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Donald Trump Called on ‘Democrat Operative’ Judge in New York Fraud Case to Be ‘Disbarred’
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Republican congressman admits he ‘was praying’ for ‘small’ GOP House majority before 2022 midterm elections
A Republican congressman and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus admitted last week he “was praying” the GOP would win just a “small” majority in the House of Representatives ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in order to shift the party further to the right, according to video obtained Monday by Fox News Digital.
“When a lot of people, unfortunately, were voting, to have a 270, 280 Republican House, I was praying each evening for a small majority, because I recognize that that small majority was the only way that we were going to advance a conservative agenda,” Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said during a closed briefing, which The Messenger first reported was “a virtual briefing for around 50 top conservative donors.”
“If it was the right majority, that if we had six or seven very strong individuals, we would drag the conference over to the right,” he added.
GAETZ, MCCARTHY CLASH ON X FOLLOWING MOTION TO END SPEAKERSHIP: ‘BRING IT ON’
Rosendale went on to praise Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a frequent critic of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for being there “from the very beginning helping accomplish that.” Gaetz, who was seated next to Rosendale in the video, along with former Trump administration official Steve Bannon, introduced a motion to vacate against McCarthy to remove him from the speakership on Monday.
“It always goes back to leadership though, which is what the first battle was about in January, and we have to change that leadership,” he added, appearing to express support for Gaetz’s bid to remove McCarthy.
Fox has reached out to Rosendale’s office for comment.
NEW POLL REVEALS HUGE GAP IN CONCERN OVER BIDEN’S AGE VS. TRUMP’S IN HYPOTHETICAL 2024 MATCHUP
The congressman’s admission came as different factions of the Republican Party clashed over a deal that would avoid a shutdown of the U.S. government, the main factor in Gaetz’s effort to remove McCarthy. A deal was ultimately reached, but at the dismay of a number of the more right-leaning Republicans in the House, including Rosendale.
Rosendale is considering a run against Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester, who is up for re-election next year. He ran unsuccessfully against Tester in 2018, coming just under 18,000 votes short.
Should he enter the race for the Republican nomination, he would join former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy and businessman Jeremy Mygland.
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Gaetz, McCarthy clash on X following motion to end speakership: ‘Bring it on’
Conservative firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy clashed on X following the former’s effort to remove the latter from the speakership.
“Bring it on,” McCarthy wrote immediately following Gaetz introducing a motion to vacate against him Monday evening, a move Gaetz had been threatening in recent days amid clashes between different wings of the Republican Party over a potential government shutdown.
Gaetz simply responded, “Just did.”
MATT GAETZ INTRODUCES MOTION TO VACATE AGAINST HOUSE SPEAKER KEVIN MCCARTHY
Fox News Digital has reached out to the offices of Gaetz and McCarthy for comment.
Gaetz’s move will force the House to take a vote on whether to keep McCarthy as speaker within two legislative days.
There are a number of members undecided on how they would vote on such a measure, but it’s likely McCarthy will need at least some Democrat votes to keep his job. Democrats could be in a position to try and extract concessions from McCarthy for their votes.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told Fox News following Gaetz’s move that he believes a motion to vacate at this time is “a bad idea.” Additionally, Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., told Fox he was undecided.
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Gaetz Moves to Oust McCarthy, Threatening His Grip on the Speakership
Matt Gaetz introduces motion to vacate against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., has followed through on his renewed threat to introduce a motion to vacate against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Gaetz, a frequent McCarthy critic, introduced the motion Monday evening on the House floor.
“Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause two A1 of Rule nine, I rise to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of House,” Gaetz said. “Declaring the office Speaker of the House of Representatives to be vacant. Resolved that the office of Speaker of the House Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”
Gaetz’s move will force the House to take a vote on whether to keep McCarthy as speaker within two legislative days.
There are a number of members undecided on how they would vote on such a measure, but it’s likely McCarthy will need at least some Democrat votes to keep his job. Democrats could be in a position to try and extract concessions from McCarthy for their votes.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told Fox News following Gaetz’s move that he believes a motion to vacate at this time is “a bad idea.” Additionally, Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., told Fox he was undecided.
This is a developing story. Check back here for updates.
Fox News’ Brianna O’Neil contributed to this report.
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Fed’s Powell gets an earful about inflation and interest rates from small businesses
YORK, Pa. (AP) — Federal Reserve officials typically gather many of their insights and observations about the economy from some of the top Ph.D. economists in Washington.
On a visit Monday to York, Pennsylvania, Chair Jerome Powell got an earful from a group with a decidedly different perspective: Small-business people who are grappling personally with inflation, high interest rates, labor shortages and other challenges of the post-pandemic economy.
Powell, along with Patrick Harker, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, traveled to York to learn about the efforts of the long-time manufacturing hub, where York Peppermint Patties were once made, to diversify its economy.
HUNDREDS OF CLIMATE ACTIVISTS SHUT DOWN FEDERAL RESERVE BUILDING ENTRANCE
The businesspeople they spoke with were generally optimistic but expressed a range of concerns: They are still having trouble finding all the workers they need. Higher interest rates have discouraged some of them from expanding. And higher costs and a chronic difficulty in acquiring enough supplies have persisted.
“We were a little blind-sided by inflation,” said Julie Flinchbaugh Keene, co-owner of Flinchbaugh’s Orchard & Farm Market, who spoke to Powell and Harker at the Gather 256 coffee shop while the two Fed officials conducted a walking tour. Since the pandemic struck more than three years ago, she said, “predictability is just gone. It’s very hard to operate a business without predictability.”
Keene noted that her parents had experienced high inflation when they ran the business back in the 1980s. But the company was much smaller then and had no employees. As a result, her father said, “I don’t have any wisdom to give you.”
“We’ll get inflation down,” Powell said after listening to her concerns.
During his tour of downtown York, Powell also met Jennifer Heasley, owner of Sweet Mama’s Mambo Sauce, who makes a barbecue-style sauce and owns a food stall in the York Central Market.
When asked before his visit what she would most want to tell Powell, Heasley said, “Lower interest rates.”
Heasley said she is paying a much higher rate now on her credit cards, which she sometimes uses to fund her business.
Powell’s visit occurred as the Fed is monitoring the economy for signs that its streak of rate increases are having their desired effect and that inflation is continuing to cool. At their most recent meeting two weeks ago, Fed officials signaled confidence about a so-called “soft landing,” in which inflation would fall back to their 2% target without a deep recession. The policymakers predicted that inflation would fall to about 2.6% by the end of 2024, with only a small rise in the unemployment rate.
But given its confidence in the economy’s resilience, the Fed also signaled that it expects to keep its benchmark rate higher for longer, potentially raising it once more this year and keeping it above 5% well into 2024.
Inflation has dwindled from a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 to 3.7% in August. In the meantime, the unemployment rate has defied predictions by remaining low while the economy has continued to expand.
Before the walking tour, Powell and Harker conducted a roundtable discussion with several business owners and executives, nonprofit leaders and educators.
Kevin Schreiber, CEO of the York County Economic Alliance, a business development group, told reporters that the local economy is growing at a healthy pace. At the same time, Schreiber said, many business people are worried about the next 12 to 18 months and the prospect that interest rates will stay high and inflation won’t be fully conquered.
A lack of child care is another top problem for many businesses in the area, Schreiber said, because it keeps many parents out of the workforce.
Schreiber said there were 219 child care centers in the area before the pandemic. Now, there are only 170. Many of the remaining centers are operating at less than full capacity because of staffing shortages.
Tom Palisin, executive director of The Manufacturer’s Association, who took part in the roundtable, said later that higher interest rates have led many local companies to pull back on acquisitions and investments in new technology.
“Companies want to invest,” he said, “but they’ve hit the pause button.”
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Democrats Weigh Whether to Rescue McCarthy From G.O.P. Ouster Bid
Students at top California university reveal who won second GOP presidential debate
A group of young conservatives at the University of Southern California are ready for a new GOP future but agree that former President Donald Trump is the strongest candidate going into 2024.
Seven Republican candidates battled at the recent second presidential debate to prove if they can be an alternative to front-runner Trump, who is polling ahead with 60% of Republican primary support, according to Fox News polling.
“Vivek Ramaswamy,” said four students when asked who won the debate, with only one student saying they felt Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., was last Wednesday night’s winner.
The presidential candidates railed against Trump for skipping the second debate, with DeSantis saying he was “missing in action” and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calling him “Donald Duck” – and members of the USC College Republicans chapter agreed that Trump “needed to be there.”
SECOND REPUBLICAN DEBATE: HERE’S THE BIGGEST WINNER AND THE BIGGEST LOSER
“I think for the people on the fence, he needed to be there. I would have wished he was there,” said senior Angelica Baker, an international relations major.
“I think that’s something voters needed to see, so I hope he chooses to participate in the next one,” another student told Fox.
“He’s leading by insurmountable odds,” USC senior Daniel Parker, who is also an international relations major, said of Trump. “And there’s no benefit to him to actually step on the stage.”
5 FIERY MOMENTS FROM THE SECOND GOP DEBATE
Chris Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence were named as having the worst performance in the GOP debate by nearly all the students, who said they are “running for a position that nobody wants them to run for.”
“For the worst night probably, Christie,” Parker said. “He’s trying to play to the Never Trumpers, and the Never Trumpers are just not big enough to get him any type of traction.”
“Nobody really looked like a leader up there. A lot of people look like they were squabbling,” Parker added.
The overall mood of the second debate was that the Republican candidates performed better than the first showdown but are still lagging behind Trump.
One student said it “just reminded me of me and my siblings” and that this scenario of arguing back and forth is “not something that you want in the Oval Office.”
“I feel like there is improvement in almost every candidate in terms of just how they presented themselves. I think DeSantis had a noticeably better stance – I guess you could say just better projecting his views and his opinions,” another student said.
“You’ve just got to prove that you can be more viable than Trump, and I just don’t see that yet,” said Lorenzo Aguirre, a business and real estate finance major.
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North Carolina Gov. Cooper vetoes 2 more bills, but budget still on track to become law Tuesday
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed on Monday both an energy bill and the legislature’s annual regulatory reform measure, while allowing legislation directing more state government oversight of high school athletics to become law.
The measures were among those the General Assembly approved last month before it left Raleigh for a brief hiatus. A dozen had remained on the Democratic governor’s desk as of early Monday.
NORTH CAROLINA GOV. ROY COOPER SIGNS INTO LAW REPUBLICAN REVISIONS TO UPCOMING ABORTION RESTRICTIONS
The vetoed measures now return to the General Assembly, where Republicans hold narrow veto-proof majorities. Before Monday, Cooper had vetoed 16 bills this year, and Republicans had overridden all but two, which are still expected to be acted upon, possibly this month.
The governor can sign a bill he receives into law or veto it. Otherwise, a bill becomes law if he fails to act within 10 days. Cooper said Monday that he signed seven of the remaining bills and declined to sign three others.
The governor had already announced Sept. 22 his decision not to sign on one of those three bills, the two-year state budget bill, which now will become law effective Tuesday.
Cooper had said there were many spending and policy provisions within the budget that he strongly disliked. But several months ago, lawmakers set an enacted budget as the trigger necessary for Cooper’s administration to implement the expansion of Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of low-income adults. So by letting the budget become law, Medicaid expansion, which has been one of Cooper’s top priorities, will launch Dec. 1.
The energy bill that Cooper vetoed would encourage more nuclear energy in North Carolina by including that the power produced from nuclear plants and fusion energy be counted toward percentages of electricity that utilities like Duke Energy must generate from renewable sources.
The bill would relabel “renewable energy resources” needed to meet the portfolio standards as “clean energy resources.” Duke Energy already is proposing to state electricity regulators that some coal-fired plants going offline in the future be replaced with a smaller-scale nuclear plants.
Cooper’s veto message said the bill attempts to take the state off a “bipartisan path to removing carbon from our electric power sector in the most cost-effective way,” to the benefit of utility company profits. A 2021 law already is pushing Duke Energy toward eliminating carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 in part by increasing solar and wind-power generation.
“North Carolina should consider all pathways to decarbonize, rather than putting a thumb on the scale in favor of building new conventional generation,” Cooper wrote.
Senate Majority Leader Paul Newton of Cabarrus County, a former Duke Energy executive and bill sponsor, said Cooper’s “hardline opposition to nuclear power is a slap in the face to North Carolina’s energy industry.” The bill, Newton said, would help create a reliable electrical grid.
As for the legislature’s annual regulatory bill, Cooper called it “a hodgepodge of bad provisions that will result in dirtier water, discriminatory permitting and threats to North Carolina’s environment.”
Environmentalists have criticized the measure for certain state permitting changes that they say could assist the approval of a proposed natural gas pipeline that would enter the state from Virginia. Another provision would adjust state law about how waste management systems for hogs and other animals on farms are permitted.
GOP Rep. Jeff Zenger of Forsyth County, a regulatory reform bill sponsor, said Cooper “sided with radical, environmentalist, job crushing bureaucrats over the people of North Carolina” with the veto.
Cooper also cited a provision that blocked administrative rules from taking effect that describe good-faith efforts to engage minority-owned businesses and others considered “historically underutilized” in state contracting,
The governor also said he had allowed a bill to become law that would place more oversight by state education leaders upon the chief nonprofit body that manages high school sports beyond what was required in a 2021 consensus law. The language demanding more supervision of the North Carolina High School Athletic Association was inserted into an unrelated insurance regulation bill.
Cooper called the sports-governance changes “a solution in search of a problem” and said lawmakers should have let the 2021 law remain.
The governor signed into law a bill that both creates a computer science course requirement to graduate from high school and demands adult age verification on websites that publish sexually explicit material.
Another bill Cooper signed would raise criminal penalties against K-12 educators who commit certain sexual acts against students and educate children in upper grades through a video about what constitutes child abuse and neglect.
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