It was one of House conservatives’ biggest demands: more representation on key committees and in senior roles. They got both, and they’re still bragging about it.
At a House Freedom Caucus fundraiser in Tennessee last month, the conservative group’s chair Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) boasted to donors about what it extracted from McCarthy. That included gaining the Homeland Security Committee gavel for a group member after securing Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) eventual chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee (he first served as the top Republican on the House Oversight panel).
Jordan’s position, Perry claimed at the event, was based on “leverage, too.” In reality, though, that position had long been expected given Jordan and McCarthy’s increasingly close relationship.
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), a member of the Freedom Caucus who was present at the event, now chairs the homeland security panel after the protracted speakership battle.
“Now we knew we were going to have a dog in the fight … we also knew the competition,” Perry said of the homeland chairmanship race – apparently referring to Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) — according to an audio recording obtained by POLITICO.
“And one of the conversations was: If that other person becomes the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, then you will not be speaker.”
While the GOP Steering Committee mostly decides panel chairs, the process is heavily influenced by the speaker. (Green’s position, as well as other competitive chair positions, were decided by the Steering panel after McCarthy’s election on the floor.) Green’s allies have argued that his win was more than just a tradeoff, saying it was a win-win given his resume and vision for the panel. A Crenshaw aide, responding to Perry’s words, called the apparent deal the “worst kept secret in Washington.”
Additionally, two of the GOP’s most conservative members — Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — were placed on the lower-profile but powerful Rules Committee. It was perhaps the most decentralizing move McCarthy made; the Rules panel decides exactly the way legislation comes to the House floor, empowering Roy and Massie to block certain bills or push for changes.
Conservatives gained more representation on other key committees, too. Two of the 20 holdout members landed on the Financial Services panel and two others got seats on Appropriations. And even Freedom Caucus members who were supportive of McCarthy landed on other top panels, like Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), who received a spot on Energy and Commerce.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Instead of owning up to failure, McCarthy appears to be looking for a scapegoat.
Behind the scenes, he’s been trash-talking his own GOP colleagues, according to a blockbuster New York Times story Thursday by Jonathan Swan and Annie Karni.
Among its revelations: McCarthy has “no confidence” in House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), whom he regards as “incompetent” and considers House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) “ineffective, checked out and reluctant to take a position on anything.”
Conversations with more than a half-dozen senior Republican lawmakers and aides revealed some additional context on the “Mean Girls” drama playing out in McCarthy’s leadership circle:
There’s a reason McCarthy is singling out Arrington and Scalise, and it’s about more than just disagreements over policy or strategy. People close to McCarthy tell us that he perceives both men as disloyal — and he’s known to hold a grudge.
McCarthy never forgave Scalise for an incident years ago when the Louisiana Republican refused to rule out challenging McCarthy for GOP leader, and he feels that Scalise didn’t do enough to help him win the gavel this year. As for Arrington, the Texas Republican privately floated Scalise for speaker when McCarthy was unable to lock down the votes for himself in January.
McCarthy’s issues with Arrington have been apparent for a while. Several weeks ago, when Arrington suggested Republicans wouldn’t introduce a budget until May, McCarthy pushed back and said they’d do so in April — leaving Arrington’s staff scrambling to clean up the mess.
Something similar happened when Arrington told reporters that Republicans were finalizing a debt ceiling offer of sorts, what he dubbed a “deal sheet,” for Biden. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” McCarthy shot back when asked about Arrington’s comments.
That jab caught several senior Republicans off guard, not just because McCarthy was publicly rebuking one of his own chairs but because the speaker was, in fact, already crafting an opening offer of sorts to Biden that was soon publicly released.
McCarthy’s defenders say that Arrington, a fiscal conservative with a reputation for wanting to move quickly, is stirring up trouble in the conference. They argue that McCarthy has to protect his frontliners and that Arrington hasn’t been sensitive enough to their political needs. They also note that some in the GOP leadership have been unimpressed with Arrington’s private budget presentations.
But Arrington’s defenders say it’s unfair for McCarthy to blame him. They note that it’s odd for the speaker to call him “incompetent” despite repeatedly asking him to give presentations on fiscal matters to Republicans at both the House GOP leadership retreat earlier this year and the full GOP conference retreat in Orlando a few days ago. (At the latter, there was little pushback on a menu of options Arrington presented, and some members even stood to praise his proposals.)
Another Arrington defender noted that GOP leadership is typically involved in drafting the budget given how difficult it can be to muster support on the chamber floor — especially with a slim, five-seat majority like the Republicans currently have. And yet McCarthy has given little guidance to Arrington, according to a senior GOP aide.
“Jodey has been working in good faith, and has largely been hamstrung by Kevin,” the aide said. “They need someone else to blame.”
Republicans we spoke to found McCarthy’s lack of pushback on the Times story to be quite conspicuous. McCarthy, they note, rarely speaks ill of his members in meetings, and if he does, it rarely leaks. His paltry response did not go unnoticed.
“He made a bunch of promises during the speaker race that were always untenable, but he made them anyway,” one senior Republican said. “At a certain point, a lot of that stuff is going to collide, and he’s getting nervous and looking for others to blame.”
Senior Republicans always knew that passing a budget with a slim majority was going to be difficult. But the interesting part of all this palace intrigue is that it’s not factions inside the rank and file causing the problems; it’s McCarthy’s own leadership team that’s in disarray.
That doesn’t bode well for House Republicans’ budget efforts — or their bid to extract concessions from Biden on the debt ceiling. And without a unified GOP front, Democrats won’t take Republican demands for spending cuts seriously.
“Allies of @SpeakerMcCarthy trying to cast blame on others — before there is any actual blame to cast — doesn’t instill confidence House Rs are ready for primetime,” The Washington Post’s Paul Kane tweeted Thursday.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“I’m watching it on TV,” Graves said of the January stalemate over electing McCarthy, as he recalled thinking: “We look like idiots.” So he began dialing conservative holdouts as well as GOP moderates resistant to the right’s biggest demands. The 51-year-old even grew a beard that he refused to shave until McCarthy prevailed.
And when McCarthy won, he appointed the self-described policy “nerd” to his leadership team — a remarkably central role given that Graves chairs no committee and won no leadership election. Graves has embraced the jack-of-all-trades adviser identity, helping smooth intra-party conflicts while building his clout in the House.
That emerging profile of “assistant coach,” in McCarthy’s words, raises the question of how Graves fits in an elected leadership team that includes fellow Louisianan Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s formal No. 2. But Graves said he’s been careful not to get in the way — and also suggested the gubernatorial run he openly mulled this year may not be the end to his statewide ambitions, declining to rule out a Senate bid in 2026.
“I’m very cognizant of the fact that all these folks were actually elected positions,” Graves said in an interview, referring to Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) He portrayed his role as “blocking and tackling” and “plate-spinning” to give McCarthy an extra assist.
“I think the intent here is to benefit the entire leadership team, the entire conference,” he added. “If ever that’s not happening. I obviously need to move on.”
He’s spent this week helping keep the House GOP together on perhaps its biggest agenda win yet, a nearly 200-page energy bill incorporating a decade’s worth of Republican energy ideas that passed Thursday, 225-204.
Yet even that broadly popular package required plenty of hands-on work with just four votes to spare. Graves and other members of leadership raced to resolve intra-party policy spats, several of which involved coastal Republicans resistant to offshore drilling.
The GOP’s energy project permitting push is a particular personal highlight for Graves, who’s literally handled thousands of permits at the state level — first as a teenager working for his parents’ small engineering firm, and later as head of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. At the latter job, he helped devise a multibillion-dollar program to rebuild coastal levees damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“He learned his way around” on energy issues as the coastal authority chief, said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), whom Graves replaced in the House and could, at some point, face in a statewide primary. “You put all that together and you have a guy others respect. And it gives him greater influence.”
While Scalise officially led the House GOP’s energy bill effort, Graves has been a central part from the start, leading McCarthy’s task force on the subject last year. He sat with senior staff to draft the details of the permitting section, a rare display of policy chops from a lawmaker. One senior GOP leadership aide described him as a “bonus chief of staff.” (A former long-time energy aide himself, Graves even tried to attend staffer committee briefings when he arrived in Congress in 2015.)
But Graves’ identity on energy policymaking has another, politically charged dimension: He got elected as a rare Republican willing to call out his party on climate change, as Donald Trump was falsely deriding it as a hoax.
And the Louisianan’s message didn’t always sit right with his party. When McCarthy first picked Graves to lead GOP pushback on Democrats’ new climate panel in 2019, some colleagues were skeptical.
“I don’t think when he got chosen [that] immediately he was everybody’s number one pick,” recalled Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who first got to know him on the panel. Armstrong now calls Graves “one of our most effective” members, full stop.
That’s a big reason why fellow Republicans answered his calls in January, when Graves first jumped in to help McCarthy’s election math problem. He and a handful of other McCarthy allies began bringing leadership and the holdouts into the same room for real talks.
Centrist Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) has called Graves “one of the unsung heroes” in the speakership battle. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a conservative holdout, said Graves excelled at convincing each side that common ground existed.
It doesn’t hurt that Graves, though sometimes seen as sharp-elbowed, also wins friends easily, despite (or perhaps due to) being a notorious prankster. “He’s the kind of guy who will give you a hard time, then he’ll step back and make sure you’re all taken care of,” said Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah).
The same players, from Graves to Roy, will soon play similar roles as the party grasps for a workable strategy to resolve the imminent debt limit crisis. But for now, Graves is wrapping up the House energy bill — which is DOA in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
During his eight years in office, he’s taken solace in seeing elements of his party move closer to the message he shaped as a coastal Republican: a readiness to talk about the disastrous effects of a warming planet alongside calls for more U.S. oil and gas production.
Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), who chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus that launched in 2021 with Graves as a founding member, credits his colleague’s “ability to explain these concepts in a way that helps Republicans get their climate feet underneath them.”
Graves is elated to see others in the party parrot his language on clean energy, including McCarthy: “I love the fact that the Republican mainstream is now talking about lowering emissions.”
Democrats who’ve worked with him, though, say he’s doing little but paying lip service to the threat of climate change by not using his sway to advance GOP policy solutions.
One who worked closely with him on the now-disbanded climate committee said that Graves isn’t interested in alienating an oil and gas industry still dominant in his coastal district, which is also vulnerable to sea-level rise from climate change.
“When no cameras are on, I love Garret. When cameras are on, he does what he needs to do. But he’s a good human being and someone I get a beer with,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.).
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who led the climate panel which McCarthy disbanded this year, said Graves under-delivered there. “He is a fierce defender of the oil and gas industry — he makes no bones about it,” she observed.
Graves dismissed those Democratic criticisms of him and the GOP’s energy bill, which was written to ease production and export of oil and gas, but also to streamline permitting reviews that affect electric vehicles and renewable energy supplies.
And he did so with characteristic bluntness, calling Democrats’ arguments “complete bullshit.”
“Those people that have the bulls-eye on oil and gas, those people haven’t run companies and thought through how you do this. Does that mean we do away with wind, solar, and geothermal? Hell no. We need absolutely everything,” Graves said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Riyadh: The famous American comedian Kevin Hart is set to perform in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of his Reality Check tour of the Middle East.
Kevin Hart will perform a one-off concert on Saturday, February 25th, at the Mohammed Abdo Arena in Riyadh City Boulevard.
Hart concerts in the Middle East
Cairo on February 21, 2023
Abu Dhabi on February 22, 2023
Sakhir in Bahrain on February 24, 2023
Riyadh, February 25, 2023
43-year-old Kevin Hart is considered one of the most prominent international faces in stand-up comedy shows and has a high audience in various countries of the world, as the halls and stands in which he presents his creations are filled with fans of stand-up comedy art.
During his career, Hart achieved many international awards, and was nominated for Emmy and Grammy Awards, while tickets for his performances are highly competitive as soon as they are released.
