Tag: republicans

North Dakota Politician Charged With Traveling to Czech Republic for Sex With Minor

A federal grand jury returned an indictment against Raymon Everett Holmberg, a/k/a Sean Evans, for Child Sex Tourism and Receipt of Child Pornography. Holmberg, age 79, from Grand Forks, ND, a former [Republican] North Dakota State Senator, was indicted on October 26, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota and appeared for an initial appearance and arraignment today.

The Indictment alleges that beginning in June 2011 through November 2016, Holmberg repeatedly traveled from North Dakota to Prague, Czech Republic, for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts (Child Sex Tourism) with a person under the age of 18 years. It also alleges that on November 24, 2012, and continuing until March 4, 2013, Holmberg received and attempted to receive child pornography depicting a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

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Meet the evangelical activist who’s had a ‘profound influence’ on Speaker Mike Johnson

Two years before going from a relatively unknown congressman to speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana spoke at a national gathering of Christian lawmakers in North Texas and shared his deep admiration for the man behind the conference: the evangelical activist and self-styled historian David Barton.

“I was introduced to David and his ministry a quarter-century ago,” Johnson said at the ProFamily Legislators Conference, which was being hosted by Barton’s nonprofit WallBuilders, a Texas group dedicated to promoting the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation whose laws should be based on a conservative reading of the Bible.

Johnson told the audience at the December 2021 gathering that Barton’s teachings — which are disputed by many historians — have had “a profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do.”

Johnson’s effusive praise for Barton, an influential background figure in the conservative evangelical political movement, sends an unmistakable signal about how the devout Christian Republican lawmaker — now second in the line to the presidency — views the role of religion in government and public life, said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania.

“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” said Fea, who’s also an evangelical. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”

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New speaker of the House Mike Johnson once wrote in support of the criminalization of gay sex

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a history of harsh anti-gay language from his time as an attorney for a socially conservative legal group in the mid-2000s.

In editorials that ran in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper, The Times, Johnson called homosexuality a “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle” that would lead to legalized pedophilia and possibly even destroy “the entire democratic system.”

And, in another editorial, he wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do,” he wrote. “This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

At the time, Johnson was an attorney and spokesman for Alliance Defense Fund, known today as Alliance Defending Freedom, where he also authored his opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas – which overturned state laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults.

ADF wrote an amicus brief in the case which supported maintaining criminalization.

“States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” Johnson wrote in a July 2003 op-ed, calling it a public health concern.

“By closing these bedroom doors, they have opened a Pandora’s box,” he added.

Now, Johnson is the speaker of the House at a time when a majority of Americans are strongly supportive of gay rights.

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‘Scripture is very clear’: New House speaker tells Congress that God has ‘ordained’ him

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in his first remarks after being elected Wednesday afternoon, told members of Congress that “Scripture” and “the Bible” are clear that he has been “ordained” by God.

“I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night,” Speaker Johnson declared.

“I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that Scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time. This is my belief. I believe that each one of us has a huge responsibility today, to use the gifts that God has given us to serve the extraordinary people of this great country, and they deserve it.”

Later, speaking outside on the steps of Congress, Johnson again mentioned “Scripture.”

Critics have characterized Speaker Johnson, who hails from Louisiana, as a “Christian nationalist.”

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Newly Elected GOP House Speaker Voted Against Numerous Marijuana Measures, Including Banking, Research And Legalization

The U.S. House of Representatives officially has a new speaker: Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA). A review of his marijuana-related votes reveals a new leader who has consistently opposed reform, including on incremental issues like cannabis banking and making it easier to conduct scientific research on the plant.

It took the Republican majority about three weeks to elect a speaker after multiple GOP conference nominees failed to amass the required votes to ascend to the position. Johnson was nominated just hours after House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), who has backed cannabis banking and other reforms, was selected and then dropped out on Tuesday following pushback from former President Donald Trump and his allies. Then, on Wednesday, the lesser-known Johnson secured 220 votes on the House floor to become the next speaker.

The congressman entered Congress in 2017, though sizing up his record is more difficult in light of his atypically high absence during roll call votes. But for the votes that he did cast on cannabis issues, there is a clear pattern: he’s again even modest, bipartisan reform proposals.

Importantly, Johnson, who serves as vice chair of the Republican conference, voted against bills to safeguard banks that work with state-licensed marijuana businesses in 2019 and 2021. That could come into play sooner than later, as Senate leadership works to advance the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act that cleared committee last month to the floor before potentially transmitting it to the House.

Under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), leadership wasn’t an especially significant concern for advocates and stakeholders, even under the GOP-controlled chamber. McCarthy had voted in favor of marijuana banking reform, so it was expected that he would not stand in the way of its advancement. How Johnson might approach the issue is less certain.

While he did cosponsor a coronavirus relief bill in 2020 that included the text of the SAFE Banking Act, he was among the chorus of Republican members who blasted Democrats for attaching the cannabis language to the broader legislation.

“The bill mentions the word ‘jobs’ only 52 times—but listen, it mentions ‘cannabis’ 68 times,” he said in 2020. “I’m not being flippant here, but we’re wondering if the staff that wrote this might have been high when they put the pen to paper.”

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The Bipartisan Urge To Control Online Speech

According to the Biden administration, federal officials who urged social media companies to suppress “misinformation” about COVID-19 and other subjects were merely asking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to enforce their own rules. But according to the social media users whose speech was stifled as a result of that campaign, it crossed the line between permissible government advocacy and censorship by proxy.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to resolve that dispute by deciding whether a federal judge and an appeals court were right to conclude that the administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to limit the influence of content it viewed as dangerous. The case is one of several controversies that illustrate the bipartisan urge to control online speech.

Two other cases on the Court’s docket involve Florida and Texas laws that, like the Biden administration’s anti-misinformation crusade, aimed to shape private content moderation decisions. While Joe Biden demanded removal of posts he thought social media companies should not allow, Republicans who backed these state laws insisted that the platforms allow speech they otherwise might be inclined to remove.

A Democratic president was offended by conservative speech that contradicted his agenda. Republican legislators and governors, meanwhile, were angry at social media companies they perceived as biased against conservatives. Although those situations might look different, they raise the same basic issue.

Should social media companies be free to set and enforce their own content rules, or should politicians have the power to override those decisions? The answer seems clear if you think the First Amendment protects editorial discretion, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held.

New York legislators rejected that proposition when they enacted a 2022 law that requires social media platforms to police “hateful” speech, which is indisputably protected by the First Amendment. A federal judge enjoined enforcement of that law in February, and New York is now asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to intervene.

While attempts to censor “hate speech” are mainly a Democratic thing, members of both major parties agree that they should not have to put up with irksome criticism when they use their social media accounts for official purposes. Politicians ranging from Donald Trump to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) have asserted the prerogative to block users whose opinions annoyed them.

That practice, the banished critics argued, violated their First Amendment right to participate in public forums created by thin-skinned government officials. In a 2019 case involving then-President Trump’s personal Twitter account, the 2nd Circuit agreed.

“Once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants,” the appeals court said, “he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.” Although that case became moot after Trump left office, the underlying issue persisted, as reflected in two cases that the Supreme Court will hear during its current term.

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Here’s Where All Nine House Speaker Candidates Stand On Marijuana

As the U.S. House of Representatives enters its third week without a speaker, more GOP lawmakers with varying records on marijuana policy are making their bids for the nomination—including a member who has been arrested for cannabis and another who co-chairs a congressional psychedelics caucus.

Most of the candidates in the leadership race have voted in favor of cannabis banking reform, even if they’ve been unsupportive of broader legalization.

After Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was ousted as speaker in a historic motion to vacate earlier this month—and the former conference nominees for the position, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), bowed out after failing to win a majority of votes on the House floor—the current cast of candidates includes nine Republican members who hope to receive their party’s nod before a potential floor vote this week.

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Conservatives are increasingly knives out for the nation’s top cyber agency

An agency set up under Donald Trump to protect elections and key U.S. infrastructure from foreign hackers is now fighting off increasingly intense threats from hard-right Republicans who argue it’s gone too far and are looking for ways to rein it in.

These lawmakers insist work by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to combat online disinformation during elections singles out conservative voices and infringes upon free speech rights — an allegation the agency vehemently denies and the Biden administration is contesting in court. The accusations started in the wake of the 2020 election and are ramping up ahead of 2024, with lawmakers now calling for crippling cuts at the agency.

“CISA has blatantly violated the First Amendment and colluded with Big Tech to censor the speech of ordinary Americans,” Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, said in a statement to POLITICO.

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US Republican senators ask tech firms about content moderation in Israel-Hamas war

A U.S. Senate panel’s Republican lawmakers sent a letter on Friday to tech companies Meta Platforms, Google, TikTok and X, formerly called Twitter, seeking information on their content moderation policies in the Israel-Hamas war, the senators said.

The Republican lawmakers of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said they asked the companies “to commit to fully preserving a documentary history of Hamas’s atrocities.”

Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people, mainly civilians. Since then Israel has bombed Gaza with air strikes. At least 4,137 Palestinians have been killed, including hundreds of children, in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Gaza, a 45 km-long (25-mile) enclave home to 2.3 million people, has been ruled since 2006 by Hamas. Gaza has been cut off from much of the outside world for 16 years since Israel imposed a blockade.

“We believe it is imperative that we preserve a full documentary history of Hamas’s atrocities,” the Republican lawmakers led by Senator Ted Cruz said.

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Earmarks Are Back: House Republicans “Opened The Bar” For The Spendaholics

Democrats take every opportunity to spend your tax dollars. The GOP was supposed to know better…

Unfortunately, the first thing the GOP did after they took control of the U.S. House – before the new Congress was even sworn in – they held a secret vote on earmarks. Last December, 158 GOP members of Congress voted to include earmarks in the year-end omnibus spending bill.

House Republicans “opened the bar” for the spendaholics.

Those 158 secret-voting members caused $16,012,272,565 of your tax dollars to be spent on 7,509 earmarks.

Not only did those 158 members adopt earmarks, the Republicans spent more of your tax dollars than their Democratic earmarking colleagues.

In the fiscal year 2024 spending bills being debated this fall, the top 63 earmarkers in the U.S. House are Republicans. Eight of the top ten earmarkers in the U.S. Senate are Republicans.

The U.S. House has a bartender at the spendaholics earmark bar – Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas). She chairs the Appropriations Committee that approves every one of those earmarks. When she was elected to Congress in 1997, the federal debt was $5.4 trillion.

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