Mike Johnson Hits All-Time Low in Stupidity With Latest IVF Comments

Mike Johnson continues to get tongue-tied when trying to talk about IVF, with his latest bonkers comments coming during an interview on Thursday.

Republican lawmakers have rushed to portray themselves as defenders of in vitro fertilization after the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that classified embryos as children. But Johnson appears to be struggling to reconcile his party’s newfound talking points with his avowed far-right Christian and anti–reproductive rights beliefs.

In an interview on Thursday, CBS host Tony Dokoupil asked Johnson whether destroying embryos constituted murder for someone who believes life begins at conception, as the House speaker does.

“It’s something that we’ve got to grapple with,” Johnson said. “It’s a brave new world. IVF’s only been invented, I think, in the early ’70s.”

The 1970s were half a century ago, so the technology on this one isn’t exactly up for debate—as many of Johnson’s own colleagues who have relied on IVF to start a family know quite well.

Johnson has refused to explicitly say whether he believes that the destruction of an embryo constitutes murder. But his past actions speak plenty loud. Johnson has long argued that life begins “from the moment of fertilization,” the same logic applied in the Alabama ruling.

He has repeatedly voted against increasing reproductive rights, ranging from abortion access to contraception. He also co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, alongside most of the rest of his caucus, which would federally enshrine fetal personhood. But when asked in November about his history on legislating against fertility treatments, Johnson claimed he couldn’t remember “any of those measures.”

Since the Alabama ruling, Johnson and his Republican colleagues have talked plenty about supporting IVF, but they have done very little to actually protect access to the treatment. A group of seven GOP representatives introduced a resolution last week expressing support for IVF and calling on elected officials to protect the treatment, but the measure is nonbinding and doesn’t actually achieve anything. Five of the co-sponsors represent swing districts and are likely just trying to appeal to their constituents.

Johnson’s comment Thursday also echoes the logic in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the landmark Supreme Court case that rolled back the nationwide right to abortion. The court’s conservative justices determined that abortion was not a fundamental right because “abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Essentially, because modern medicine has progressed, people do not have the right to bodily autonomy.

But it’s unclear how far back something has to go to be considered “history.” Again, IVF has now been around for half a century. The first record of abortion in the world is from 1550 BCE, and the procedure was definitely being performed in the American colonies.

For what it’s worth, Johnson himself was also only invented in the 1970s. He was born in 1972, and now, 50 years later, we’re all having to grapple with his policy choices.

A New York judge has ruled that the jury in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial should be kept completely secret—except, of course, to Trump and company.

Both parties and their attorneys, staff, and consultants in the case will have access to the names of jurors, though other details will be kept more secret, according to Judge Juan Merchan. Residential addresses and places of work will be kept strictly confidential and shared only with attorneys and away from Trump, Merchan noted, citing the potential for harassment in the high-profile case of the volatile former president as reason for the safeguards.

“The Court further finds good cause … that there is a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of jurors,’” Merchan wrote, adding that Trump has “an extensive history of publicly and repeatedly attacking trial jurors and grand jurors.”

It remains to be seen if that precaution will be enough to keep Trump from targeting the batch of private citizens conducting their civic duty.

Trump’s habit of lashing out at those around him in the courtroom became abundantly clear during a couple of his legal trials last year. During his New York fraud trial, for example, he repeatedly smeared Justice Arthur Engoron as “crooked” and baselessly asserted that one of the judge’s law clerks was having an affair with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He has extended similar treatment to other court staff doling out his judgment, including special counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Judge Tanya Chutkan, and countless others, sometimes defying court-ordered gag orders in order to do so.

And his rabid followers took that a step further in his Fulton County case, during which far-right conspiracy theorists doxxed a grand jury, circulating their full names, ages, and addresses and ushering a deluge of hate and violent threats their way.

“Defendant’s conduct in this and other matters—including his extensive history of attacking jurors in other proceedings—presents a significant risk of juror harassment and intimidation that warrants reasonable protective measures to ensure the integrity of these proceedings, minimize obstacles to jury selection, and protect juror safety,” prosecutors wrote in their motion to Merchan.

About a third of Trump’s 91 criminal charges stem from the hush-money case, in which Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

It wouldn’t be the first extraordinary measure taken to keep a jury safe from the ire and scrutiny of Trump’s followers. Jurors were kept fully anonymous and partially sequestered in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case, with Judge Lewis Kaplan citing Trump’s behavior as reason for the extreme measures.

Shortly after the jurors handed down the verdict, Judge Kaplan warned them to “never disclose” that they were on the jury, out of concerns for their safety.

There are still hours on the clock before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, but Republicans have already thrown off House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plea for civility.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made clear that she would have no qualms about slinging more mud at the president’s annual visit to Congress.

Greene told Fox News’s Chad Pergram Thursday that her “district was fine with me calling him a liar last year” and that she would “decide in the moment” if she felt the urge to do it again.

She reportedly made the comments while handing out pins with the name Laken Riley, the 22-year-old woman who was killed by an undocumented immigrant and who has since become the face of a bill that would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants arrested for theft.

During Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address, Greene, clad in a $495 fur-trimmed, white alpaca coat that was meant to echo the Chinese spy balloon, led a GOP chorus that loudly booed and jeered the president. The group regularly interrupted the address and caused a scene so humiliating for the party that it got former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to mouth to them to “shush.” At one point, while Biden explained the potential for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in talks on the debt limit, Greene shouted, “Liar.”

That show necessitated a similar warning from Republican leadership ahead of Biden’s return to Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson privately urged party members to keep decorum during Congress’s annual visit by the president.

“He just said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum,’” one GOP lawmaker told The Hill on Wednesday.

“We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming,” the lawmaker added, referring to Democrats. “I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”

Donald Trump must have gotten tired of winning, because he just added a six-figure legal bill to his ever-growing pile of lawsuit fines.

A London judge has ordered Trump to pay £300,000 (or $382,000) in legal fees for Orbis Business Intelligence, court documents released Thursday showed. Orbis is a consulting firm founded by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele.

During his career in British intelligence, Steele ran the Russia desk. In 2016, he compiled a dossier that alleged Trump and members of his inner circle had been “compromised” by Russia’s security service. Documents in the dossier, which have not been verified, claimed Russia had been grooming Trump for collaboration for years. Two memos also said that Trump had participated in “sex parties” in St. Petersburg and received “golden showers” from sex workers in Moscow.

Trump sued Orbis, claiming he had “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress,” particularly from the sex-related claims. He has denied all the allegations in the dossier, which was leaked to and then published by Buzzfeed in 2017.

But presiding Judge Karen Steyn threw the case out last month, saying it was “bound to fail.” And now, she has ordered Trump to reimburse Orbis for the company’s legal fees incurred during the daylong hearing.

That $382,000 bill, however, is just a drop in the bucket of Trump’s growing legal fees. The former president owes more than $466 million for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. He was initially fined $354 million, but interest adds an additional $112,000 per day.

Trump also owes a total of $88.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll—$5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her and $83.3 million for defaming her a separate time. He owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more in fines and gag order violations during his myriad lawsuits.

What’s more, Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani says he still hasn’t been paid for legal services. Giuliani estimated that Trump owes him about $2 million in total.

Proud Navy veteran and former White House doctor Representative Ronny Jackson appears to have smudged some of the details of his military record.

On his congressional website, the Texas Republican describes himself as a “retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral with nearly three decades of military service.” But that leaves out one big omission—that Jackson was demoted from the senior naval flag rank to captain in July 2022.

That move came after the Pentagon inspector general released a scathing report on Jackson’s behavior while serving in Donald Trump’s White House, including that the doctor—who had retired from the Navy in 2019—berated, drank with, and sexually harassed subordinates while serving as the director of the White House medical unit. Jackson was also accused of popping Ambien throughout the workday.

Those revelations came with a $15,000 cut in annual pension payouts for a 24-year veteran like Jackson, as well as social stigma within the ranks.

“The substantiated allegations in the [Department of Defense inspector general] investigation of Rear [Adm.] (lower half) Ronny Jackson are not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022,” Lt. Cmdr. Joe Keiley, a Navy spokesman, told The Washington Post.

Jackson casually dismissed the report in his July 2022 memoir, Holding the Line, conveniently skipping over the part where he was formally demoted.

“If I had retired and not gotten into politics, this investigation would have never gone anywhere,” Jackson wrote. “This was happening because I am a perceived threat to the Biden administration and because a few political appointees in the Department of Defense want to make a name for themselves.”

Jackson has played a key role in Trump’s 2024 campaign, helping the presumptive GOP presidential nominee shrug off concerns over his age by affirming that Trump is of sound mind and body, despite his increasingly routine mental glitches.

At least one Republican representative has finally taken a concrete step to demonstrate support for IVF, after widespread backlash for apparently only paying lip service to the issue.

California Representative Michelle Steel revealed Thursday that she has removed herself as a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which would have established that life begins at conception—and put medical workers at risk of lawsuits if anything happened to an embryo.

“As someone who struggled to get pregnant, this is of personal importance so let me be clear,” Steel said in an op-ed in The Orange County Register. She slammed “Washington insiders” for misrepresenting her stance on life.

“I believe life begins at conception. I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother. Unlike my opponents, I do not support harmful late-term abortions,” she wrote, using a medically inaccurate term.

“Having experienced it firsthand in starting a family, I am an ardent supporter of IVF. I believe nothing is more pro-life than helping families have children and I do not support federal restrictions on IVF. Which is why when a recent court ruling in Alabama raised questions as to whether the Life at Conception Act, if passed, would ban IVF, I removed myself from that bill to not create confusion about my support of IVF.”

The Life at Conception Act was introduced first in 2021 with 166 co-sponsors (all Republicans) and then again in 2023 with 124 (again all Republicans). Many opponents of the bill, which has not advanced since, have warned that, if it became law, the legislation would heavily restrict access to in vitro fertilization. The bill and its sponsors have come under increased scrutiny in light of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling establishing that embryos can be classified as human children.

Since the ruling, which severely restricted IVF in the state, Republicans have rushed to portray themselves as ardent defenders of the medical procedure, particularly those who represent districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Steel, who is up for reelection in November, is one of those vulnerable Republicans.

Steel was quick to post on social media about how much she supports IVF access after the Alabama ruling, and was immediately called out for declining to acknowledge that she was still listed as a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act at the time. She did not specify in her op-ed when she removed herself as a co-sponsor.

Still, Steel is one of the first Republicans in Congress to take real action to demonstrate her support for IVF. In contrast, Representative Nancy Mace introduced a nonbinding resolution last week expressing support for IVF and calling on elected officials to protect access to the treatment. The measure is nonbinding and does nothing to actually protect IVF. Five of the resolution’s six co-sponsors represent vulnerable districts.

House Republicans needed a wrist slap ahead of Thursday’s State of the Union address, with House Speaker Mike Johnson privately pleading with party members to keep decorum during Congress’s annual visit by the president.

“He just said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum,’” one GOP lawmaker told The Hill on Wednesday.

“We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations. Let them do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming,” the lawmaker added, referring to Democrats. “I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”

As sad and embarrassing as the classroom reminder is for the nation’s elected officials, it is, unfortunately, necessary.

Last year, Republicans launched a series of outbursts during Biden’s address, essentially becoming props in an unscripted call-and-response with the president. While Biden dissected the topic of immigration, lawmakers cried out “secure the border,” and when he explained the potential for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in talks on the debt limit, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a fur-trimmed white coat, shouted “liar.”

Still, it’s not completely clear if party members are willing to heed Johnson’s advice and resist the urge to interject.

“Will they do it? Somebody asked me that earlier and I said, ‘Does the Baptist Church got a bus?’ Of course they will because he’s gonna say some very offensive things, he’s gonna attack us,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Hill.

“I think we just need to try to be a little classy,” he continued. “Consider where we’re at, let the other side do that. You know, they did it to Trump, and nobody said boo, but when we do it we’re gonna get made an example of it.”

Apparently quoting Hitler isn’t enough for North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor. Mark Robinson also wants to take away women’s right to vote.

Robinson—a Hitler-quoting, LGBTQ-bashing, feminist-hating, conspiracy-pushing antisemite—won the Tar Heel State’s Republican gubernatorial nomination on Super Tuesday. Since then, a four-year-old video has resurfaced of him making yet more questionable comments.

During an event hosted in March 2020 by the Republican Women of Pitt County, Robinson, who was then running for lieutenant governor, mused on what would make America “great again.” He said someone had asked conservative activist Candace Owens which version of the U.S. was better: one where “Black people were swinging from cheap trees” or one where women weren’t allowed to vote.

“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Robinson said, apparently thinking that was an entirely normal and reasonable thing to say to a roomful of women.

According to Robinson, before women had the right to vote, “in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.”

The room was silent during Robinson’s comments, but apparently it wasn’t too off-putting to voters. Robinson went on to become lieutenant governor, and then he won his 2024 primary with 66 percent of the vote. Mathematically, some of those voters had to be women.

Robinson has long held other outrageous stances. He has said feminism was created by Satan, that feminist women are “fem-nazis,” and that feminist men are “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties.”

In December 2017, he wrote on Facebook that, “The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his.”

Robinson has also quoted Hitler on social media. In 2014, he cited the genocidal German dictator’s stance on racial pride. Then, at a Moms for Liberty event in July, he defended his desire to quote Hitler.

In other posts, Robinson has downplayed the Holocaust, compared abortion to murder, and called LGBTQ people “filth” and “maggots.”

On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee pushed forward with its impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, inviting his son Hunter Biden to testify in a public hearing on March 20. It is not yet clear if the younger Biden has agreed to the date.

Last week, Hunter Biden finally gave in to monthslong requests for him to appear before the committee in a closed door hearing. Over the course of six hours, Republicans found themselves targeted more than the president’s son, being roundly accused of ignoring evidence supporting the president’s innocence and pushing a double standard by refusing to examine the financial gains pocketed by President Donald Trump and his family off of their official White House positions, including a $2 billion deal with a Saudi crown prince and Trump ally brokered by the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, shortly after he left the White House.

So far, Republicans have failed to provide any witnesses or concrete evidence that show criminal wrongdoing by Joe Biden. The committee’s former star witness, Alexander Smirnov, served as the singular source for claims that Biden had profited millions off of his son’s connection to Burisma. But that angle, which House Republicans had believed was their best bet at nabbing the president, completely blew up in their face last month when Smirnov was indicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI. Since then, Smirnov has reportedly admitted to law enforcement that top Russian intelligence officials were involved in the smear campaign against the sitting president.

Meanwhile, all of the other witnesses that Republicans have called, claiming that their testimony will blow the case wide open, have instead debunked every single accusation against the Biden family.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says it’s OK that he hung out with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a couple times because he also was friendly with plenty of other questionable characters.

The independent presidential candidate offered the staggering defense during a Wednesday appearance on the podcast Flagrant. Kennedy has previously admitted that he had flown on Epstein’s private plane twice.

“I’m in New York for most of my life. You run into everybody in New York,” Kennedy said. “I mean, I know Harvey Weinstein. I knew Roger Ailes. I knew, O.J. Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house.”

Kennedy insisted that he wasn’t aware he was hanging out with a bunch of sexual abusers and an accused murderer. “You don’t know these people are swamp creatures until all this stuff comes out,” he said.

But at least with Epstein, who killed himself in prison before he could stand trial for sex trafficking minors, Kennedy said he “did see the creepiness immediately.”

But apparently not so immediately that he didn’t go on the disgraced financier’s private plane a second time.

The internet, of course, had jokes about Kennedy’s mind-boggling defense.

“Who name drops four rapists and a murderer???” one person tweeted.

Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer pointed out that someone seemed to be missing from the guest list.

“Never stop running for president, Bob,” another person quipped.

Kennedy’s presidential campaign has struggled to take off, and in recent weeks has been hit with some major mishaps. Kennedy ran a campaign ad during the Super Bowl that borrowed the iconic “Kennedy for president” jingle from his late uncle John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. Kennedy was forced to apologize to his other family members, who were outraged that the anti-vaxxer had tried to leverage the family name for campaign clout.

And on Monday, the Democratic National Committee accused a pro-Kennedy super PAC of violating campaign finance regulations.

But Kennedy appears to be slowly gaining support. While he notched no big wins on Super Tuesday, Kennedy did announce that he has gathered enough signatures to qualify for the New Hampshire and Nevada ballots in November.