How the Big, Beautiful Bill got through the House

At the start of the week, The Spectator wondered how on earth Speaker Mike Johnson would get the Big, Beautiful Bill through the House, in the face of unified Democratic party opposition and seemingly intractable divides on the GOP side.

The answer, it turns out, involved copious amounts of alcohol, side deals, naps, late-night staff shifts and the Democratic gerontocracy.

Congressman Gerry Connolly’s sudden death on Wednesday shocked Washington. It also proved to be a boon to Johnson’s math. The Speaker ended up with more wiggle room, because one Republican who failed to vote slept through the late-night final tally. After months of debate, the House passed the bill 215-214; it now heads to the Senate, which is poised to change it and send it back. The White House wants the final version passed by the Fourth of July. 

But Johnson didn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat by himself; President Donald Trump came in at the last minute to force Republicans to back the bill. His political operation even called safe “yes” votes to ask for dirt on GOP holdouts. All of them ultimately fell in line except for Congressmen Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson, who voted with all of the Democrats, and for Congressman Andy Harris, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, who voted present. 

Following the bill’s passage, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that Trump would like to see both Massie and Davidson primaried out of office. While Massie is implacably opposed to many Trump priorities, the “no” and “present” votes from Davidson and Harris struck many as insincere. “If Gerry Connolly was still alive, Andy Harris or Warren Davidson would have voted yes. Who the F are we kidding?” one senior GOP staffer told Cockburn.

The White House used carrots and sticks to get their must-pass bill over the finish line. “White House legislative affairs was doing rounds keeping our morale up,” a staffer who spent the evening on the Hill said.

Staffers Cockburn spoke to worked throughout the night from their offices, restaurants or from their homes. “I’m trying to find buddies to keep drinking with me,” one said. “I was out at a dinner and had to send vote recs so I drove here in a debatable state,” another said.

One office split the work into shifts from 6 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 4 a.m. and 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. to ensure that their bosses were staffed at all times. 

At the end of the day, Johnson defied the doubters once more and the staffers who were on Capitol Hill were able to see their hard work pay off. “It was surreal seeing the sun rise over the dome, knowing we were making history,” one Hill vet told Cockburn.

On our radar

CRIMSON TIDE Harvard University is suing the Department of Homeland Security for banning the enrollment of foreign students at the college.

PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS The US Treasury will cease production of one-cent coins next year.

VIEW TO A KILL Top Disney executives suggested to the executive producer and hosts of The View that the show should “broaden its conversations beyond its predominant focus on politics,” according to a report in the Daily Beast.

Is Media Matters getting canceled?

Who cancels the cancelers? The Federal Trade Commission is conducting a probe into Media Matters for America over whether the nonprofit watchdog illegally colluded with advertisers.

In a letter to the group, the FTC requires “the organization to share copies of its budgets, documents showing the effects of ‘harmful’ online content on advertisers, and communications with other watchdog groups,” according to the New York Times. MMfA is presently the subject of a lawsuit from outgoing White House senior advisor Elon Musk, who accuses them of attempting to damage his platform X’s relationship with advertisers. “Media Matters published research in 2023 documenting that advertisements on X appeared alongside antisemitic posts,” the Times reports. The organization is suing X back, accusing the site of “libel tourism.”

Media Matters was founded in 2004 by David Brock, with the help of liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. The organization began with the intention of combatting “conservative misinformation” and is perhaps most notorious for the Fox News advertising boycott it led from 2011 to 2013. Since then, however, the group has arguably become the main engine of American cancel culture, dedicating its vast research capabilities toward offense archeology and overwhelmingly targeting right-of-center figures.

One person to fall afoul of the watchdog is Amber Duke, Cockburn’s former colleague who is now senior editor at the Daily Caller. “Media Matters deserves to be reduced to rubble for the number of lives they’ve attempted to destroy just because they can’t stand people that have different opinions to them,” she told Cockburn.

Senate Twink: ‘Je ne regrette rien’

You can’t keep a good man down. Welcome back Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the Senate Twink, who emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis this week in a New York magazine interview with Brock Colyar.

Maese-Czeropski, longtime readers of this newsletter will recall, worked as a staffer for Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland until December 2023, when he was fired after a video of him having sex with a male partner in a Senate hearing room started doing the rounds in DC. Sadly Colyar gets his timeline mixed up in his retelling: “Unwisely, perhaps, he didn’t keep the video to himself. And neither did his date. Within days, it was leaked to the Daily Caller.” Cockburn is ashamed to clarify that this story was his exclusive: he reported it hours before the Caller did.

Now living in Australia, Maese-Czeropski is unrepentant about his antics. “Throughout our conversation, he insists he has no regrets, save for getting caught,” Colyar writes. “‘Who cares?’ he asks me over a dozen times. ‘The only person I negatively affected was myself. I bear those consequences. But I don’t regret fucking in the Senate.’”

According to the interview, Maese-Czeropski invited his partner for a liaison on Senator Amy Klobuchar’s desk because he was “bored.” “What is it they say about idle hands?” he tells Colyar. The interview does not offer a justification for the pair’s decision to film and circulate the encounter – or for the several other explicit photographs of himself Maese-Czeropski posted on a Twitter/X account.

The Senate Twink does reflect on the road he chose not to travel, though. “I had a half-second where I was like, I know so many people who’ve fucked in the Senate. I could throw people under the bus to water out my own scandal,” he says. Goodness. Know anything? Please inform Cockburn so he can alert the janitorial staff.

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