Good afternoon, Press Pass readers. I want you to know that the things that matter to you also matter to me, which is why I keep asking the tough questions in the Capitol. Our Bulwark+ community is what makes it possible to get answers directly from lawmakers. So if you’ve enjoyed the free editions of this newsletter so far, please consider upgrading your subscription to support our work. Today’s edition starts off with a failed attempt by House Republicans to change the chamber’s rules after a far-right member actually crossed the aisle and gathered enough support to advance a pro-family policy. Top Republicans didn’t just punish the lawmaker for it, they sought to ensure that her legislation could never again make it to the floor without the consent of the majority’s leadership. It was a gamble—one they lost when nine members of their own party voted against them. In addition, I spoke to a handful of lawmakers about Trump’s comments about pursuing a third term for president despite the law being clear that he can’t. The perspectives they offered were varied but uninspiring. Lastly, in light of the uproar caused by the Ukrainian president forgoing a suit during a recent visit to the Oval Office, it’s curious how little the administration seems to otherwise care about dress codes. All that and more, below. Lawmaking Moms Hand Mike Johnson a Major LPlus: How does acceptance of a third Trump term get massaged into normality?
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) found herself on the outs with her party and Republican colleagues for daring to demand changes that would allow parents in Congress who need time off after the birth of a child to temporarily vote by proxy. This would save them a choice between trekking back to Washington or missing votes on key pieces of legislation because they or their child is in need. Luna secured a discharge petition—a procedural method that can force legislation onto the floor without leadership’s consent—for a bill to permit this narrow form of proxy voting. But House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team were not having it. What’s the phrase? “When you can’t beat ‘em, change the rules to avoid embarrassment”? I think that’s how it goes. The House Rules Committee did just that on Tuesday. On a party-line, 9-4 vote, Republicans moved to kill the discharge petition’s validity and any other that is “substantially the same.” In other words, they took a hatchet to the normal discharge petition process as well as the possibility that proxy voting would get consideration again in this Congress. But a Rules Committee vote is just step one. Step two comes when the full House gets to vote on that same motion. And when that happened later in the day, the rule failed by a margin of 206-222. Including Luna, nine Republicans voted against it. Luna and her bipartisan backers essentially told GOP leadership to shove it. With the discharge petition able to move forward, it will have to come up for a full vote within two legislative days. It’s not clear if it will pass since some Republicans who supported the idea of allowing it to have a vote may not end up supporting the measure itself. But it’s still the highest-profile rebuke of Johnson’s speakership. After all, Republican leadership had moved swiftly and put a lot of political capital behind stopping Luna’s resolution, with threats, backroom deals, and more. It got so contentious that Luna resigned from the House Freedom Caucus Monday in protest. In a letter to her colleagues, she wrote:
Johnson maintains that proxy voting is “unconstitutional,” despite the fact that he took advantage of the process nearly 40 times during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and as late as December 2022, when the Democrat-controlled House had authorized the practice. “I believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it violates more than two centuries of tradition in the institution, and I think that it opens a Pandora’s Box where, ultimately, maybe no one is here,” Johnson said. “And we’re all voting remotely by AI or something.” Johnson also maintains that the use of the discharge petition was out of bounds, as it is traditionally a tool the minority party uses to try and jam the majority. But Luna’s defenders (and she has more than a few) said the speaker was acting with malice. And after the rule went down, Johnson responded by cancelling the votes for the rest of the week, suggesting that the discharge petition forced his hand. Prior to the Rules Committee vote, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) excoriated Republicans on the committee for not acting in good faith. “Representative Luna thought there was a process. If you wanna get a discharge petition, do the work, get on the floor, convince your colleagues to sign that discharge petition, have them put their names and signatures in ink,” she said. “And if this committee, with these Republicans, pass something that takes that away, they are changing the rules after the fact.” Luna told me Monday evening that she believes the change proposed to block her proxy voting measure is unfair (she followed accepted procedure and then her own party leadership moved to torpedo her) and pursuing it is unwise. “I think that everyone’s been pretty clear about the process, and you should allow new moms in Congress to vote,” she said. “And I don’t think changing the rules last-minute because they realize that the majority of the conference agrees is the right play.” Luna’s proposal to allow new parents in Congress to have a colleague vote in their stead for a fixed period of time is an objectively pro-family policy. And there’s something admirable about a far-right member of the Republican conference like Luna leading a bipartisan effort with support from a majority of the House to enable younger lawmakers with growing families to keep working without needless stress or strain right after welcoming a baby into the world. That her Republican colleagues are trying to rejigger the rules to prevent her from succeeding directly contradicts what they have been preaching for years. King meIt started out as a joke, or, years ago, a meme. The idea that President Donald Trump would illegally, extralegally, or legally but controversially game out a pathway to pursue a third presidential term wasn’t supposed to be serious. Republicans happily egged him on in statements and by introducing longshot legislation that would make overtime Trumpism a real possibility. But the joking phase is now over. In a Sunday interview with NBC News, Trump said that he believes he has serious options for subverting or maneuvering around the Constitution’s two-term limit. “Well, there are plans. There are—not plans. There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know,” Trump told Kristen Welker. He later added, “No, I’m not joking. I’m not joking. . . . But, I’m not—it is far too early to think about it.” One reporter quipped that this is a “non-issue” on Capitol Hill. But just because Republicans want to ignore the matter doesn’t make it less real. Name an issue where it’s widely understood that there is a red line that Trump must not cross. He’s already crossed many of them! And each time he has, Republican members of Congress have either turned away in pitiful silence or cheered him on. Despite his criminal behavior, a jury finding him liable for sexual abuse, the fact that he egged on a violent mob intent on stopping the peaceful transfer of power (and that he subsequently pardoned those criminals), and much else, Republicans have stuck with Trump. As for this latest example of a thing that supposedly cannot happen here, when I asked lawmakers in the Capitol Monday afternoon about Trump’s aspirations to serve in a third term, Republicans gave mixed answers. Many reverted back to familiar positions. Since there’s some confusion about this, it bears repeating: Trump is no longer joking about subverting term limits. This is plain from his own words. But that didn’t stop many Republicans from insisting that it was indeed a joke. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said a third term isn’t possible without a “change in the Constitution.” Thune also told reporters that it’s likely Trump is just “having some fun with it.” “It’s kinda hard to run a third term,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.). “I get what he’s saying, but I don’t wanna make a story out of something that’s not a story.” “I get that,” Mullin added when a reporter noted how explicit Trump was in the NBC interview. “But there’s a problem with that. I think you guys know the Constitution as much as anybody. . . . He can say he’s not joking, but it’s tongue-in-cheek,” Mullin added. “It kinda sounded like he was joking,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters. “Don’t you think he’s probably kinda trolling?” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked rhetorically. Asked about Trump saying he’s serious about it, Hawley said, “Well, I know, but I say that a lot, too.” At least one senator, Susan Collins (R-Maine), claimed to have not even seen Trump’s remarks, telling me of Sunday’s biggest news item: “I hadn’t heard that.” A couple Republicans were more explicit in their opposition, at least as it relates to the status quo. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday morning that “everybody” needed “to read the Constitution.” He added:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters that “the 22nd Amendment is clear and unequivocal” that the president is barred from being elected to a third term in the White House. The most forceful response to questions about Trump’s third-term comments came from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who said very plainly, “He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.” “I shouldn’t have to answer [that],” he added. “Read the Constitution.” When I made clear to Grassley that Trump said he was exploring pathways to holding a third term and then asked the senator to confirm that there is no such possibility, Grassley said, “That’s what I’m saying.” Trump is not the only one interested in whether he can hold office beyond January 20, 2029. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a resolution that would allow a candidate in Trump’s position to pursue a third term, although he doesn’t seem to have any real support for advancing it. The bill currently has zero cosponsors. Ogles’s bill includes a clever carveout to exclude the one former president who could potentially wallop Trump in a future election: Barack Obama. The bill specifies that for a president to run for a third term, their first two terms must not have been consecutive. Coincidentally, Ogles is also a cosponsor of Rep. Ralph Norman’s (R-S.C.) bill to impose term limits on members of Congress. That bill would cap senators at two terms (twelve years) and House members at three (six years). Currently in his fourth term, Ogles might have a hard time explaining how his argument is meant in good faith. Beyond the halls of Congress, Steve Bannon told NewsNation that Trump will run and win again in 2028. In addition, the Third Term Project, a group explicitly formed to advance this particular fantasy, has been steadily astroturfing a “grassroots” effort to create the appearance of popular support for a constitutional amendment that would change the rules for Trump’s benefit. Republican senators’ responses to Trump’s comments can be organized according to well-known archetypes of members of Congress. Some live under a rock and know nothing, while others wink at or laugh off the crazy idea that may one day not seem so farfetched. A few were clear about what the Constitution says, which was a bit surprising, especially given which members took that stand. But even those positions can still change—political expediency is an acid that can burn through even the strongest principles, if the right guy is pouring it on. Andrew Egger contributed to this report. High on their own suit supplyI wanted to highlight a couple consequential menswear moments from the past 48 hours. First, musician Kid Rock joined Trump in the Oval Office for an executive order–signing event in a getup that Evel Knievel might describe as garish.
That’s the same room in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was mocked and condemned for not wearing a suit. The right-wing media sphere considered his contemporary military garb to be highly disrespectful. Kid Rock’s gaudily bedazzled fit—something you might buy at Spirit Halloween in a pouch labeled ‘kitschy Americana performer’—elicited no such complaints. The other garb gaffe occurred in Tokyo during Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. One of Hegseth’s deputies forgot to wear socks with his bumming-around loafers during the meeting. Perhaps the SecDef told him beforehand, ‘This is going to be a picnic,’ and the aid thought he meant it literally.
The Japanese observe very strict decorum during meetings of this nature. The bare ankles and casual look of the loafers would never be tolerated on the Japanese side. Just take a look at the right side of the image: The Japanese delegation is clad in black shoes with dark socks, as is customary. American conservatives like Hegseth like to make much of their suiting choices (he, for one, is notably wearing yellow socks). But as this episode demonstrates, they often do so without a working knowledge of the “social language” of attire—an idiom their Japanese counterparts know well. “Japan is a country built upon the principle of mutual respect. Look at the proper business attire of the Japanese delegation and then compare to the disrespectful Charleston wannabe gettup [sic] of this aide,” remarked journalist Saagar Enjeti. “It is an immense insult to a proud and good people.” I’ll leave you with a tip worth keeping in mind as summer approaches: Leave the sockless look to garden parties and lounging by the pool. You’re a free subscriber to Bulwark+. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and ad-free and member-only podcasts, become a paying subscriber. Did you know? You can update your newsletter preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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