Speaker Kevin McCarthy(RINO-CA) is pushing the House toward a last-minute escape hatch from a government shutdown before Sunday's deadline— one that will require support from Democrats and potentially endanger his gavel.

After a private House Republican meeting on Saturday morning to try to figure out spending strategy, GOP leaders announced they would push ahead with a 45-day stopgap spending bill to avert a shutdown and allow them more time to pass their own full-year spending bills.

Executing that plan would require help from a significant swath of Democrats — the exact scenario under which conservatives have threatened to try to end McCarthy's speakership.

“If I have to risk my job for standing up for the American public, I will do that," McCarthy said. He had previously likened a vote on such a clean funding patch, without border policy changes or any other conservative provisions, to surrender.

The House will vote on the short-term funding patch under rules that require two-thirds support for passage. Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) has conveyed to fellow leaders that the GOP lacks the votes on its own side of the aisle to pass any short-term stopgap bill without looking to Democrats, but the bill is likely to get the support it needs to pass from the opposing party.

McCarthy's latest 45-day idea had presented Democrats with a tough choice: whether to support government funding without Ukraine aid. In the end, Democratic leaders are expected not to whip the vote.

The speaker's shift in strategy comes less than 24 hours before a shutdown that's set to begin at midnight Sunday. And it comes with significant political risk for the Californian, who's facing threats to try to strip McCarthy's gavel.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has led that charge against the speaker, has vowed to force a vote on removing McCarthy if a “clean” short-term funding measure came to the floor. He indicated on Saturday that he would need to consult with his allies about the status of a forced ouster vote, if the clean funding patch were to pass.

McCarthy argued during a private conference meeting on Friday night that putting a short-term funding bill on the table would “dare” Democrats to support something that lacked Ukraine aid.

“I think if we had a clean one without Ukraine, we would probably be able to move it through,” McCarthy told reporters afterward.

Part of GOP leadership’s effort to woo the holdouts included a calendar unveiled during the conference meeting that outlined plans to move nearly all of the rest of House Republicans' full-year spending bills — none of which have a chance at passing the Senate in their current form.

House Republicans have passed four individual spending bills so far, leaving eight to go.

But two of the Republicans who have talked the loudest about potentially ousting McCarthy — Gaetz and Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) — were two of the first people to leave that Friday night meeting.

House GOP leadership is also racing with the Senate to see which chamber can clear a stopgap funding bill first. Senators are expected to vote on Saturday afternoon to advance a bill that would fund the government through Nov. 17 and give additional aid to Ukraine.

“If we can operationally get another stopgap out of the House ... before [senators] act, that’s our best option,” McHenry said Friday evening after the House GOP meeting.

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) attacked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for failing Republicans twice in legislative battles, saying if he failed House Republicans a third time, she would be "done."

House Republicans remain stalled over passing a stopgap funding measure needed to fund the government past the Sept. 30 deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown.

AS GOP WRESTLES WITH SPENDING DEAL, WILL HOUSE DEMOCRATS COME TO THEIR AID?

Spartz, one of the Republicans who pledged to vote "no" on the original stopgap funding measure that was released over the weekend, said McCarthy is going to fail the GOP if he is not willing to fight for its concerns.

“If he is not willing to fight — fight and win — then he is going to fail Republicans,” Spartz told Politico. “He is going to be tested one more time. From my perspective, he’s already failed us twice. The third time, I’m done. … I judge people not on what they say, but the results. We need to win something.”

McCarthy unveiled an updated proposal on Wednesday for the stopgap spending measure that swayed some of the holdouts' opinions. The updated proposal includes an agreed-upon top-line number for the budget, something that hard-line House Republicans have pushed for to support the measure.

However, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) claimed at least seven Republicans planned to vote against the measure.

When opposing the original stopgap spending measure, which was issued on Sunday, Spartz blamed the Republican-controlled House for "failing the American people again" and blasted McCarthy’s “lack of real leadership.”

The second-term congresswoman did not confirm if she would vote "yes" on the updated proposal, sending a message to the House speaker that Republicans need a win.

McCarthy has suffered a series of setbacks in his leadership, from struggling to pass the debt ceiling deal to the latest continuing resolution negotiations, leading to a rise in talks about forcing a vote to oust him. While House Republican leadership continues to debate over the short-term spending plan, a procedural vote on the defense appropriations bill is expected on Thursday.

President Joe Biden will announce the Office of Gun Violence Prevention on Friday and the new office will be coordinated with Mike Bloomberg gun control proponents and others.

According to the Washington Post, “The new office will report up through Stefanie Feldman, the White House staff secretary and a longtime Biden policy aide who has worked on the firearms issue for years.”

Coordination in the office is expected between the “White House, the Community Justice Action Fund and Everytown for Gun Safety.”

Shannon Watts, a Mike Bloomberg affiliate who founded Moms Demand Action, praised the creation of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, saying, “If this announcement is, in fact, the creation of a single point of leadership on gun violence in the administration, it’s a very big deal for the movement.”

She added, “A governmental focal point dedicated to creating a framework for overseeing national policy, research and resources would be more than symbolic — it would be a significant turning point for the movement.”

On August 31, 2023, Breitbart News reported that Biden’s ATF was using executive rule to expand background checks to the point of nearly being universal.

In a press release that accompanied the announcement of the proposed rule, Attorney General Merrick Garland said:

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was passed by Congress to reduce gun violence, including by expanding the background checks that keep guns out of the hands of criminals. This proposed rule implements Congress’s mandate to expand the definition of who must obtain a license and conduct a background check before selling firearms.

The ATF’s rule will redefine language so that there is not simply a category of Americans buying and selling guns from and to one another — as they have done since 1791 — and a category of Federal Firearms Licensed holders (FFLs) selling guns at retail. Rather, every seller will have to prove he is not trying to make a profit, or he will be required to ensure the purchaser undergoes a background check before taking possession of the firearm.

Russell Brand has today been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse by four women during the peak of his fame.

The allegations are claimed to have taken place between 2006 and 2013, while Brand was presenter for BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4 before then becoming a star in Hollywood.

Among the explosive claims, reported by The Times, include other claims that Brand was controlling. abusive and predatory in behaviour.

The bombshell allegations came after Brand posted an astonishing video late on Friday night vehemently denying what he called 'very serious criminal allegations' made against him.

Sharing his 2min 45sec monologue to his 11million followers on X and 6.5 million subscribers on YouTube, Brand lashed out at 'aggressive' media claims as he insisted any relationships he had 'during his time of promiscuity' were 'consensual'.

In the report by The Times, one woman alleges Brand raped her against the wall in his Los Angeles home.

A second woman alleges that Brand assaulted her when he was 31 and she was 16 and still at school. It is claimed the actor referred to her as 'the child' during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months

A third woman alleged the comedian sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles and that he threatened her with legal action if she told anyone.

While the fourth claimed she was sexually assaulted by Brand who she alleges was physically and emotionally abusive towards her.

An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.

The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.

So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.

True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.

Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.

Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.

Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.

In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.

Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.

But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left. There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:

Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?
Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?
Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?
If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?
Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?
If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?
If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?
If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?
If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?
Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?
If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?
In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?
If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?
Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?
Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?
Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?
Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?
Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:
“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”