What you need to know about the House speaker election
CNN
The 119th Congress will begin on Friday, ushering in a new era of Republican control in Washington that will start with a high-stakes leadership fight to pick the next House speaker.
The 119th Congress will begin on Friday, ushering in a new era of Republican control in Washington that will start with a high-stakes leadership fight to pick the next House speaker. Mike Johnson is vying to retain the gavel and has President-elect Donald Trump’s endorsement, but he faces tough vote math with the narrowest House majority in nearly 100 years, leaving little room for error. Johnson can only afford a single GOP defection if every lawmaker shows up and votes, and one House Republican - Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky - has already said he won’t vote for him, while roughly a dozen more have not committed to supporting him. Looming over the race is the question of what happens if the House has not yet elected a speaker by Monday, January 6, the day lawmakers are supposed to count electoral votes and finalize the results of the presidential election – a scenario that would put Congress into unprecedented territory. To be elected speaker, a candidate must win a majority of votes out of all votes cast. If all 435 members of the House vote, then a majority is 218 votes. There is expected to be one vacancy when the House convenes for the vote. Former GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has said he won’t take the seat he was elected to in the new Congress.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.
If nothing else, the controversy over the Trump administration’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean has surfaced a long-overdue debate about its already legally dubious first strikes.
Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.
Authorities in Colombia are dealing with increasingly sophisticated criminals, who use advanced tech to produce and conceal the drugs they hope to export around the world. But police and the military are fighting back, using AI to flag suspicious passengers, cargo and mail - alongside more conventional air and sea patrols. CNN’s Isa Soares gets an inside look at Bogotá’s war on drugs.
Young Americans are “a generation under profound strain” with little confidence in institutions and widespread economic concerns, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics survey of adults younger than 30 released Thursday.
As lawmakers demand answers over reports that the US military carried out a follow-up strike that killed survivors during an attacked on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, a career Navy SEAL who has spent most of his 30 years of military experience in special operations will be responsible for providing them.