Johnson steels for speaker vote as Trump rages about ‘laughing stock’ US

The House Republican leadership revealed their new rules for the 119th Congress on Wednesday, including a measure making it more difficult to remove the speaker of the House.

Here’s Gustaf Kilander to explain.

The incumbent is in a better position now than Kevin McCarthy was two years ago, Eric Garcia writes.

But he still has to navigate the Rubik’s Cube that is the House Republican conference.

Here’s a typically oddball message to the world from Donald Trump to start your day.

Man, only Don Quixote hates windmills more than this guy.

The president-elect also announced further nominees to his incoming administration overnight, including new US ambassadors to Spain and the Netherlands and a team to support Scott Bessant at the Treasury.

Pressed by Fox News anchor Sandra Smith on whether he was “privy” to any information proving such a link, Homan acknowledged he was not before saying he felt there were just “too many coincidences” between the two incidents.

Hours after a U.S. Army veteran plowed a truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating New Year’s on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, leaving 14 dead and dozens injured, Fox News reported that the terror suspect’s vehicle was spotted crossing the U.S.-Mexico border just two days prior.

The conservative cable giant’s suggestion that the horrific tragedy may have been linked to migrants entering the United States sparked an immediate freakout from prominent conservatives — and likely led to President-elect Donald Trump’s initial statement on the mass casualty event that tied immigration to the terror attack.

While the incoming president insisted he’d been proven right that “the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country,” Fox News soon walked back much of its reporting, noting that the vehicle had been spotted near the border in November rather than late-December and that it didn’t appear the suspect was the driver in that instance.

Justin Barangoa has the story.

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, D.C.

Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, has faced pushback from some Republicans after he supported a recent spending bill that the president-elect and Elon Musk opposed.

That could pose a problem for him this week because Johnson can only afford to lose two Republican votes – assuming all Democrats vote against him – if he wants to keep the top Congressional job. At least one Republican has already signaled they are not voting for Johnson.

Donald Trump’s one-time White House strategist Steve Bannon warned Elon Musk Tuesday that he and other MAGA diehards are going to “rip your face off” unless Musk smartens up and stops pushing visas for skilled foreign workers to take good-paying tech industry jobs away from Americans.

He instructed Musk to “sit back and study” to understand MAGA’s — and what supporters believed was Trump’s — America First stance to keep U.S. jobs for Americans.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts warned that elected officials should not to disregard the rulings made by the court in a report.

Roberts, who will mark 20 years at the top of the court later this year, released his year-end report where he warned of increasing attacks to the legitimacy of the court.

The court has come under increased scrutiny ever since it moved to a decisive 6-3 conservative majority largely put in place by President-elect Donald Trump during his first tenure in the White House from 2017 to 2021.

Eric Garcia reports from Washington, D.C.

Justin Barangoa has the story.