Indiana Representative Victoria Spartz has announced she will be stepping away from the “circuses” of doing what she was elected to do—governing—so that she could join forces with a fake advisory group that wants to dismantle the government.

Spartz pledged her services Monday to the Department of Government Efficiency, led by technocrat Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I will stay as a registered Republican but will not sit on committees or participate in the caucus until I see that Republican leadership in Congress is governing,” Spartz wrote in a post on X. “I do not need to be involved in circuses.”

Spartz wrote that she would rather spend her time in office not carrying out the functions of that office but helping DOGE and Representative Thomas Massie, who similarly committed himself to working with DOGE, “to save our Republic.”

Spartz currently serves on the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, including two subcommittees: the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, as well as the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. She also holds positions on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Republican Policy Committee.

Apparently, DOGE’s mission to gut federal funding to essential services is far more important than any of those things. Musk and Ramaswamy have floated plans to slash the budgets of public broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, and “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Medicaid—with the hopes of cutting government spending by $2 trillion by July 2026.

This isn’t the first time Spartz, who was elected in 2020, has tried to get out of doing her job.

In October 2023, Spartz criticized Congress’s approach to the national debt and threatened to resign. “If Congress does not pass a debt commission this year to move the needle on the crushing national debt and inflation, at least at the next debt ceiling increase at the end of 2024, I will not continue sacrificing my children for this circus with a complete absence of leadership, vision, and spine,” she warned. “I cannot save this Republic alone.”

Spartz’s latest move reportedly comes in response to the House Republican Steering Committee declining to give her a post on the Ways and Means Committee. Her decision could further imperil the caucus’s already razor-thin majority in the chamber.

House Democrats voted Tuesday to elect Representative Gerry Connelly as the party’s ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, beating a bid from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and proving once again that they have learned absolutely nothing. 

Connolly beat Ocasio-Cortez by 131 to 84, Politico reporter Daniella Diaz posted on X. 

Punchbowl News reported last week that Connolly had a powerful ally pulling for him: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had set her sights on quashing the New York progressive’s shot at leading the House of Representatives’ key investigative arm.

As of last week, Ocasio-Cortez had reportedly won the support of the majority of Democrats on the Oversight Committee, a group made up of younger, more progressive members of the party, but Connolly was triumphant in Monday’s House Democratic Steering Committee vote, which selected him 34 to 27.

Connolly was ultimately favored by the majority of the House’s Democratic Caucus. 

MAGA Republican Representative James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said last week that he favored Ocasio-Cortez for the coveted spot.  

While Connolly, a 16-year House veteran, is a seasoned investigator, he has some serious red flags. He is part of the old guard of establishment Democrats who have struggled in recent elections, and earlier this year, the 74-year-old Virginia lawmaker announced that he had been diagnosed with esophagus cancer. 

By comparison, the 35-year-old Cortez has proven to be a lightning rod in the House—both good and bad—and winning a high-ranking position would have signaled a significant shift in party leadership following a bruising election. She is also popular among younger voters, a key demographic among whom Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed in November.

This story has been updated.

Republicans seem to be very serious about sending Liz Cheney to jail.

GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, released his own findings on the House January 6 select committee. The report accused former Cheney, who sat on the committee, of witness tampering, alleging that she “colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson.” Hutchinson is the former Trump White House aide turned MAGA villain after she testified before the January 6 committee on the chaos surrounding the attack on the Capitol.

Loudermilk’s findings also called for Cheney to be criminally investigated and repeatedly claimed the January 6 committee withheld or destroyed evidence. He conveniently notes that “this interim report reveals that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; but it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities.”

This is yet another installment in the string of extrajudicial threats lobbed at Cheney. Most of them are from President-elect Donald Trump, who has long despised Cheney after she supported his first impeachment.

This all comes after Trump clarified his revenge list for the umpteenth time earlier this month on Meet the Press.

“I think those people committed a major crime, and [Liz] Cheney was behind it,” he said of the January 6 committee. “And so was Benny Thompson. Everybody on that committee.… For what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail.”

Rumors about potential preemptive pardons for Cheney and other members of the January 6 committee have circulated, but no one has been granted one at this juncture.

Critics of Pete Hegseth have slammed the defense secretary nominee as many things: a vitriolic television host, an alleged drunk, and an accused sexual abuser. But he’s also, apparently, a January 6 “truther.”

In the wake of the Capitol riot, Hegseth appeared on Newt’s World, a podcast hosted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, espousing baseless allegations that the mob that delayed the certification of the 2020 presidential election results was actually coordinated by leftists, CNN’s K-File reported........

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