Despite controlling every branch of the federal government, the mood among elected Republicans is at a low ebb, particularly in the House of Representatives, where members of the GOP "can't stand each other," Oriana González and Reese Gorman report for NOTUS.

Hostilities spilled out in the open yesterday, when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) called House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) a liar. But the problems apparently go deeper.

“It’s always been the case, in life and in Congress, that it’s a roughly a small amount of people that behind the scenes are getting most things done,” a senior House Republican told NOTUS. “And there’s always been the case that there’s always a small group of folks who are out here being celebrities. What is different now is that the group of people who get things done is now smaller and the group of celebrities is now bigger.”

Read more at NOTUS.

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday harshly criticized President Donald Trump's decision to pardon former Honduran President Juan Carlos Hernández.

The editorial board of the conservative newspaper noted that conservative lobbyist Roger Stone reportedly gave Trump a letter Hernández wrote to the president asking for a pardon, claiming he was a victim of President Joe Biden's administration.

"Like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change," Hernández wrote in part.

The Journal warned that his "pardon without explanation undermines the rule of law and the prosecutors who put Mr. Hernández away."

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

The morning after President Donald Trump raised eyebrows for closing his eyes and appearing to drift off in the middle of one of his televised Cabinet meetings, a Republican senator stepped up to say the president is actually very energetic.

The comment by Sen. Roger Marshall (Kan.) came during a discussion this morning on Trump’s MRI. The test also raised red flags about the president’s health, although the White House maintains Trump’s health is excellent.

“I’m a pretty hard worker. I’ll work 100, 110 hours a week. He outworks me. He’s the first person I’ve ever known that works harder than I do. He runs around that golf course,” Marshall said on Newsmax, a conservative cable channel.

“He's playing three-to-four-dimensional chess right now with time being that fourth dimension,” he added.

Since returning to the White House earlier this year, the list of people pardoned by President Donald Trump — which includes Jan. 6 rioters; convicted billionaires; Darryl Strawberry, for some reason; and, most recently, the disgraced former president of Honduras, whom the Justice Department once accused of being at "the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world" — has raised fears about the corrupt use of one of the presidency's key constitutional prerogatives.

And the worst could still be yet to come, warns New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie:

"As venal and scandalous as the president's pardons have been," Bouie writes, "they aren't yet as bad as they could be. Take the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential criminal immunity for 'official acts' in Trump v. United States. Under the conservative majority’s theory of the Constitution, which treats the pardon as a 'core power' shielded from judicial scrutiny, the president could order the assassination of a political rival and then pardon those involved without any violence done to the constitutional order."

Read more at The New York Times.

Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday took an apparent swipe at President Donald Trump, saying he did not anticipate the ongoing effort to politicize the military and noting "that used to be something that I would lecture other countries not to do."

In a conversation with Olivia Walton, the chairperson of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Obama acknowledged that Americans "are more divided and that our democracy is more unstable than any time in my lifetime."

"I would say that the order, the system, the sets of institutions that were built after World War II and then refined over the course of subsequent generations, I think those are unstable in ways I would not have expected," he added.

Obama also made an apparent reference to Trump's effort to cling to power following his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

"I would not have expected the legitimacy of an election and the peaceful transfer of power to have been challenged. I thought that was not something that would happen today,” Obama said. "I would not expect the politicization of the Justice Department or our military, and I don't think that's happened. I think there's been resistance, particularly in the military, to that, but the degree to which that has been encouraged — that used to be something that I would lecture other countries not to do."

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, admitted he changed his mind to be supportive of tariffs after Trump took a "maximalist position."

Speaking at a summit hosted by The New York Times, Bessent was asked about being a skeptic on the import levy as recently as 2024.

Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager before joining the Trump administration, said the president has "normalized the idea of a 15 to 20% tariff."

"I've had an open mind, and I've evolved on this, and the president's been right," the Treasury secretary said, adding that he had advocated for "smaller, incremental tariffs."

A federal immigration crackdown began Wednesday in New Orleans under an operation that a Homeland Security official said would target violent criminals, expanding the Trump administration’s sweeps that have unfolded in other U.S. cities.

The Los Angeles Clippers sent point guard Chris Paul home in a move announced by Paul early Wednesday morning.

Paul, who announced in November this season would be his last in the NBA, posted a note to Instagram at 2:40 a.m. ET that said "Just Found Out I'm Being Sent Home" with a peace sign emoji. The Athletic reports Clippers basketball president Lawrence Frank confirmed the decision, which was not one initiated by Paul, in a statement.

Read more at The Athletic.

Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and Treasury secretary who had an extensive relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein, has been banned for life from the American Economic Association.

Summers, whose emails with Epstein were part of a massive document dump done by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, voluntarily resigned from the AEA. The organization condemned his conduct while announcing he will no longer be permitted to attend AEA events or participate in any capacity with the group's journals.

Summers previously resigned from the board of OpenAI and said he would step back from all public commitments after his emails with Epstein became public.

Talks between Russia and the U.S. on ending the nearly four-year war in Ukraine were constructive, but much work remains, Yuri Ushakov, a senior adviser to President Vladimir Putin, told reporters on Wednesday.

Putin met U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner in the Kremlin in talks that began late Tuesday as part of a renewed push by the Trump administration to broker a peace deal. Both sides agreed not to disclose the substance of the talks.

Read more at The Associated Press.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s rial currency fell Wednesday to a new low of 1.2 million to the U.S. dollar as nuclear sanctions squeeze Tehran’s ailing economy.

Former Judge Andrew Napolitano on Tuesday said his former colleague Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "should be prosecuted for a war crime" after the U.S. launched a second strike to kill two people who survived its original attack on a suspected drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean on Sept. 2.

"It gives me no pleasure to say what I'm about to say, because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News," Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst for Newsmax, told the network. "This is an act of a war crime."

"Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people," he continued.

Hegseth and President Donald Trump have sought to deflect blame over the scandal, saying that Adm. Frank Bradley made the call to launch a second strike to kill the two survivors.

Despite their victory in Tuesday's special election in Tennessee, Republicans are very worried about what the narrow margin with which Republican Matt Van Epps defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn means for the party.

The result "is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle,” an unnamed House Republican told Politico. “Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.”

Read more at Politico.

The White House on Tuesday attacked Sabrina Carpenter after she called out the Trump administration for using her music in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest video.

In a reference-filled attempt to diminish the pop star’s criticism, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson issued a new statement (per Politico).

Read more here.

Jimmy Kimmel clowned Donald Trump for having "quite a team" around him following the president’s lovefest of a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

"They have better quality cabinets at Ikea," said the late night host, who joked the Cabinet was "crushing" it in the president’s second term.

Read more here.

Democratic activist Mayra Macías announced Wednesday she’s running as an independent for the House seat being vacated by Rep. Chuy García (D-Ill.).

Macías will face off against García’s current chief of staff, Patty García, the only candidate who filed to run as a Democrat before Chuy García announced his retirement — after it was too late for anyone else to jump in the race. (The two Garcias are not related.)

Read more here.

via Associated Press

A driverless Waymo taxi carrying passengers in San Francisco struck an unleashed dog Sunday, the company confirmed, weeks after another one of their vehicles ran over a beloved neighborhood cat in the city's Mission District.

“Unfortunately, a Waymo vehicle made contact with a small, unleashed dog in the roadway,” a company spokesperson told The Los Angeles Times. “We are dedicated to learning from this situation and how we show up for our community as we continue improving road safety in the cities we serve.”

Waymo did not share any information on the dog's condition following the accident.

The Justice Department on Tuesday sued six Democratic-led states — Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington — over their refusal to turn over their statewide voter registration lists.

"States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon for the Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

But the DOJ's requests have alarmed experts who warn the department's demands for voter data could ran afoul of state and federal laws, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.

In a formal complaint filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday, the family of a Colombian fisherman is accusing the Trump administration of breaking the law by killing the man in a Sept. 15 U.S. strike in the Caribbean.

The petition marks the first known complaint against the airstrikes the U.S. has been conducting since early September in the region, killing over 80 people.

Dan Kovalik, the U.S. human rights attorney who filed the petition, told CNN Carranza's family is seeking compensation, while also calling for an end to the violence.

“These killings are against international law. They are against US law. We want this to stop, and we think this is at least a first step to having that happen,” Kovalik said.

Pope Leo on Tuesday said the U.S. should not try to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by military force, noting that it "is better to search for ways of dialogue, or perhaps pressure, including economic pressure," according to translation of his remarks provided by Reuters.

Speaking at a press conference on his way home from Lebanon, the pope added that the Trump administration should look for other ways to pursue change there "if that is what they want to do in the United States."