Boehner with a Bible

That didn’t take long. Over the weekend, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told a room of wealthy Republican donors he was going to rein the rebels in, booting them from their committees, Punchbowl reports, “if they oppose party-line procedural votes.”

It took the speaker just six months to fully develop the political views of a 2012 Republican, from backing unwinnable foreign wars and border surrenders to warrantless spying and the whole anti-Semitism debacle. It took him just a few weeks longer to start thinking he’s got the power of a 2012 Republican leader to boot. But does John Boehner with a Bible have any bite behind that bark? The answer is almost certainly no.

The center-left coalition Johnson has cobbled together won’t hold into a new year.

Johnson knows he can’t just start kicking members off their committees in the middle of the session. That would take floor votes, and in any case, the revolt against him was too large, with a record 55 Republicans voting no on a “party-line procedural vote” for Ukraine war funding just last month. A majority of Republicans joined the “no” faction later in the process.

Alternatively, he could simply decline to reassign committee positions next Congress to those members who continue to thwart him, using his sway over the Steering Committee to make it happen. If he tried it, he’d face a broader, more popular rebellion than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has managed to spark.

Finally (and most likely), Johnson can wait until the week after the November election, when House Republicans gather to vote on the rules they want to follow internally for the next Congress. When this comes along, he can write that any Republican who votes against a “party-line procedural vote” in the new Congress will be automatically stripped of his or her committee assignments.

There are generally 100 or so Republican members who will do whatever the speaker tells them on any point, so if he pushes for this change, it will pass. He can also likely get rid of the single-vote motion to vacate that has pestered his speakership and ended his predecessor's.

He can win the conference rules fight, but he can’t make it stick — because at the start of the new Congress in January, he’ll need to run for speaker again. And that’s when his opponents will get him (and his allies will abandon him).

If Republicans expand their majority at all, it won’t be by the 30 votes that the likes of former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) once commanded. The realities of redrawn congressional maps mean Republicans might add 10 seats to their rolls in November. This means in the January leadership elections, the next speaker will have precious little room for ticking off his colleagues.

The center-left coalition Johnson has cobbled together won’t hold into a new year, and he’ll find that when he really needs them, the war hawks and big spenders he’s made close company with won’t be rushing to the ramparts to recrown him.

Anyone who wants to be speaker — and there are many, including Steve Scalise (R-La.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) — will need to negotiate with his caucus. That’s where conservatives will demand concessions in the caucus rules, just as they did with then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on motion to vacate in the first place.

“You need significantly more than a 10-seat margin to kick people out effectively and have no consequences,” one senior conservative staffer and veteran of the Boehner and Johnson fights told Blaze News. Tight partisan margins, the staffer explained, make this reality “a permanent feature of the House going forward.”

Leadership might want it. The moderate and liberal Republicans might want it. Some facets of a potential Trump administration, no doubt, would like a peaceful House as well. Johnson simply cannot deliver. He almost certainly can’t even maintain his speakership for another Congress.

It’s been 10 years since Boehner’s infamous crackdown on conservative Republicans helped establish the Freedom Caucus. Boehner knew his city and used this knowledge to try to crush the rebellion. He threatened fundraisers to drop recalcitrant members, revoked House dining passes, and infamously went after committee seats.

In the end, one of his loyal chairmen was almost kicked off the committee he had tried to suppress, and Boehner himself ended up retiring to Florida. "He did it just enough to piss them off,” one congressman remembers, “but not enough to change their behavior.”

And Mike Johnson is no John Boehner.

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IN OTHER NEWS

The Trump trial derailment

It was a stormy day in court (sorry) when former porn star and current Trump critic Stormy Daniels took the witness stand on Tuesday in Donald Trump’s hush money trial.

Prosecutors successfully pushed Daniels to recount graphic and salacious details about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The judge, typically very deferential to the Democratic DA’s office, scolded both Daniels and prosecutors over her testimony.

Trump’s lawyers moved for a mistrial over what they called “extraordinarily prejudicial” testimony that unfairly inflamed the jury against Trump. What do the sex positions Daniels and Trump may or may not have used during a one-night stand 18 years ago have to do with allegedly falsifying business records in 2016, you may also be asking.

But the judge unsurprisingly did not call for a mistrial, and the defense went about attempting to undermine Daniels’ credibility during cross-examination.

There are no trial proceedings on Wednesdays, so the saga was set to continue Thursday at 9:30 a.m.

The campus collapse

MIT officially ended its diversity, equity, and inclusion pledge this week and will no longer force prospective employees to make it.

“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways," school President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement, “but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

That it took years for such an obvious point to be made clear speaks poorly to the state of elite education, but elsewhere, the news is darker. Farther south at New York’s Columbia University, school leaders canceled graduation ceremonies in anticipation of ongoing mob disruptions.

Students at the Ivy League, meanwhile, continue to distinguish themselves, misspelling “Palestine” in graffiti across the entrance to a hall they’ve occupied. Has-been rapper Macklemore recorded a cringe-inducing song to support whatever their goals are. In it, he claims forcing the Chinese communists to sell TikTok undermines freedom.

Meanwhile, UNC Chapel Hill leadership is fighting against its own radical professors, one of whom is threatening to withhold students’ grades until the university unsuspends student members of the mob. It’s amazing it has taken so long. Now that it’s here, it’s past time to clean house of the “teachers" who made all this possible in the first place.

Blaze News original: Mob rules — pro-Hamas campus protesters' most disgusting behavior caught on video

The fire rises: ‘Signal’s Katherine Maher problem,’ City Journal

Here’s a good rule for a paranoid man to remember: If it’s a widely available “encrypted” messaging service or phone, you can bet a government intelligence service was involved in its creation. Paranoid or not, it’s a good rule of thumb, and with Signal, it might be true. Over at City Journal, Christopher Rufo reports:

First, the origin story. The technology behind Signal, which operates as a nonprofit foundation, was initially funded, in part, through a $3 million grant from the government-sponsored Open Technology Fund (OTF), which was spun off from Radio Free Asia, originally established as an anti-Communist information service during the Cold War. OTF funded Signal to provide “encrypted mobile communication tools” to “Internet freedom defenders globally.”

Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.

The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.

You can read the rest at City Journal.