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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was widely condemned Wednesday after canceling all House votes for Thursday — which would have been the chamber’s “last day until after Election Day” — sparking accusations that the move was designed to dodge impeachment proceedings. “The Speaker has cancelled votes and is sending us home,” wrote Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) in a social media post on X. “And there is really only one reason — impeachment of [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) revealed Tuesday that he intended to file articles of impeachment against Hegseth related to the deeply unpopular U.S. war against Iran, which he argued to be unlawful. With Thursday being the House’s last legislative day until after the midterms, Massie vowed to invoke House rules that would require the matter to be brought up for consideration within two legislative days. In a shock move, however, Johnson revealed that he had canceled Thursday’s votes and would likely send all House members home until the midterms. Outraged reactions, including accusations that the decision was made solely to avoid addressing Massie’s articles of impeachment against Hegseth, were swift. “This is so pathetic by the Republicans, deserves being made famous,” wrote longtime political commentator Bill Kristol. “Maybe Dems should go to the floor, try to loudly object to adjournment, say they're staying there and are willing to work, maybe make the Sergeant at Arms escort them out. Cause a ruckus.” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) also issued a brutal condemnation of Johnson. “For the TWENTY-EIGHTH day this year, Mike Johnson has canceled votes, this time to avoid voting on Hegseth's impeachment,” Houlahan wrote in a social media post on X. “Do your job, Speaker Johnson, so we can do ours.” > ‼️🚨 Breaking News 🚨‼️ The Speaker has cancelled votes and is sending us home. And there is really only one reason—impeachment of Pete Hegseth. Here’s what’s going on ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/9Xvhyazqv5 > — Rep. Melanie Stansbury (@Rep_Stansbury) September 16, 2026

Hollywood star Ashley Judd recently found herself nodding along with an admittedly strange bedfellow at a recent “pro-human” conference on the future of artificial intelligence. The actress joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), longtime MAGA mouthpiece Steve Bannon, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and others Tuesday in Washington to discuss the need for government regulation of AI technology, and Judd told CNN's Pamela Brown that she agreed with Bannon despite his past mockery of her. "Well, of course, Mr. Bannon, when I was going to run against [Mitch] McConnell, did the silly video of me like I was an airhead with all this nonsense coming out of my head and I'm like, 'Y'all come take my class at Harvard, you might learn something,'" Judd said. "You know, they're just so self-important." Bannon railed against tech oligarchs and called for universities to reject Chinese students to protect American AI research, while Sanders argued AI would not discriminate based on borders or nationality, but Judd is more concerned about the tech being used as another tool to abuse women and girls. "I agree with them," she said, "and it's also taking a look at male demand, like, what is the content, and it's male demand for sexualized violence. That is the content, and so I want to make sure that we continue to discuss masculinity in healing the male psyche as part of the conversation. I think they're totally right, but I would also add to the senator, women's and children's lives are changed every day by male sexualized violence, and this is just an acceleration and amplification of it." President Donald Trump has rejected a need for further regulation of AI development, which even some tech leaders have argued is necessary, but Judd dismissed his claims that the dangers posed by the technology were simply a hoax. "It's so silly," Judd said. "There's nothing to say. It's silly to engage with nonsense, and that's a kind of crazy-making to try to make sense out of something that doesn't make sense." - YouTube youtu.be

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled Thursday's votes and will likely send members home until the November midterms, a move one Republican suggested was meant to sidestep a forced impeachment vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Johnson told reporters Wednesday that Thursday's votes were canceled and the House will likely leave for recess after the final votes, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin reported on X. The House had been scheduled to return Nov. 9, CNN reported. The decision comes after House Democrats urged Johnson to cancel the recess and keep the chamber in session to deal with what they called the "catastrophic risk posed by advanced artificial intelligence." More than 100 House Democrats have called for the recess to be canceled, Melugin reported. Leadership had discussed scrapping Thursday's votes to head off the Hegseth impeachment vote, Washington Sun reporter Reese Gorman wrote on X. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on the House floor Tuesday, CBS News reported. The articles accuse the defense secretary of defying Congress during the Iran war. Massie filed the measure as a privileged resolution, which stops leaders from quietly shelving it, according to ABC News. The status forces a floor vote within two legislative days, a deadline that would have hit Thursday. Such a vote would force Republicans to go on the record defending Hegseth weeks before the midterm elections, the outlet reported. Massie gave GOP leaders no warning before he took the floor, CNN reported. "When they found out I was doing the Epstein discharge petition, they canceled two weeks of Congress, and I think if they found out I was going to do this, they might have canceled even more days," Massie said. "Why today? Because Speaker Johnson has basically canceled the rest of Congress until the elections," Massie told ABC News. Gorman reported it was unclear whether canceling Thursday's votes could actually head off the impeachment vote. Republican leaders could also move to table the resolution, killing it without a straight vote on impeachment, ABC News reported. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson defended Hegseth to CBS News as a "transformative leader" who has "slashed bureaucracy, unleashed innovation, and delivered for our warfighters every step of the way." Massie said Tuesday that he had not heard back from Johnson, who he said has "48 hours" to call the vote, The Hill reported.

The Trump administration spent $9.5 billion last year on paid administrative leave for federal employees as part of its effort to shrink the government, according to a new estimate from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. That figure marks a sixfold jump in paid-leave salary costs compared with 2023, and agencies' use of such leave rose 435 percent over the same period, and much of the spike traces back to the deferred resignation program pushed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, reported CNN. DOGE – which was purportedly set up to root out waste, fraud and abuse – allowed workers to resign while staying on paid leave for months without working, and GAO estimates the program alone cost $6.7 billion and placed more than 144,000 employees on leave, while some agencies offered multiple rounds as it grew more popular once employees grasped how sweeping the workforce overhaul would be. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management doesn't actually know the true cost of the leave used to downsize the workforce, and even GAO's own figures may be overstated due to unreliable agency data — raising doubts about whether the administration can verify its promised long-term savings. OPM Director Scott Kupor insisted the report ignored the bigger picture, arguing the $9.5 billion was "a one-time expense" to shrink the government by 270,000 employees against what he described as $40 billion in annual taxpayer savings. "That 400 percent return on investment is a massive benefit to the taxpayer," Kupor said in a statement to CNN. The program launched days after Trump took office via an email titled "Fork in the Road," and unions warned employees against signing up, questioning whether the government would pay them through September; a lawsuit to block it failed. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)'s report last summer estimated the broader DOGE effort had squandered billions, prompting OPM to defend the program, with Kupor saying it would save "$20+ billion in costs, annually." Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused the administration of abandoning its own stated mission. "After promising to cut waste, Trump instead set billions upon billions in taxpayer dollars on fire to quite literally pay people not to do jobs they loved," she said, calling it "the most expensive way imaginable to make government worse." CNN said it had reached out to the White House for comment.

Conservatives are livid at President Donald Trump for undoing whatever little good last week's Dallas Republican convention actually achieved, according to Politico. "Trump-a-palooza" was supposed to hand the GOP a "unified message" to energize his MAGA supporters who "typically stay home in a midterm year," Politico reported. Instead, the president has spent the week bouncing between "unrelated storylines" like his White House ballroom construction and the Kennedy Center takeover, leaving candidates fielding questions about whether they agree with him that AI concerns are a "hoax" and defending the administration's embrace of Flock surveillance cameras. "It's incumbent on the White House and others to drive the message from the top down — but we've demonstrated, for a while, that that's not a strong suit," a GOP strategist working on multiple battleground races told Politico. "We come out of the convention, and this week we're talking about anything but what we said we'd talk about last week." A former Trump campaign official put it more bluntly, saying the headlines Trump is generating "are not helpful," and urged candidates to break from the White House script when it serves them. Kevin Madden, a veteran GOP strategist who worked on Mitt Romney's and George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, said the scattered storylines risk erasing the convention from voters' memories entirely. He chalked it up partly to "the always Trump news cycle" and partly to candidates needing to run "hyper localized, hyper personalized contests" in their own districts rather than leaning on a national message. One GOP fundraiser summed up the real stakes bluntly: "The issue hurting the GOP is the price of gas and, [to a] lesser extent, the price of food. None of the other stuff, including AI, matters."