Stephen Colbert
Late-night hosts tore into a meltdown by congressional Republicans on Wednesday as they failed to impeach the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, on made-up charges.
“You know that I give Republicans in Congress a hard time,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “But every so often you’ve gotta just step back and appreciate how much harder of a time they give themselves.
“Because recently, their stupid levels have reached critical dumb,” he continued, as Republicans rejected their own border deal that they demanded four months ago in exchange for aid to Ukraine. Instead, they tried to impeach Mayorkas.
The GOP has “just a razor-thin majority in the House”, Colbert explained, “so clearly Speaker Johnson would bring this to the floor for a vote only if he knew with absolute certainty they had the votes to … and, they lost.
“Mike Johnson, are you definitely against porn? Because you sure like getting spanked while everyone watches,” he added.
The GOP were thwarted by the Democratic congressman Al Green of Texas, who found out about the vote while watching television in the hospital for abdominal surgery and promptly called an Uber to the Capitol. “That takes a lot of guts, some of which might still be in the back of that Uber,” Colbert joked. Green arrived on the congressional floor still in a hospital gown and without shoes. “It turns out he was wearing one boot, but he left it in Mike Johnson’s ass,” Colbert quipped.
Humiliatingly, Johnson had already appointed 11 managers for the failed impeachment before the vote. “Oh I was wrong, Speaker Johnson can count – his chickens before they hatch,” Colbert joked.
Seth Meyers
The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is, “much like his predecessor, failing miserably at the job”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night.
House Republicans attempted to impeach Mayorkas “for no reason other than politics”, he explained. “Republicans can’t name any supposed high crimes or misdemeanors, they just want a political win against Joe Biden.
“And the way you know this whole enterprise has been doomed from the start is that it’s been spearheaded by Marjorie Taylor Greene,” who in announcing the pursuit of Mayorkas mispronounced the word indictment. “I blame Fox News for this,” said Meyers. “Maybe if you guys talked about Trump’s four indictments on air more, the GOP caucus would know how to pronounce it.
“Impeachment is a weighty thing. It’s not something you bring to the House floor without knowing for sure that you have the votes to pass it,” Meyers added. And yet due to miscounting how many Democrats would be present at the vote, the GOP resolution “went down in flames”.
“Republicans knew this impeachment was doomed before it ever began because it had no chance in the Senate,” said Meyers. “Now it turns out they can’t even get it through the House. This is what they’re wasting their time on because the GOP isn’t a serious governing party.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel recapped Nikki Haley’s embarrassing loss in the Nevada Republican primary, where Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot. Haley got about 30% of the vote, while “none of the candidates” got 63%. “You know how they say you’re second to none? She finished second to none!” Kimmel laughed.
“I like the idea that people took time to wait in line to vote for none of these candidates,” he added. “It’s like going to the Wendy’s drive-thru and saying ‘nothing for me, thanks!’
“None of the candidates is probably the only thing America can agree on right now.”
Meanwhile, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is in Moscow for an interview with Vladimir Putin, “which is so overtly ridiculous, he put out a pre-emptive video to nervously explain why he’s doing this”, said Kimmel.
“Vladimir Putin – he’s a murderer, he’s a war criminal, he hates everything America stands for, he’s a liar and a propagandist, but Tuck thinks we just need to hear him out!”
As Carlson put it in the video: “Not a single western journalist has bothered to interview the leader of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.
“I love ‘involved in this conflict’ – it’s like saying in Jaws the great white shark was ‘involved’ in the biting,” Kimmel mused. “It takes two to be eaten, you know?”
