This Horrible Congress Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Congress had a no-good, very bad year.

As the 118th Congress winds down the first of its two-year session, it’s abundantly clear that this latest iteration has come up shockingly short, passing just 20 bills through both chambers, according to Quorum legislative data analyzed by Axios. Four additional bills are currently waiting Biden’s signature.

That’s drastically lower than previous congresses, which tallied far above 50 bills in their first year and typically passed between 300 and 450 laws.

This year’s congressional report card sank below even some of Congress’s most unproductive years, reported Axios, including the 104th, 112th, and 11th Congresses, which saw Republicans controlling the House or Senate during Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies. Still, those sessions managed to pass between 70 and 73 laws.

The abysmal productivity is thanks, in large part, to historic divisions and tensions among Republicans, who are still holding onto a slim majority, effectively necessitating unanimous consent to pass sections of their agenda.

The House has also failed to come up with budgetary solutions as the government stares down another looming government shutdown just weeks after it comes back from Christmas break.

The majority of bills that were able to slip through the cracks this year were unsurprisingly uncontroversial. Those included measures to rename Veterans Affairs clinics and to mint a coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, noted Axios.

Republicans also managed to waste the better part of two months over the last year, unable to pick a leader. Given the upcoming election, it’s unlikely that next year will prove more productive.

The GOP also chose to waste time on the impeachment of President Joe Biden, which even Republican lawmakers admitted failed to tie the president to any wrongdoing, let alone illegal activity.

Donald Trump wants someone to challenge Texas Representative Chip Roy in the primary.

Although Roy sits comfortably in the House of Representatives’ far-right wing, the Freedom Caucus member and Trump have locked horns a few times before. Trump took aim at Roy on Monday in a classic late-night social media post.

“Has any smart and energetic Republican in the Great State of Texas decided to run in the Primary against RINO Congressman Chip Roy. For the right person, he is very beatable,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If interested, let me know!!!”

Roy is currently running unopposed in the Republican primary. And since the deadline to file candidacy was last week, it looks likely to stay that way.

Trump and Roy have bumped heads a few times since the latter took office in 2019. Roy voted against overturning the 2020 election results. A year later, when Roy ran for GOP conference chair, Trump endorsed Representative Elise Stefanik. Stefanik was elected.

Roy was also one of the first backers of Trump’s 2024 primary opponent, Ron DeSantis. Roy first endorsed DeSantis in March, before the Florida governor had even officially declared his candidacy.

Once touted as Trump’s successor, DeSantis failed to pick up steam and is trailing Trump badly in the polls. But that clearly doesn’t mean Roy’s continued support for DeSantis doesn’t irk Trump. It’s possible that two years from now, the Texas representative will face a challenge from a Trump-backed candidate—and that candidate could dethrone him. But for now, his seat is very safe.

Young voters are proving decidedly less interested in a 2024 Biden win than they were four years ago.

A New York Times/Siena College poll published Tuesday indicates that most young voters are leaning toward voting for Donald Trump, with the indicted former president pulling 49 percent of the vote from constituents aged 18 to 29, with Biden at just 43 percent. That’s a stark contrast from July, when young voters preferred Biden by as much as 10 percentage points.

The difference is likely due to the president’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, in which Biden has been a staunch ally to Israel. That’s resulted in a 72 percent disapproval rating within the same age bracket, according to the poll. However, faced with Trump on the other side of the ballot, those voters say they may be more likely to stay home than turn up to the voting booths.

“I don’t want to vote for someone who is not aligned with my own personal values, as Biden has shown he is not when it comes to Gaza,” Colin Lohner, a 27-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, told The New York Times. “Do I vote for Biden or do I not vote at all? That’s really difficult, because if I don’t vote for Biden, I open up the possibility that Trump will win, and I really do not want that.”

So far, the conflict has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.9 million people living in the Gaza Strip—roughly 90 percent of its population—since the war began on October 7.

The dwindling poll numbers are an alarming difference for the beleaguered president, who needed the support of young and minority voters to clinch his 2020 bid for the White House. Biden has voiced his own concern, reportedly marking his favorability ratings as a known issue in a closed-door White House meeting with top aides the day before Thanksgiving.

At the time, Biden was neck and neck in general election polls with GOP front-runner Donald Trump, with Trump predicted to win by a hair with 43 percent of the vote against Biden’s 42 percent, according to a Morning Consult poll.

And yet, the president is particularly irked that voters are not rewarding him for low unemployment figures and a humming economy that has defied predictions of a looming recession. As of December 14, Biden trailed eight points behind the oft-indicted former president in a national survey, predicted to gain just 35 percent of the vote against Trump’s 43 percent, according to a HarrisX/Harris poll.

Donald Trump’s lawyers are trying to prevent an expert witness from testifying in his upcoming defamation trial against writer E. Jean Carroll. In a fun twist, the expert witness is the same woman who helped set massive damages for Rudy Giuliani.

A federal judge ruled in September that Trump is liable for defaming Carroll in 2019 and owes her monetary damages. The exact amount will be set during the trial, which will begin in January.

Trump’s lawyers filed a motion on Wednesday asking presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan to bar Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor who analyzes social media trends, from testifying against the former president next month.

In the court documents, lawyer Michael Madaio argued that the damages estimates Humphreys had previously submitted were too high.

“The damages estimations in her initial report are egregiously inflated (to the tune of millions of dollars), utilize methods which ascribe harm in an unreliable and incorrect manner; and do not accurately reflect the actual harm to plaintiff’s reputation,” Madaio wrote.

Madaio took particular issue with the fact that Humphreys had initially included estimates for alleged damage caused by three different comments Trump made. Carroll is no longer suing over one of those statements, but Madaio argued Humphreys had not adjusted her estimate accordingly.

Carroll’s lawyer hit back Monday, pointing out that Humphreys had indeed accounted for the change in estimated damages in a supplemental report.

“Trump is understandably desperate to get rid of Professor Humphreys,” Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote in a filing asking to reject Trump’s request. “That Professor Humphreys recently testified in another case that resulted in a $108 million defamation verdict likely adds to Trump’s sense of urgency.”

Kaplan was referring to the defamation case against Giuliani. The former Trump lawyer was found liable in August for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. On Friday, Giuliani was ordered to pay the women a whopping $148 million in damages.

Humphreys testified against Giuliani on December 13, the same day Trump’s lawyers filed the motion to bar her from appearing at the Carroll trial. Her testimony was pivotal in determining the exact amount of damages he owed.

Humphreys is no stranger to Carroll’s case against Trump. The Northwestern professor already testified in Carroll’s first defamation lawsuit against the former president. In May, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages, based on Humphreys’s estimates.

Carroll’s second lawsuit is for comments Trump made in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her memoir. Judge Kaplan ruled that since Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse, his 2019 comments are by default defamatory. Carroll is now seeking up to $12 million in damages, based on Humphreys’s recommendation.

Clearly $148 million in legal penalties isn’t punishment enough for Rudy Giuliani, who took to Newsmax’s airwaves on Monday to vent even more defamatory lies about Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“Your initial allegations, do you still believe them to be true?” asked host Rob Schmitt.

“Yeah. Well, of course they’ll sue me again when I say that, but yeah, I do,” Giuliani said. “But they want me to lie. They, basically, they are suing me in order to lie to them.”

“If I showed you the evidence right now, and I think you’ve played it on your air, people would see that what I said was absolutely true,” he said.

Unfortunately for the former federal prosecutor, claiming that people made him lie may not be the concrete defense he hopes it to be.

Before last week’s judgment, Giuliani repeated election lies that he had previously admitted were untrue mere steps outside the courthouse, resulting in a wrist slap by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who warned that it could result in more defamation charges for the broke fixer. And despite repeated promises to provide evidence on his debunked allegations, when the time came to finally take the stand and make “definitively clear” that what he said about the pair of workers was true, Giuliani opted not to.

Freeman and Moss originally sought $24 million each in damages after the former New York City mayor accused them of manipulating ballots—claims that transformed into months of harassment, death threats, and protesters at their doorsteps. Instead, the jury decided they deserve far more. On Friday, a court ruled that the mother-daughter duo would receive $16 million each in damages for defamation, $20 million each for emotional distress, and another $75 million in punitive damages from the former Trump attorney.

On Monday, the pair hit Giuliani with another lawsuit seeking a gag order and to permanently bar America’s disgraced mayor from continuing to trash-talk them. That new suit is based entirely on baseless claims that Giuliani made over the weekend, including some statements allowed to air on Newsmax, according to the legal complaint.

“Are they actually going to put a gag on me while I walk around?” Giuliani joked on air.

If there’s one thing you can count on Republicans for, it’s to tepidly push back on Donald Trump’s most vile comments.

Trump drilled down harder than ever on fascist language during two weekend speeches. On Saturday, he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The next day, he promised to use federal law enforcement funds to combat a “military invasion” at the southern border.

But when asked about his comments late Monday, Republican senators had only the mildest of rebukes. “I obviously don’t agree with that. I mean, we’re all children of immigrants,” Senator Shelley Moore Caputo told Politico, somehow managing to “All Lives Matter” immigration.

Senator Roger Wicker said he “certainly wouldn’t have said that,” and Senator Thom Tillis called Trump’s words “unhelpful.”

Senators John Kennedy and Todd Young declined to comment, although Young joked he was “looking forward to another year of answering these questions.”

“Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities,” Trump said over the weekend.

He then promised to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS.”

No GOP senators have called for Trump to apologize. Their lukewarm stance should come as no surprise, though.

This is a familiar tune for Republican lawmakers. Throughout Trump’s presidency, Republicans regularly evaded questions about his inflammatory rhetoric. Lawmakers would say they hadn’t seen the former president’s posts on social media or during speeches. Sometimes they would say they disagreed with his stance; other times they would quietly adopt his position.

In fact, Republicans were perfectly happy to let Trump’s words slide so long as he continued to give them what they wanted in terms of policy and judicial appointments. This has continued since Trump left office, for instance last November, when Trump met with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and antisemite Kanye West.

No members of Republican leadership ever explicitly condemned the meeting. Some lawmakers even tried to claim that Trump didn’t know who he was meeting or that he had condemned Fuentes’s previous comments.

The Georgia election workers that Rudy Giuliani defamed sued the former Trump attorney again on Monday for continuing to make defamatory statements about them.

Giuliani was found liable in August for defaming Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, after he accused the pair of manipulating ballots in Georgia during the 2020 election. The two women have been subjected to months of harassment and death threats. A judge ordered Giuliani on Friday to pay Freeman and Moss nearly $150 million in damages last week.

Freeman and Moss filed a fresh defamation lawsuit against Giuliani Monday for refusing to take a hint.

“Defendant Giuliani continues to spread the very same lies for which he has already been held liable in the Freeman I action,” the lawsuit said, referring to the previous case.

In fact, on December 15, “just hours after the jury in Freeman I returned a $148 million verdict against him, Defendant Giuliani appeared from Washington, D.C. for a live interview on Newsmax, in which he repeatedly asserted, either directly or at minimum by implication, that he was in possession of video evidence demonstrating the truth of his allegations against Plaintiffs.”

Giuliani has already admitted that he made false statements about Freeman and Moss. In a July court filing, he acknowledged that his “statements carry meaning that is defamatory.” At the time, he insisted he only made that concession to move the lawsuit forward.

Except he moved it forward right to a ruling of liability. And on Friday, a jury decided he owed the mother and daughter $148 million: $16 million each in damages for defamation, $20 million each for emotional distress, and another $75 million in punitive damages.

Monday’s lawsuit is only seeking to bar Giuliani from making or repeating any more false claims about Freeman and Moss. The women have also requested he pay their legal fees for the new suit, but they are not asking for further financial damages.

That could be because Giuliani is so hard up for cash that he will likely struggle to make the payments from Friday’s ruling. Giuliani has begun representing himself in court to save some cash. The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” is scrambling to find the money for all his legal fees and even listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg his boss Donald Trump to pay him for working as Trump’s personal attorney. That didn’t work, but Trump did agree to host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani. Entry cost: $100,000 a plate.

What’s more, people keep suing him for money owed. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.

Meanwhile, Giuliani’s ex-wife says he owes her more than $260,000 for her country club memberships, condominium fees, and health care as part of their divorce settlement. Giuliani narrowly avoided jail time over that lawsuit in December. And one of Giuliani’s former associates sued him in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead sexually harassing and abusing her over two years.

Joe Biden is finally fed up with his second-rate polling numbers.

The night before the president took off to celebrate Thanksgiving, he gathered his closest aides in the White House to talk about a game plan for his tanking numbers, according to several unnamed sources who spoke to The Washington Post.

For months, the president and his first lady had expressed frustration at the Democrat’s disappointing numbers, but the night before Thanksgiving proved to be a turning point in which Biden complained to his team that his numbers were unacceptably low. That night, he asked his team what they planned to do about it, according to the outlet.

At the time of the meeting, Biden was neck-and-neck in general election polls with GOP front-runner Donald Trump, with Trump predicted to win by a hair with 43 percent of the vote against Biden’s 42 percent, according to a Morning Consult poll.

But Biden’s numbers have only continued to plummet since then, likely influenced by the president’s foreign policy: Many Democrats reject his unwavering support of the Israeli invasion of Gaza while others are frustrated by his inability to wrangle Congress to send along more aid to the Ukrainian war front against Russia. At the same time, Biden is particularly irked that voters are not rewarding him for low unemployment figures and a humming economy that has defied predictions of a looming recession. As of December 14, Biden trailed eight points behind the oft-indicted former president, predicted to gain just 35 percent of the vote while Trump curried 43 percent, according to a HarrisX/Harris poll.

Top Democrats have warned for months that the Biden campaign had failed to scale up its national campaign quickly enough. Just one year out from Election Day 2024, the campaign has only recently announced leadership teams in battleground states like Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and South Carolina, according to campaign officials.

“The Republican primary could end quickly, and the general election could begin in weeks, not months,” Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, told the Post. “Given Trump’s noisiness and his ability to bully his way through the daily information wars, I think it’s really important that the Biden campaign move into general election mode as soon as possible. We’re not where we want to be. Some of our coalition is wandering, and we need to go get them back.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has an interesting opinion on what makes the Big Apple so great: It could be subject to a terrorist attack at any moment.

In a Monday interview, Adams was asked to sum up 2023 in one word.

“New York,” Adams replied, which is technically two words.

“This is a place where everyday you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open. This is a very, very complicated city, and that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”

The utter lack of imagination in Adams’s “one word” answer aside, this is an extremely bad take. A city isn’t great because one of the most traumatic experiences in recent American memory happened there. And you certainly aren’t going to curry favor with your constituents by warning them it could easily happen again.

Adams has been in office for about two years, and he recently recorded the lowest-ever approval rating for a New York mayor. A poll released in early December by Quinnipiac University found just 28 percent of respondents said they approved of Adams’s performance.

His popularity certainly isn’t helped by his penchant for very strange behavior. In August, Adams chose to mark the anniversary of Indian independence by comparing himself to Gandhi.

Adams has also repeatedly said he has carried a photo of a fallen police officer in his wallet for decades. Instead, Adams allegedly instructed his staff in 2022 to print out the photo and then age it with coffee stains.

Meanwhile, the mayor is facing a federal investigation into his campaign, as well as an accusation of sexual assault from 30 years ago.

Elon Musk may be held accountable for X (formerly Twitter) devolving into a hellscape. The European Commission on Monday opened multiple investigations into the platform under the bloc’s new social media law.

The Digital Services Act went into effect in Europe in late August. The sweeping new rulebook aims to create safer online environments: Digital platforms are required to prevent and remove posts that contain illegal goods, services, or content. Targeted ads based on sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs are prohibited, and ads targeting children are heavily restricted.

“We now have clear rules, ex-ante obligations, strong oversight, speedy enforcement and deterrent sanctions and we will make full use of our toolbox to protect our citizens and democracies,” EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton told Politico.

The infringement proceedings into X are the commission’s first ever under the DSA. The four probes will look at whether the platform violated rules on combating illegal content and disinformation, as well as rules on transparency regarding advertising and data sharing. Investigators will also seek to determine if X misled its users when it changed its blue-check system. The check marks used to indicate that a user’s identity had been verified, but they now show that the user is paying a subscription fee in exchange for increased visibility.

The investigations do not immediately indicate wrongdoing. But if X is found culpable, the company could face fines of up to 6 percent of its global revenue.

The commission has also taken preliminary steps to investigate other major social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. Investigators have requested information to see how the platforms combat illegal content and disinformation, and how they protect minors.

This isn’t the first time the European Commission has taken aim at X owner Musk. In November, the bloc froze ads on the platform, following a Media Matters report that found X has been placing ads for brands including Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to posts that promote Hitler and Nazi beliefs.

Hate speech has flourished on X in the little more than a year since Musk bought the platform. The social media research group National Contagion Research Institute found that in the 12 hours after Musk bought X, use of the n-word increased almost 500 percent.

And Musk is often a major source of that hate speech and disinformation. In addition to aggressively antisemitic posts, Musk also regularly lets Nazis back on X, shares transphobic content, and spreads conspiracy theories.