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In an astonishing display, Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become the Speaker of the House was thwarted three times – by members of his own Republican Party.
The House of Representatives convened Tuesday (Jan. 3) to open the 118th Congress, with Republicans having a slim majority after the midterm elections last November. As the first vote to elect the Speaker of the House unfolded, the congressman from California fell short as he received 203 votes with 19 voting for Jim Jordan, the GOP representative from Ohio. The second vote bore out the same results, and the third and final vote in the chamber actually saw McCarthy lose a vote, making the tally 202 to Jordan’s 20.
The failed bids marked the first time since 1923 that an election for speaker went through multiple ballots. In contrast, the Democrats in the House displayed a firm and unified stance as they nominated Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to be Speaker in each round of voting with no defections.
Many observers point to a giant divide between McCarthy, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump to be in the role, and the 19 GOP members who represent the far-right segment of the party. This includes Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. Boebert would later claim in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier that she and the other representatives had gone to McCarthy with a deal to help him attain the 218 votes needed for him to be Speaker but he “smugly refused.”
GOP members had also spent time Tuesday attempting to bargain with Democratic members of the House to not be present for the next round of votes so McCarthy could win. This was confirmed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was seen talking with both Gaetz and oddly enough, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. “McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I fact-checked and said absolutely not.”
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy is refusing to cave in his attempt to obtain the speakership as the House will vote again at noon Wednesday (Jan. 4). “I’m staying until we win,” he said to members of the press between the second and third votes. “I know the path.” Trump put out a call for unity among Republicans in a Truth Social post on Wednesday morning, saying “it’s now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN.”
*UPDATE: After losing the 4th vote, It seems McCarthy is well on his way to losing a 5th, too.
By now you’ve probably heard about the boatload of lies incoming New York Republican Rep. George Santos unleashed during his successful run to represent Long Island in the House. The 34-year-old fabulist is already facing probes from the House Ethics Committee, as well as federal, state and local authorities over his wide-ranging fibs, from lies about the elite Bronx prep school he didn’t attend and the colleges he didn’t graduate from, to the prestigious jobs he never held at a pair of Wall Street firms, lies about his grandparents surviving the Holocaust (and his Jewish heritage) and a series of whoppers he told about his mother’s death.
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It would all be pretty funny if it wasn’t potentially illegal and it didn’t put a pathological phony near the levers of government, so naturally The Late Show‘s cold open on Tuesday night (Jan. 3) took on the story by putting Santos’ many deceptions into song, cued to Meredith Brooks’ 1997 breakthrough hit, “B–ch.”
The “A Definitely True Message from George Santos” bit opened with news reports about Santos’ multiple misrepresentations of his mother’s death before a fake George said he had only one (or two, or maybe 10 things) to say. Then, to the strains of Brooks’ urgent pop hit, he proclaimed, “I’m half black/ I’m a Jew/ I graduated from Baruch/ My grandpa fled a war/ But wait there’s even more/ I invented root beer floats/ I’m the guy from Quaker Oats/ And that’s not even all the stuff I am.”
The parody went on, with fake Santos proclaiming that he’s also Chinese, from Belize and in a pair of claims outrageous even for him, that his hair is made of bees and that he’s actually Adele in disguise. Some of the fabrications sounded almost plausible, like that he ran the New York Marathon and was instrumental in demoting Pluto from planet-dom. And he swore the latter on both of his mother’s graves, so they must be true.
Santos had a pretty terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first day in Congress on Tuesday, with cameras catching him sitting by himself as other representatives seemingly shunned him and he walked briskly away from reporters, while a Washington Post writer revealed that when Santos stood up to vote for still-unseated Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a “Hispanic Democrat yelled “mentiroso!” which means “liar” in Spanish.
Watch the Late Show cold open below.
Taylor Swift’s “22” completely changed how people think about its title number. Even the White House isn’t immune to the 33-year-old pop star’s contagiously catchy melody — at least, that’s what the executive branch’s official year-end review, posted Thursday (Dec. 29), would suggest.
Written by domestic policy advisor Susan Rice and published on the White House’s website, the report summed up several of the Biden-Harris administration’s major accomplishments in 2022. But first, it began with the best, most obvious word-lyric association.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling ‘22,” Rice wrote, referencing the lyric from the chorus of “22.” She also posted the quote on Twitter.
I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling ‘22. The past year undoubtedly brought its share of daunting challenges, but 2022 also yielded remarkable progress for the American people. 🧵— Susan Rice (@AmbRice46) December 29, 2022
Rice went on to cite President Biden’s signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress’ progressive strides in gun-control policy, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act — which Swift would most definitely approve of in particular, as she emotionally spoke about her personal stake in the act in Netflix’s Miss Americana — and many more as notable achievements made by the White House in the past 12 months.
“The past year undoubtedly brought its share of daunting challenges — from Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine, to devastating hurricanes along the Atlantic Coast and fires in the West, to stubbornly high inflation around the globe,” Rice wrote. “Yet, 2022 also yielded remarkable progress for the American people.”
The love between the current administration and Swift goes both ways. During Biden’s campaign in 2020, the “All Too Well” singer publicly endorsed him and even baked cookies declaring her support for his presidency. Biden later thanked her for her advocacy, and quoted one of her other lyrics on Instagram.
“Election Day is right around the corner — are you ready for it?” he wrote, referencing Swift’s Reputation single “…Ready For It?”
Written By D.L. Chandler , Senior Editor Posted 31 mins ago @dlchandler123 D.L. Chandler is a veteran of the Washington D.C. metro writing scene, working as a journalist, reporter, and culture critic. Initially freelancing at iOne Digital in 2010, he officially joined the iOne team in 2017 where he currently works as a Senior Editor […]
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The Department of Justice is now moving to right a historic wrong by instructing prosecutors to eliminate racial disparities in drug cases at the behest of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
On Friday (Dec. 16), Garland issued directives to federal prosecutors to pursue the same charges and establish equivalent sentencing for both cocaine powder and crack cocaine. The current law sees people who are convicted of possessing 28 grams of crack cocaine receive a mandatory sentence of five years in prison. That same sentence is only given to those who are convicted of possessing nearly twenty times that amount in the powdered form of cocaine. The previous situation highlighted how Black and Latinx defendants were unfairly given heavier sentences under those guidelines which began under President Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs” in 1986.
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Garland’s move to step in and issue these new guidelines comes after the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of the Law Act, or EQUAL Act, was passed by the Democratic-led House of Representatives last year with Republican support. But despite 11 GOP Senators backing it, the bill was ultimately stalled once it was presented to the Senate for a vote due to lacking the 60 votes needed for its advancement. The ratio at the heart of the act was lowered in 2009 from 100-to-1 under the Fair Sentencing Act which was passed by Congress while President Barack Obama was in office in 2010.
The attorney general sent out his directives in a memo. “In such cases, prosecutors should consider supporting a downward departure or variance,” Mr. Garland wrote. The memo also outlines that these new guidelines should also cover sentences that result from plea agreements. Individual prosecutors still have the leeway to use discretion on this matter from case to case.
The directive prompted some concern from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa who claimed in a statement that “it undermines legislative efforts to address this sentencing disparity.” He continued: “That hard-won compromise has been jeopardized because the attorney general inappropriately took lawmaking into his own hands.”
The move is something that President Joe Biden and his administration have been agitating for since entering office. Garland had issued a memo early last year stating that attorney general’s offices across the country should expect new guidelines to be released. The timing of the move is significant as well, as Congress is in a lame-duck session before the Republicans regain control of the House next year while the Democrats have a firmer control of the Senate.
By the early 1990s, Fleetwood Mac was running on fumes. The group’s 1990 album, Behind the Mask, peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard 200, and Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, who died on Nov. 30, hinted that they were done touring.
Then the band got some valuable exposure from an unlikely place: Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. As Clinton told Billboard, a supporter who drove him to an event in Los Angeles suggested that he use the song and “I knew it was a brilliant idea.”
At the time, with George H. W. Bush in the White House after eight years of Ronald Reagan, the song was like a breath of fresh air: Upbeat, optimistic, and full of the rock n roll sensibility that Clinton symbolized as the first Baby Boomer to serve as president. Clinton himself was a musician – a saxophone player good enough to perform on The Arsenio Hall Show as well as a fan, so it made sense to have a song that reflected his perspective.
“Honestly, Bill and Hillary [Clinton], that was one of their favorite songs,” remembers Paul Begala, the chief strategist of the 1992 campaign who became a counselor to the president after he won. “He had grown up with dreams of becoming a musician and he loved that band.”
In some ways, “Don’t Stop,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 1977, wasn’t an obvious choice. “Once I got in the race,” Clinton told Billboard, “some of my staff tried to get me to go with a more current song.”
But it worked.
“That song encapsulated everything,” Begala tells Billboard. “He started insisting we play it at every rally – he just loved it. He also loved that Garth Brooks song ‘We Shall Be Free,’ but he settled on ‘Don’t Stop’ because of the message.”
Some of that was the implication that the future belonged to the Baby Boomers. “His conception of Bush was that he was a good man but his time had come and gone,” Begala says. Some of that involved the concept of “future preference,” an idea Clinton learned about from his Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley.
Quigley “said that America became the greatest nation in history because our people had always embraced two important ideas: that tomorrow can be better than today, and that every one of us has a personal, moral obligation to make it so,” Clinton said. “’Don’t Stop’ captured the sentiment perfectly with both its lyrics and its upbeat, simple melody.”
Fleetwood Mac appreciated his use of the song, and the Rumours-era lineup – Nicks, McVie, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood and Lindsey Buckingham – reunited to play its first show in six years at Clinton’s inaugural ball. That seems to have boosted the band’s sales, and the Feb. 6, 1993, issue of Billboard reported that the band’s Greatest Hits jumped from No. 30 to No. 11 on the Catalog Albums chart, while Rumours debuted on that chart at No. 36.
By 1997, the band’s classic lineup was back together again – first for a show that was recorded for the live album and TV special The Dance, then for a tour that ran through much of that year. The next year, Fleetwood Mac was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In January 2001, Fleetwood Mac reunited to perform at a farewell party for Clinton on the White House lawn. “On one of his last days as president, the staff organized a farewell party on the South Lawn and the band surprised him,” Begala remembers. “I introduced Fleetwood Mac and they started playing ‘Don’t Stop’ and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” The band played an 11-song set.
“It was one of the most amazing moments of my life,” Begala says.
Clinton told Billboard that he would always be grateful to Christine McVie and her bandmates for letting him use the song, reuniting to play his inaugural ball and “for giving me a lifetime of great music and memories, and, of course, for that roadmap to the future.”
Milo Yiannopoulos is no longer onboard Kanye West‘s presidential campaign, the far-right political personality confirmed in a Sunday (Dec. 4) statement to The Daily Beast.
“Ye and I have come to the mutual conclusion that I should step away from his political team,” said Yiannopoulos, who previously worked as an intern for Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. “I will continue to pray for Ye and all his endeavors.”
Billboard has reached out to Yiannopoulos for comment.
The split comes just a couple weeks after after Kanye — who now goes by — confirmed his intent to run for president in 2024 following his failed White House bid in 2020. Yiannopoulos’ involvement in the campaign was also announced at this time, with the rapper introducing him to paparazzi as someone who was “working on the campaign.”
A few days after Ye confirmed that Yiannopoulos was part of his political team, the Yeezy founder was spotted dining in Mar-A-Lago with former President Donald Trump and another far-right commentator, Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has become known for his extreme antisemitic and white nationalist views, making him an unsurprising companion for Ye, who’s been repeatedly making antisemitic comments as of late.
Just last week, Ye praised Hitler and said he loved Nazis. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” he told Alex Jones on InfoWars Thursday (Dec. 1). “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.”
The interview and his continued hate speech sparked outrage on social media. President Joe Biden also spoke out after Jones’ chat with Ye, condemning antisemitism and Holocaust denialism in a strongly worded statement on Twitter. “I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure,” the president wrote. “And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.”
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he chose as his campaign theme song “Don’t Stop,” a song by Christine McVie from the Rumours album. At the time, with George H. W. Bush in the White House after eight years of Ronald Reagan, the song came to symbolize the passing of the torch of leadership to the Baby Boomer generation, as well as the idea that the future could be brighter, if Americans worked to make it so.
The song, which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 1977, played such an important part in the campaign that the classic Rumours lineup of Fleetwood Mac reunited to play President Clinton’s inaugural ball.
Below, President Clinton remembers how he chose the song, as well as what it represents.
In June of 1991, when I was still Governor of Arkansas, I flew to Los Angeles for an event. The young man who was driving me to my speech, Shawn Landres, asked me if I was going to run for President the next year. I told him I hadn’t made a decision yet. He told me, “Well, I think you should run, and when you do, this should be your campaign song.” Then he popped a Fleetwood Mac tape into the tape deck and played “Don’t Stop.” I’d loved that song and Fleetwood Mac for years, and as soon as Shawn suggested it, I knew it was a brilliant idea. Once I got in the race, some of my staff tried to get me to go with a more current song, but I held out and hoped I’d get permission to use it.
“Don’t Stop” was the perfect choice because politics at its best is about people and making the future better for them. Life requires all of us to live in the present and for the future. We can’t unlive or completely forget the past. And the memories of our victories and defeats, our mistakes and moments of pride, can make us wiser for what happens next. But if every day is consumed by the past, it’s another day lost in a quickly passing life.
When I was a student at Georgetown, my professor of Western Civilization, Carroll Quigley, taught me about the idea of “future preference.” He said that America became the greatest nation in history because our people had always embraced two important ideas: that tomorrow can be better than today, and that every one of us has a personal, moral obligation to make it so. I quoted him often throughout my 1992 campaign and both my terms in office, and “Don’t Stop” captured the sentiment perfectly, with both its lyrics and its upbeat, simple melody.
Everyone knows Christine McVie was a great songwriter, but it turns out she was a pretty good political philosopher, too. I’ll always be grateful to her – and to Mick, Stevie, John, and Lindsey – for being so generous in letting me use the song, for reuniting to play at my Inaugural, for giving me a lifetime of great music and memories, and, of course, for that roadmap to the future.
Amid a historic uptick in antisemitism in the United States, Pres. Joe Biden tweeted an unequivocal rejection of hate speech and admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Friday morning (Dec. 2), less than a day after Kanye West repeatedly told conspiracist Alex Jones: “I like Hitler,” while praising the Nazi regime on Jones’ Infowars talk show.
“I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure,” Biden tweeted in the statement that did not mention West by name. “And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.”
The strongly worded statement from Biden also starkly contrasted with the scene last week at Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago resort, where the former one-term president hosted Ye (as Kanye West is now known) as well as far right activist and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who is known for spewing antisemitic rhetoric. Also present at the lunch that Trump hosted on the high-visibility patio at his golf club was Ye’s apparent 2024 presidential campaign manager and professional right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been blocked from most major social media platforms for his repeated slurs against Islam and feminism and his embrace of antisemitic figures.
In an attempt to tamp down the fierce backlash for the lunch from figures on both sides of the aisle, Trump released a series of statements on his right-wing Truth social platform claiming he “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he was ushered into the club as part of Ye’s entourage despite reportedly not being on the guest list that day.
In contrast to Biden’s full-throated disavowal of antisemitic speech and Nazi fetishizing, Trump has repeatedly equivocated when it comes to condemning hate speech, including failing to denounce the Ku Klux Klan when he was endorsed by its former leader in 2016 and famously blaming “both sides” during the aftermath of a deadly white supremacist protest in Charlottesville in 2017. The lunch came a week after Trump launch his third bid for the White House.
West has been on a month-long media tour that has found the rapper repeatedly spewing hateful rhetoric aimed at the Jewish people that has led to rapid downfall of his once-formidable fashion and music empire, as well as yet another ban from Twitter on Thursday when he posted an image of a swastika.
Check out Biden’s tweet below.
I just want to make a few things clear:The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.— President Biden (@POTUS) December 2, 2022
Advocates representing a wide cross-section of the music industry are again urging Congress to pass the Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act, the long-simmering legislation that would provide an extra tax break to musicians, technicians and producers for recording sessions.
“Prior to the conclusion of the 117th Congress, the American music community calls on you to support American music creation that is still reeling from the pandemic by passing into law the bipartisan and bicameral Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act,” reads a Nov. 15 letter sent to Congressional leadership, co-signed by 23 groups across the business.
The Recording Academy, which made the bill a major focus of its Grammys on the Hill event in April as well as its annual District Advocate Day in October, continues to lead the charge. During the latter event, held on Oct. 6, approximately 2,000 Academy members participated in lobbying for the HITS Act and other music industry priorities at nearly 200 U.S. congressional offices in Washington, D.C.
“Our hope is that we can get it done here before the 117th comes to a close because we have a lot of bipartisan support, bicameral support [in the] House and Senate,” says Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. “I really feel like this is something we should be able to get done and we’re hoping we can get done in the next few weeks.”
The HITS Act would allow musicians, technicians and producers to deduct 100% of recording expenses up to $150,000 on their taxes in the year they’re incurred. That’s a change from the current law, which requires music creators to amortize those expenses over the economic life of a sound recording, a period that usually ranges between three and four years.
The bipartisan bill was first introduced in the House on July 31, 2020 (followed by a companion bill in the Senate on Dec. 3, 2020), though it failed to pass as part of the two pandemic relief packages or as part of the $3.5 billion budget reconciliation package known as Build Back Better, which was ultimately halved and renamed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 before being signed into law in August. Now, with only a month to go before the changeover to a new, split Congress — Democrats will retain control of the Senate while Republicans will control the House of Representatives — advocates are hoping the bill can finally, successfully make it through the gauntlet as part of a must pass bill during the last few weeks of the year.
“[During] the lame duck period with these must pass bills, if there’s any kind of tax language in there or any kind of economic language in there that ties in with this, we’re really hopeful it will get in this time around,” says Richard James Burgess, president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which has long served as a key advocate for the legislation.
In the entertainment realm, music production is an outlier in terms of taxation; film, TV and live theater productions already enjoy a 100% first-year deduction. The HITS Act would simply apply the same standard to music, Burgess says, while also encouraging future music creation: “I think if anybody needs it, it’s musicians that need it really badly. It affects independent musicians and independent artists and independent labels probably more than anybody else because they have less bandwidth financially. The idea of getting $150,000 per project [that can be] written off against your taxes in the year that you incurred it, could really make a difference between being able to make another record next year or not.”
Burgess adds that the bill won’t just affect musicians and producers but trickle down to other parts of the industry and the greater economy. “Every artist that makes a record, that has a knock on effect to many, many other musicians and ancillary workers in the music industry,” he says. “Getting these kinds of tax benefits will make a difference across the board.”
While Burgess and Mason jr. were both relatively confident HITS could make it through the next Congress given the bill’s bipartisan support, they’ve clearly grown impatient on behalf of creators, many of whom lost income during the early stages of the pandemic. After more than two years of disappointment, Mason jr. puts it in stark terms: “Yes, it could get passed next year, but…I don’t think we should continue to have it laid off and cut out of bills. This is something that’s important for us coming out of COVID. We’ve seen this community suffer enough.”
You can read the full Nov. 15 letter below.
Dear Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, Leader McCarthy, and Leader McConnell: The 117th Congress has witnessed significant bipartisan and bicameral accomplishments that have benefitted American workers, families, and consumers, and levelled the playing field so some important domestic industries can grow. Prior to the conclusion of the 117th Congress, the American music community calls on you to support American music creation that is still reeling from the pandemic by passing into law the bipartisan and bicameral Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act (H.R. 1945/ S. 752).
The HITS Act is a low-cost and commonsense modification to existing U.S. tax law that will incentivize the production of new sound recordings by allowing qualified productions to deduct 100% of their costs upfront. With an annual deduction limit of $150,000, the bill is designed and tailored to specifically incentivize independent creators and labels to produce new music, sparking important creative investments in countless music small businesses across the country. This targeted approach makes the HITS Act a fiscally responsible investment in the American creative economy.
The HITS Act also brings much-needed parity to the tax code for all creative industries. Currently, under Sec. 181 of the Internal Revenue Code, qualified film, television, and live theatrical productions may elect to fully deduct new production costs in the year they are incurred. Music production, which occurs in every state and congressional district, deserves the same treatment. Instead of being able to fully deduct production expenses in the year they occur, independent recording artists must currently amortize production expenses for tax purposes over the full economic life of a sound recording. For small creators, this timing difference slows down their reinvestment in new projects that can fuel growth. The HITS Act harmonizes the tax code and ensures that all the major creative industries are treated similarly.
As you consider end-of-year legislation, the music community strongly urges you to pass the HITS Act. It represents exactly the type of bipartisan, bicameral, and non-controversial economic investment that Congress should be proud to support. Passage of H.R. 1945/S. 752 is a smart and simple step that will make a lasting difference for countless independent music creators and music small businesses.
On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of music makers and music businesses across the country, thank you for your consideration.
Signed,
American Association of Independent Music
Artists Rights Alliance
ASCAP
Black Music Action Coalition
Broadcast Music Inc.
Christian Music Trade Association
Digital Media Association
Future of Music
Global Music Rights
Gospel Music Association
Music Artists Coalition
Nashville Songwriters Association International
National Independent Talent Organization
National Independent Venue Association
National Music Publishers Association
Recording Academy
Recording Industry Association of America
SAG-AFTRA
SESAC
The Society of Composers and Lyricists
Songwriters Guild of America
Songwriters of North America
SoundExchange
CC Chairman Ron Wyden, Senate Finance Committee
Ranking Member Mike Crapo, Senate Finance Committee
Chairman Richard Neal, House Ways and Means Committee
Ranking Member Kevin Brady, House Ways and Means Committee