line, supporting Israel while trying to mitigate its worst impulses. Now the Biden Administration is urging a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza so that people can get food, medicine, fuel, clean water, and maybe more of the injured can be removed.

Politico reports that the White House thinks Netanyahu is on his way out. “Joe Biden and top aides have discussed the likelihood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s political days are numbered — and the president has conveyed that sentiment to the Israeli prime minister in a recent conversation.” The Daily Beast reports that Biden and Netanyahu probably are headed for a breakup:

While the immediate support the U.S. showed for Israel in the wake of Hamas’ wanton atrocities of Oct. 7 was humane and appropriate, founded (as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has noted) in President Joe Biden’s moral decency, that very same Biden character trait will very likely soon require a rift with Netanyahu.

That is because the Israeli prime minister and the extremists in his government are fundamentally bad actors who have contributed greatly to the current crisis.

It is the profound flaws of judgment and instincts of Bibi & Co. that will require Biden and his team to demand a significant change of course by Israel. Should that change not come, it will then be the deep-seated values of Biden and his team and their clear sense of U.S. national interests that will require what will be a major adjustment in U.S. policy.

Edward Luce of the Financial Times writes that Netanyahu is an albatross around Biden’s neck.

Joe Biden has hitched his fortunes to a man — Benjamin Netanyahu — who is co-creator of the ghastly dilemma with which Israel is now faced. The problem with Biden’s bearhug strategy is that he has no veto on the Israeli prime minister’s actions. The tool Biden wields is influence. Everything about Netanyahu suggests that behind-the-scenes suasion is not a method that works.

I don’t know that Joe Biden “hitched his fortunes” to Netanyahu but to Israel, and very likely the White House would be just fine if there were a new Prime Minister sooner rather than later. But yes, I think Joe Biden’s support for Israel is in part about trying to influence it to not go crazy and massacre civilian Palestinians, but that doesn’t seem to have worked.

In other news — Yesterday Senate Republicans finally had enough with Tommy Tuberville. 

Republican senators angrily challenged Sen. Tommy Tuberville on his blockade of almost 400 military officers Wednesday evening, taking over the Senate floor for more than four hours to call for individual confirmation votes after a monthslong stalemate.

Tuberville, R-Ala., stood and objected to each nominee — 61 times total, when the night was over — extending his holds on the military confirmations and promotions with no immediate resolution in sight. But the extraordinary confrontation between Republicans, boiling over almost nine months after Tuberville first announced the holds over a Pentagon abortion policy, escalated the standoff as Defense Department officials have repeatedly said the backlog of officials needing confirmation could endanger national security.

“Why are we putting holds on war heroes?” asked Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, himself a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. “I don’t understand.”

I’m out of time to write today, but here’s the New York Times article you may have heard about, no paywall. If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda.

And here’s another tidbit about the deeply weird speaker of the House:

Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) does not have a bank account.

At least, that’s what Johnson reports on years of personal financial disclosures, which date back to 2016 and reveal a financial life that, in the context of his role as a congressman and now speaker, appears extraordinarily precarious.

Over the course of seven years, Johnson has never reported a checking or savings account in his name, nor in the name of his wife or any of his children, disclosures show. In fact, he doesn’t appear to have money stashed in any investments, with his latest filing—covering 2022—showing no assets whatsoever.

Of course, it’s unlikely Johnson doesn’t actually have a bank account. What’s more likely is Johnson lives paycheck to paycheck—so much so that he doesn’t have enough money in his bank account to trigger the checking account disclosure rules for members of Congress.

House Ethics Committee filing guidelines state that members must disclose bank accounts they have at every financial institution, as long as the account holds at least $1,000 and the combined value of all accounts—including those belonging to their spouse and dependent children—exceeds $5,000. …

… Jordan Libowitz, communications director for watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, offered a more blunt assessment, saying that if Johnson truly doesn’t have any assets, it “raises questions about his personal financial wellbeing.”

“It’s strange to see Speaker Johnson disclose no assets,” Libowitz told The Daily Beast. “He made over $200,000 last year, and his wife took home salary from two employers as well, so why isn’t there a bank account or any form of savings listed?”

Johnson has also carried debts over for several years, which Libowitz said would sharpen the question.

“He owes hundreds of thousands of dollars between a mortgage, personal loan, and home equity line of credit, so where did that money go?” Libowitz said. “If he truly has no bank account and no assets, it raises questions about his personal financial wellbeing.”

The article goes on to say that the Johnsons have reported about $200,000 annual income for the past several years. They aren’t wealthy, but they shouldn’t be destitute.

Here’s another story on the deep weirdness of Mike Johnson, although it’s about his wife. Kelly Johnson for years has run some kind of “Christian counseling service” that is partly based on the writings of Hippocrates.

Kelly Johnson’s website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor’s Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.

“The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc,” a catalog of the organization’s offerings states. “Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state.”

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.

Does she know that Hippocrates wasn’t a Christian? Anyway, the website was taken down shortly after MAGA Mike became speaker. For more about how the forced-birth movement seems to have adopted Hiipocrates as one of their own, see The Shadow Medical Community Behind the Attempt to Ban Medication Abortion at The Intercept.

US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has reinstated Trump’s gag order.

Trump responded by attacking Attorney General Bill Barr, a potential witness in the case, while continuing his public assault on Chutkan. 

Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election interference case, reinstated a partial gag order that had been approved then temporarily appealed in October as Justice Department prosecutors and Trump’s legal team debated the First Amendment grounds of the order. Trump took to Truth Social barely an hour later to attack the judge and former Attorney General Bill Barr, a potential witness in the case. 

“I called Bill Barr Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB. He just didn’t want to be Impeached, which the Radical Left Lunatics were preparing to do,” Trump wrote just 75 minutes after the gag order was reinstated. “Bill Barr is a LOSER!”

Your move, Judge Chutkan.

The most interesting thing I saw this morning is this item from the New York Times, How Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age. I apologize that I’m out of gift articles for the month. This article is arguing that Trump is making more verbal gaffes than usual, and that this may be a sign of deterioration of some sort. I don’t know that I’m taking this very seriously, as his head was never screwed on all the way as near as I can tell.

Mike Spence is suspending his presidential campaign. Yeah, I know, we weep and we mourn. “Suspending” means it is not officially ended, and he could crank it up again should the political landscape shift. Maybe Trump will be abducted by aliens. You never know.

Another of the specimens running for the Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis, said  “liberal, soft on crime” policies were to blame for the mass shooting in Maine that left 18 people dead earlier this week. According to the CDC, in 2021 the homicide mortality rate in Maine was 1.7 per 100,000 population. The homicide mortality rate in Florida was 7.4. The winner, though, was liberal, soft-on-crime Mississippi, at a whopping 23.7. And number two is Mike Johnson’s Louisiana, at 21.3. Indeed, with a couple of exceptions, the states with the most homicide deaths make up a roll call of the old Confederacy. See America’s Highest Gun Death Rates Are in the South at Axios. Somehow I don’t think liberalism is the problem.

Speaking of aliens, the new Speaker seems more alien by the minute. To plumb the depths of his weirdness, do read What’s Up With Mike Johnson’s Black Son at TPM by Josh Marshall.

Video surfaced of an interview Johnson did with Walter Isaacson just after the death of George Floyd in June 2020 in which he revealed that he had an adopted black son, Michael. … 

…I had only heard this story in passing until this evening when TPM Reader RS flagged something odd about the story. No African-American son shows up in any of the family photographs on Johnson’s House website or on his personal Facebook page. Nor does Michael figure anywhere in any of Johnson’s campaign biographies.

As I went further down this rabbit hole tonight I was a bit dumbfounded. Is Michael made up? Is he excluded from family pictures? I was so baffled that I went pretty far down that rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on.

It gets weirder.

I was able to piece the story together from the introduction to the full video of the 2020 interview and a write up in The Advocate centered on the 2019 reparations hearing. In Johnson’s interview with Walter Isaacson it sounds like he’s talking about two 14 year olds, boys of the same age. But if you listen closely he refers to Michael at that age in the past tense. Michael was 36 in June 2019 and presumably 40 today. Johnson is 51.

Josh Marshall speculates that maybe this was some kind of fostering situation, and that the Johnsons never formally adopted Michael and consider him a “son” in an informal sense. But who the bleep knows?

I’m all out of gift articles for the month, but everybody should read Paul Krugman’s column from a couple of days ago. Johnson wants to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 or 70. He wants to raise the Medicare eligibility age to 70 and keep raising it. He wants to destroy employment based health insurance by limiting the tax deductions for employers. He wants to cut  $3 trillion over a decade from Medicaid, children’s health coverage, and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans would lose health care.

And I have to ask, why? What does he think he’s saving money for?

And then there’s his extremist culture war positions. See Mike Johnson Hates America, But He Believes He Can Save It by David Corn at Mother Jones.

Please, Democrats, don’t hold back. Hang this guy around the neck of every House Republican who voted for him, which is pretty close all of them, I believe. There may have been a couple of absences.

In other news. It appears Israel has begun its ground invasion of Gaza. I think someday they’ll regret this.

The mass shooting in Maine may be one of the rare examples of a shooter who really is mentally ill. All information about him seems thin at this point, so we may yet learn otherwise. I am gratified, at least, that so far not even Gateway Pundit is claiming the alleged shooter, Robert Card, is part of Antifa or in the employ of George Soros. But it’s early yet.

We’ve had a few hours to study up on the new Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. And he’s a hard-right Christian nationalist. On any issue you can think of, especially culture war stuff, Johnson sits at the farthest right of anyone in Congress. But by all accounts he has a low-key and sociable demeanor and hasn’t pissed anyone off, yet.

The larger issue with Johnson is that he hasn’t been in Congress all that long — he was first elected in 2016 — and he hasn’t had anywhere close to the kind of experience needed to do the speaker’s job. A whole lot of people think he will soon find himself in way over his head.

He also is a leading election denier. This is from the New York Times, October 2022 —

While most House Republicans had amplified Mr. Trump’s claims about the election in the aftermath of his loss, only the right flank of the caucus continued to loudly echo Mr. Trump’s fraud allegations in the days before Jan. 6, The Times found. More Republican lawmakers appeared to seek a way to placate Mr. Trump and his supporters without formally endorsing his extraordinary allegations. In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.

On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a “third option.” He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.

In a quick google I couldn’t find a clear rebuttal to the charge that changing voting procedures because of the pandemic was unconstitutional. Apparently there is old case law that discourages changing voting procedures within a certain amount of time near an election. This was part of the basis for Texas AG Ken Paxton’s infamous December 2020 lawsuit against battleground states, which SCOTUS tossed because Paxton didn’t have standing. I personally think it’s a bogus argument regarding 2020, but as you know I’m not a lawyer.

Anyway, the real challenge is going to be when Johnson has to choose between absolute obstructionism and passing nothing or compromising to pass something and thereby pissing off the MAGAts in the House. And I believe the one-person-challenge rule is still in effect. However, it appears that the demands for a CR in November to keep the government funded won’t be too extreme, since Johnson is new at the job. We’ll see.

With all the hoopla over the new Speaker of the House, who is a hard-right MAGA zealot I’m sure we will all come to despise in no time, you may have missed a Trump event today.  In his New York civil fraud trial Trump was called to the witness stand and put under oath. And then he was fined for violating his gag order again. Here are the details:

During a break in the trial this afternoon, Trump told reporters, “This judge is a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” The person who is usually sitting next to Judge Arthur Engoron is his law clerk, Allison Greenfield. The original gag order happened when Trump posted that Greenfield was Chuck Schumer‘s “girlfriend.”

Upon hearing about the new remarks, Judge Engoron called Trump to the witness stand and put him under oath. This happened:

Trump said he was referring to Cohen, who he’s previously called a rat, a liar and a felon.

The judge asked Trump if he’d previously referred to his law clerk as “partisan” and Trump said, “maybe” he had referred to her as not fair because she’s “very biased.”

But, Trump insisted, he was referring to Cohen when he told reporters earlier that Engoron is “a very partisan judge with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is.” 

Engoron said he found Trump’s testimony “not credible.” Then he fined Trump $10,000.

And then this happened:

Trump stormed out of the courtroom about 45 minutes later, after the judge denied a motion from his lawyers on a separate legal issue. Trump lawyer Cliff Robert had seized on Cohen’s testimony that Trump never explicitly instructed him to inflate his financial statements to ask the judge for a directed verdict dismissing the AG’s claims about the statements, which Engoron refused.

The abrupt departure appeared to catch even his attorneys by surprise and caused gasps throughout the courtroom.

“The witness just admitted that we won the trial and the judge should end this trial immediately. Thank you,” Trump told reporters after he left.

Under questioning from AG’s office, Cohen testified later Trump didn’t specifically tell him to inflate the numbers and said he was like a “mob boss” who tells you what he wants without directly telling you.

When Cohen wrapped up his fiery two days on the witness stand, Robert again asked the judge for a directed verdict, a request he said was “absolutely denied.”

“This case has credible evidence all over the place,” the judge said. “There is enough evidence in this case to fill this courtroom.” 

In other news: Sidney Powell is still pushing the Big Lie in her social media accounts.

On her social-media accounts, Powell has continued to push claims that the 2020 election was rigged and that prosecutors in Georgia who brought the criminal case against her were politically motivated. The newsletter published by her dark-money group has shared articles arguing the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, “extorted” her guilty plea.

Plea deals can be canceled, can they not?

It looks like there’s about to be a Speaker. The Republicans are hanging together and voting for Mike Johnson of Louisiana. I believe he has the votes.

Josh Marshall:

Moments from now Mike Johnson of Louisiana will become Speaker of the House and I just found out that Johnson and his wife have a podcast about ‘religious conservatism’, basically a heavy focus on abortion bans, opposing gay marriage and the like. Before entering Congress Johnson was a ‘religious liberty’ activist. It’s on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and the rest. You have to figure that opposition researchers are going to be listening to it pretty closely. The first episode I’m listening to is Episode 12 “The Truth about January 6th that You’ve Never Been Told”. After that there’s Episode 14 “Post-Roe America: What Happens Now?” Johnson supports an absolute national ban on abortions.

I understand that Johnson also is opposed to sending aid to Ukraine. So this ain’t good.

This time it’s Jenna Ellis, who had been complaining last spring that Trump wasn’t helping pay for her legal bills. This is the New York Times on the plea (no paywall):

Ms. Ellis, 38, pleaded guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, a felony. She is the fourth defendant to plead guilty in the Georgia case, which charged Mr. Trump and 18 others with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.

Ms. Ellis agreed to be sentenced to five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution and perform 100 hours of community service. She has already written an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, and she agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors as the case progresses.

Interesting bit:

Ms. Ellis, unlike the other defendants who have pleaded guilty, asked the court to let her give a statement. She cried as she rose from the defense table and said, “As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously.”

She said that after Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, she believed that challenging the election results on his behalf should have been pursued in a “just and legal way.” But she said that she had relied on information provided by other lawyers, including some “with many more years of experience than I,” and failed to do her “due diligence” in checking the veracity of their claims.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” Ms. Ellis told Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court. “I look back on this experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I’ve taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”

However,

In March, Ms. Ellis admitted in a sworn statement in Colorado, her home state, that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several public claims that widespread voting fraud had occurred and had led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. Those admissions were part of an agreement Ms. Ellis made to accept public censure and settle disciplinary measures brought against her by state bar officials in Colorado.

Though she is still able to practice law in Colorado, the group that brought the original complaint against her, leading to the censure, said on Tuesday that new action would be coming.

“We do plan to file a new complaint in Colorado based on the guilty plea, so that the bar can assess the matter in light of her criminal conduct,” said Michael Teter, managing director of the 65 Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group.

So she’s not quite getting her stories straight.

In other news that is a surprise to me, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) won the nomination for speaker today. Emmer is one of the small minority of candidates who voted to certify the 2020 election, which probably means the Freedom Caucus crew won’t vote for him. Emmer got 117 votes in the Republican caucus. Coming in second with 95 votes was Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who did not vote to certify the 2020 election. Then the House Republicans had an internal roll call to see if Emmer could get to 217. But he fell more than 20 votes short. It’s not clear to me what’s going to happen next.

Michael Cohen testified today in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. Trump was in the courtroom, I believe. I’m sure there will be more commentary on this soon.

Update: Trump is trying desperately to get the J6 charges dismissed.

Former president Donald Trump launched a multipronged legal attack late Monday on his federal prosecution for allegedly subverting the results of the 2020 election, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment as political speech and arguing that he cannot be tried in criminal court for attempting to block Joe Biden’s victory, because he was already impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate.

I’m not sure the fake electors scheme, among other things, qualifies as “political speech.” And I’ve heard all over the place that an impeachment trial in the Senate can’t count as “double jeopardy” because it is outside the judicial system, and a conviction would not have resulted in any sort of criminal or civil charges, just removal from office. What this tells me is that Trump’s lawyers just file whatever he tells them to file and do their best to make it look less ridiculous than it is.

Another flip? Mark Meadows has been granted immunity by Jack Smith’s team, I believe in the J6 case.

Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump’s prolific rhetoric regarding the election.

According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, before final results were in.

Update: Meadows is throwing cold water on this story, which was reported by ABC News. See Emptywheel for details.

Emmer Dropped Out. So what if the House Dems recruited Liz Cheney and got some Republican to nominate her? She’d need, what, five or six Republican votes? At least she’d not work with Trump and would bring aid to Israel and Ukraine to a vote.

Preview of the week ahead: I understand there are nine candidates for House Speaker. The GOP plans to choose a nominee tomorrow. I can’t see how this group of House Republicans will ever give any one candidate the votes to win the speakership.

I don’t know that anything new is expected in the various Trump civil and criminal cases. But we can always be surprised. We may hear something about scheduling the remainder of the Fulton County defendants, since the trial that was supposed to start by is no longer needed. Joyce Vance says that if Judge McAfee doesn’t try to squeeze it in before the J6 trial starts in March, then it probably won’t happen until summer 2024, if then.

For your reading enjoyment … see A President, a Billionaire and Questions About Access and National Security in the New York Times. No paywall. The billionaire is Australian and spent tons of money at Mar-a-Lago to get acccess to Trump. And now he says Trump shared foreign policy and nuclear secrets with him. Which Trump denies, of course.