Welcome To The Big Leagues, Mike

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

White smoke billowed from the Capitol, intermingling with the singeing stench of cigar smoke that has clouded the House’s third floor ever since Republicans retook the majority. 

Republicans back slapped and posed for ill-angled selfies. The halls were devoid of pizza mountains for the first time in weeks. Habemus speaker. 

The gavel has passed to Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), an utterly predictable succession as Johnson is a heavy hitter in the Republican party and a household name from sea to shining sea. Ahem. 

While Democrats immediately pointed to the congressman’s history of election denialism and anti-abortion absolutism, Republicans countered that he’s nice. 

That affability will have to be robust enough to see him through the same set of obstacles that felled Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago: A reactionary right wing whose entire ideology is breaking the government, mandatory government funding deadlines and a single-member motion to vacate threshold coupled with the continued existence of Matt Gaetz (R-FL). 

It’s the newest iteration of the same dysfunction that pushed John Boehner and Paul Ryan out of politics, that ripped the gavel from McCarthy’s hands and that ritually humiliated nearly all of his immediate successor candidates (with the exception of Jim Jordan, whose assholery seemed to awaken the resistance of the heretofore doormats that pass as Republican moderates). 

When I asked around about whatever happened to that “hey, maybe let’s change the motion to vacate rule so the Gaetzes and Maces can’t just do this again next time their insatiable thirst for attention builds” idea, a series of House Republicans told me that a) Johnson would be gifted a honeymoon and b) those that had deposed McCarthy were “chastened” after the last few weeks. I pondered that as I ducked around the dozens of reporters flanking a mirrored sunglasses-clad Gaetz, preening on the House steps with his wife on his arm.

We have a new speaker; nothing that has made the job so repulsive that Patrick McHenry (R-NC) was all but swatting away those trying to draft him with his oversized gavel has changed. 

But what’s that sound you hear? It’s the clattering of the keyboards of hundreds of Democratic opposition researchers, digging into Johnson’s every public utterance, most of which have gone entirely unnoticed until a couple days ago. In those measly hours, they’ve surfaced his anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and straight-up homophobic worldviews, his election denialism and voter suppression and his hatred of whales. 

Welcome to the big leagues, Mike. Winning the gavel was hard enough — keeping it will be harder.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Fulton Or Federal: What’s The Bigger Threat?

Let’s take a moment to reflect on where we are: a former President is besieged by two state and federal criminal cases each. On the federal side, Trump faces Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution and the D.C. January 6 case. At the state level, there’s the oft-forgotten Manhattan campaign finance case, and the Fulton County, Georgia RICO prosecution.

It’s hard to judge pacing given that, at this point, the timing of motions and trial is up to each judge. But Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ RICO case has seemingly leapt ahead over the past several weeks, with a whopping four defendants out of 19 agreeing to cooperate in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges. That includes three Trump attorneys: Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Ken Chesebro.

I’ve written about how the combined testimony of the three attorneys seems to imperil Rudy more than anyone else. CNN reported this week that Fulton County prosecutors have discussed plea deals with at least six more defendants in the case.

Trump could win next year and very easily pardon his own potential federal convictions away or force the prosecutions to grind to a sudden halt. But absent a favorable Supreme Court ruling (which would surely come in the event of his election), Trump would have far fewer direct powers as President to shut down a state-level prosecution. Of course, if you talk to Trumpworld denizens, they laugh off the prospect of normal rule of law existing in 2025. But we’ll see how far one determined and effective prosecutor can go.

— Josh Kovensky

DQ Drama And An 1869 Murder Case

Trump’s blatant wrongdoing both as President and now as a candidate triggered a cottage industry of legal scholars and commentators, focusing on hewing bespoke arguments for why — even though your complaints are very legitimate — a given law simply just doesn’t work as a remedy for whatever scandal you think matters and, in fact, it was damaging to even consider using it in the first place.

We’ve seen this happen with two impeachments, with the Emoluments Clause, with the Mueller investigation. There’s a claim of wrongdoing, an attempt to address it, and a chorus of voices claiming that the tactic of accountability is misplaced or ill-suited for whatever reason. Trump’s allies are doing the same in the effort to use the Constitution’s Disqualification Clause to knock him off the 2024 ballot for engaging in insurrection, this time by reaching back to an 1869 murder case.

It’s called In Re: Griffin. Caesar Griffin, a black man, tried to use the Disqualification Clause to overturn his murder conviction by arguing that the judge in his case, a former Confederate state representative, should not have been eligible to serve under the Constitution’s ban on those who engaged in insurrection. Griffin hoped to overturn his conviction that way but was thwarted by then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase who, while riding circuit, wrote an opinion which expressed a view that no other judge has yet held: that for the Disqualification Clause to work, Congress would have to pass a law explaining how it was to be executed.

That flew in the face of the innumerable former Confederate officials disqualified from office during Reconstruction, and of several court cases which arose from those bans. But Trump’s attorneys have plucked it out of the annals of American law to argue — now before three cases seeking to knock him off the ballot in Colorado, Minnesota, and Michigan — that Congress needs to pass a law before he can be disqualified. Trump lost on that argument in Colorado this week, paving the way for an evidentiary hearing on Tuesday. Minnesota will hear more arguments on Thursday, and Michigan the following week.

— Josh Kovensky

• Federal Judge Orders New Majority-Black District In Georgia, Warns Legislature Not To Jerk Him Around
• Trump DQ Cases Hinge On One Question: Does Congress Need To Act?
• Best Way To Make Someone’s Quiet Extremism Widely Known? Elect Them Speaker
• Jack Smith Gave Mark Meadows Immunity For Testimony
• New Episode Of The Josh Marshall Podcast: Magic Mike

— Nicole Lafond

“This group is ready to govern.”

That’s what the Republican conference told reporters late Wednesday night after inviting in the press staked outside of their private meeting room to brag about taking almost a month to accomplish the most basic duty of governing as the majority.

While they finally managed to elect a lesser-known election denier as speaker, the same funding crises from before McCarthy’s ousting, coupled with new global disasters, loom large. Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) ability to lead an unruly, fractured caucus on issues like appropriations bills and critical aid to Ukraine and Israel will be quickly put to the test.

— Nicole Lafond