Marjorie Taylor Greene Hammered For Refusing To Stop Smashing Gavel At Hearing
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was hammered repeatedly by a Democratic congresswoman on Tuesday for the way she was using her gavel.
After a witness testified in a DOGE subcommittee hearing, the Georgia Republican said, 'No one loves veterans more than President Trump.'
New Mexico Democrat Melanie Stansbury immediately objected, and pointed out that, according to the rules of parliamentary procedure,Greene had not been recognized to give a statement like that.
'Madam, it is not your time right now,' Stansbury said.
Greene declared, 'I'm the chair of this committee,' and started banging the gavel while Stansbury kept noting, 'That's not how parliamentary procedure works.'
'Miss Stansbury, you're not recognized,' Greene said, banging her gavel even more.
Stansbury told Greene she could 'smash' the gavel all day, before mockingly suggesting that 'We're going to get you a Robert's Rules of Order,' a noted manual for parliamentary procedure.
'Madam Chair, calm down. Let's move on,' Stansbury added.
The video below pretty much nails the encounter.
Of course, people had thoughts about the incident ― it's the internet, silly.
This isn't the first time Greene has used her gavel against Stansbury.
Back in May,she slammed her gavel more than 50 timesduring a House subcommittee hearing focused on transgender women in sports, after Stansbury went over her allotted time.
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Politico
15 minutes ago
- Politico
California Democrats stage internal war over Gavin Newsom's late push to build more housing
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Instead, Democrats are throwing up heavy resistance to his last-minute stand on housing development — a proposal that has drawn outrage from labor and environmental groups in heavily-Democratic California. 'Anyone who believed this would not cause a giant explosion — they were living in la-la-land,' said Todd David, a San Francisco political consultant who has worked for state Sen. Scott Wiener and housing-focused groups. For Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender, it was a striking show of resistance from a flank of his own party over housing. A priority of the Democratic governor, Newsom had put his political capital behind an attempt to strong-arm the Legislature by making the entire state budget contingent on passing a bill to speed housing development by relaxing environmental protection rules. A spokesperson for Newsom pointed to a statement Tuesday night emphasizing partnership with lawmakers in reaching a budget deal while noting that 'it is contingent on finalizing legislation to cut red tape and unleash housing and infrastructure development across the state — to build more, faster.' The fault lines on display this week run deep. Construction unions and the statewide California Labor Federation have long resisted housing bills they see as eroding wage standards, often packing hearing rooms with members who urge lawmakers to vote no. Democrats have at times decried their union allies' hardball tactics. But Newsom's unprecedented intervention — and the forceful response from union foes — pushed the conflict into a whole new realm. 'To have legislation that is this large and this significant be forced through at the 11th hour … seems pretty absurd to me,' Democratic state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez said at the hearing. 'I just cannot begin to explain how incredibly inappropriate and hurtful this is.' Scott Wetch, a lobbyist representing the trade unions, contended that this could be the first time since the Jim Crow era that California is 'contemplating a law to suppress wages.' Pérez, who represents a Los Angeles district, said the proposal was 'incredibly insensitive' amid immigration raids targeting mostly 'blue-collar workers who are Latino.' And Kevin Ferreira, executive director of the Sacramento-Sierra's Building and Construction Trades Council, told lawmakers the bill 'will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs.' In a sign of the stakes, the fight quickly spilled beyond California as North America's Building Trades Unions — an umbrella group covering millions of workers across the United States in Canada that rarely intercedes in state politics — sent Newsom a blistering letter warning the bill would 'create a race to the bottom.' Environmental groups piled on late Wednesday, with around 60 of them, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, blasting the proposal in a letter as a 'backroom Budget Trailer Bill deal that would kill community and environmental protections, even as the people of California are faced with unprecedented federal attacks to their lives and livelihoods.' Unions warned the governor was betraying his Democratic base. Gretchen Newsom, a representative of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Newsom's stance was baffling to people 'looking at the Democratic Party and wondering what comes next for the governor.' 'I see this as a complete debacle and devastating to workers all across California,' said Newsom, who is not related to the governor. Labor leaders were once again at one another's throats, with many opponents faulting carpenters' unions who have backed streamlining efforts. Danny Curtin, director of the California Conference of Carpenters, said the scale of housing woes in California, where the price for the median home now tops $900,000, demanded an aggressive solution. 'The housing crisis is the most politically, socially, economically destabilizing crisis in California,' Curtin said. 'I would give the governor credit for trying to cut through another year of arguing.' In the broader budget negotiations, Newsom had largely capitulated to pushback from lawmakers over the steepest cuts he had proposed making to the state's Medicaid program, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Now, he is putting his political capital behind affordability proposals. But in a sign that Newsom's influence may be waning, lawmakers on Wednesday delayed a vote over wage provisions tucked into a separate budget bill. The proposal would allow developers to set a minimum wage standard for construction workers on certain affordable housing projects that could be lower than what union workers currently command. 'It's not a simple thing around the edges,' said state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, a Los Angeles Democrat. 'It is a massive change. It challenges the role of collective bargaining in this state that has never been done before.' Wiener, a state budget negotiator who for years has fought to remove obstacles to denser housing development in California, defended the proposal at the hearing as setting a 'floor, not a ceiling' for wages. But he admitted that the swift and ferocious opposition led him to delay the vote. 'It's always appropriate for people to say, 'This needs to be changed, that needs to be changed. This wage is too low, that wage is too low,' Wiener said. 'That's always appropriate.' The governor was markedly less aggressive this year in his efforts to wring a budget deal out of lawmakers. Newsom did not attend caucus meetings in person to make his case for the housing legislation, as he has with previous proposals, although he has been in touch with some lawmakers via text message. Some of that was a matter of timing: Newsom has been preoccupied by the White House launching sweeping immigration raids and then deploying federal troops to Los Angeles, fomenting a standoff that overlapped with budget negotiations. Corey Jackson, a Democrat from Southern California who chairs an Assembly budget committee on human services, said that while he wasn't privy to Newsom's involvement in discussions, California needs a governor who is '24/7 going to be focused' on the state. 'Because our issues are that complicated,' Jackson said. 'And the number of crises that come up in California, as you've seen, will continue to happen every year.'
Boston Globe
42 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Usha Vance's new life in Trump's Washington
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There she studied the development of copyright law in 17th-century England and wrote in the Gates scholars' yearbook that her interests were 'exploring urban neighborhoods, cooking & green markets, long walks, panicking about law school.' Whatever worries she may have had, friends describe her as a picture of confidence when she was back at Yale in 2010 to start law school. She and JD Vance were soon assigned as partners on a major writing assignment. He was awestruck. 'She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful,' he wrote in a widely quoted passage in 'Hillbilly Elegy.' The feeling was not mutual at first. 'I think it's fair to say that JD was sort of the pedal in the relationship and I was a little bit of the brakes,' she told the crowd at the U.S.-India forum this month. 'Because I was sort of focused on the schooling part of it.' The two were a couple by their second year of law school, when they went to Washington for interviews with law firms. In an episode in his memoir, JD Vance recounted that he had returned dejected to their hotel room one night after feeling he had done badly with a favorite firm. Usha Vance tried to comfort him, he wrote, but he exploded and stormed out into the streets of downtown Washington. Usha Vance chased after him. 'She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her,' JD Vance wrote. Advertisement The two were married in 2014 in an outdoor wedding in Kentucky, near JD Vance's hometown, and spent the next decade crisscrossing the country as their jobs moved them from the East Coast to the West Coast and back to the Midwest. Along the way, Usha Vance gave birth to Ewan in 2017, Vivek in 2020 and Mirabel in 2021. Vance clerked for Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Chief Justice Roberts, and worked for the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco and Washington. JD Vance became a partner in a venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and major Trump supporter. Usha Vance watched her husband participate in a Fox News town hall in Columbus, Ohio, in November 2022, while Vice President Vance was running for US Senate. MADDIE MCGARVEY/NYT In 2017, after 'Hillbilly Elegy' had become a critically acclaimed explanation of the Trump working class to the elite, the couple moved to Cincinnati, where Usha Vance worked remotely for Munger. The couple bought a big $1.4 million Victorian in East Walnut Hills, a liberal-leaning neighborhood. Vance joined the board of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and put Post-it notes on wine bottles to remind her husband which were the good ones to use for guests. A Pivotal Hearing A pivotal moment for Usha Vance came in 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh, by then a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her at a high school party nearly 40 years earlier. Kavanaugh denied the accusation and was narrowly confirmed, but friends say that Vance was outraged by Democratic attacks on a man she admired. 'My wife worked for Kavanaugh, loved the guy — kind of a dork,' JD Vance told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last year. 'Never believed these stories.' That same year, JD Vance went to a dinner of the Business Roundtable, a group of top American chief executives. He sat next to the head of a hotel chain who complained, JD Vance has recounted, that Trump's crackdown at the border had cut off the flow of low-wage immigrants, forcing him to hire American workers at higher prices. A friend said that both Vances were appalled by his complaints. 'One of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mindset of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have 7 million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force,' JD Vance told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the Times in 2024, recalling his encounter with the hotel chain executive. Americans will do those jobs, Vance said, but not for 'below-the-table wages.' When Vance became Trump's running mate in the summer of 2024, Usha Vance quit her job at Munger and threw herself into the vice presidential campaign. She and the children were often on the trail with him, and colleagues say she was a key part of the preparations for his debate with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance visit the Taj Mahal with their children in Agra, India, on April 23. KENNY HOLSTON/NYT Becoming Second Lady Usha Vance has largely stayed out of the fray over the administration's political and policy agenda, even as her husband has continued to be a polarizing figure. At one point, he defended a far-right party in Germany, and at another, he successfully called for the reinstatement of an aide to Elon Musk who had quit after the revelation of racist posts he made on X. The one exception for Usha Vance was in March when she planned a trip to see a national dog sled race in Greenland, which Trump has said he wants to take over from Denmark. Vance made a cheerful video ahead of the trip, but it was ultimately downsized to a brief stop with her husband at a U.S. military base after strong objections from Greenlanders. In the coming months, Vance says she will continue to roll out second lady projects. For now, she continues to take her children to her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the one with the view of the Washington Monument. This article originally appeared in .
Fox News
2 hours ago
- Fox News
Kari Lake declares US Agency for Global Media ‘rotten to the core,' sets 2026 shutdown goal: 'A boondoggle'
Kari Lake isn't backing down. In blunt testimony before Congress Wednesday, Lake declared the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the $950 million agency for which she is the senior advisor overseeing Voice of America (VOA), is "rotten to the core" and on track to be gutted by 2026. "This place is rotten. It's rotten to the core," Lake told the House Oversight Committee. "President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up, and he's also issued an executive order to reduce this agency down to its mandate, to what is mandated, statutorily required. That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't care if they attack me." She's not acting alone. Lake provided Fox News Digital with a letter from House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., demanding records on USAGM's foreign hires, conflicts of interest and its handling of disinformation and national security. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to say, "Why would a Republican want Democrat 'mouthpiece,' Voice of America (VOA), to continue? It's a TOTAL, LEFTWING DISASTER — No Republican should vote for its survival. KILL IT!" Lake didn't hold back in describing what she found within USAGM. "It's really like a rotten piece of fish," she said. "And you're looking at it, and you're saying, 'Is there anything we can pull out of here and eat?' And it's best to just scrap the whole thing and start over." She argued that instead of defending American values abroad, the federally funded national and international news agency had become compromised with hostile actors potentially influencing what gets broadcast on the U.S. taxpayer's dime. "The [Chinese Communist Party] has more control over what we put out editorially than people who are management at the agency," Lake said. "Are any of these VOA employees who acted on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party ... still employed? It's possible. We're working to try to figure that out." She accused the grantees — including VOA, Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund — of resisting oversight and stonewalling basic financial reviews. "Nearly $400 million, the hard-earned taxpayer dollars of hard-working American people, are going to these grantees, and they've stonewalled us from getting any information until the eleventh hour," Lake said. "Finally, last night, knowing I would be sitting here, they finally agreed to say, 'Oh, we'll let you look at our books now.' It's a joke what's going on." Lake found no shortage of support from Republicans on the committee, including Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who said the agency should've been shut down years ago. "We might as well be riding a Model T down the middle of the street. It might be ... it looks good, and it brings back old memories, but, dadgum, it's not very efficient," Burchett said. Lake agreed, adding, "It's a relic." Democrats accused Lake of dismantling a strategic asset and repeating anti-VOA rhetoric similar to that used by China. Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., said, "You just want to reduce it to its statutory minimum. And then you said … that it will be gone by 2026. You want it gone. The president wants it gone by 2026. ... You're a propaganda machine for the Trump administration." Dean said she had "no questions" for Lake, adding, "You have misled this committee. ... You've lost your credibility. You have poured it out in buckets." Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas, claimed layoffs would "cede all of our soft power in the world to our adversaries," arguing, "354 million people listen to [VOA] every week." Lake replied bluntly, "Those are government numbers. And I don't trust those numbers." Johnson shot back, "That's a sad state of affairs when you don't trust the government that you're representing." Lake defended the cuts, saying they follow the law and common sense. "We are doing what is statutorily required," she said. "The statutory minimum President Trump put forth in his executive order ... and that's what we're going to do." Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., expressed concern that cutting grantee staff could weaken U.S. influence in hot spots like Iran and North Korea. "We can do it with a smaller staff.," Lake replied. "This newsroom should have been downsized a long time ago. … It's over. Too many people were working in the newsroom, and we've shrunk that down." She added that many grantee roles were redundant. "Why do we need RFA to be doing a Mandarin news service when we at VOA are doing Mandarin?" Lake said. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., closed with a comparison. iHeartMedia runs a national operation at $90 million per year. USAGM's budget? Nearly $1 billion. Lake's closing message was direct. "We can do this smarter, leaner and with loyalty to American values," she said.
