House Select January 6th Committee

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had failed the Republican Party by refusing to open the House of Representatives for legislative business during the government shutdown last year.

During an appearance on C-SPAN this week, host Dasha Burns noted that the year ended without passing an extension for health care subsidies, causing insurance costs to skyrocket for many Americans.

"Republicans having the majority should have planned further in advance instead of the last weeks of the year to see how am I going to deal with this," McCarthy replied. "So now they've kind of got a political football. Remember what happened in the House."

"The Democrats did shut the government down. Everybody would agree with that," he continued. "But the Senate kept working. The House kept everybody away. And when you only have a majority for two years to pass a bill, you have to have a hearing, then you have to have a markup, then you've got to pass the bill, then it's got to go the floor? You just lost two months."

"Was it a mistake for Johnson to send the House home?" Burns wondered.

"The House, you have the power as the Speaker and the majority," McCarthy pointed out. "If you give that power away, you may look at the end of the day, oh, I gave two months, maybe the Democrats won the shutdown."

"How many other bills could we have passed? How many things could we brought to the floor that was an 80-20 issue that actually put the Democrats in a bad place for shutting the government down?"

President Donald Trump hit the greens again this week on the taxpayers' dime as a new report found he visited his golf clubs a staggering 88 times in 2025, more than a quarter of the days he's spent in the White House.

Trump, an avid golfer, didn't waste a second ringing in 2026 before swinging his clubs at Trump International Golf Club Palm Beach, according to a photo posted Thursday by his videographer, Michael Solakiewicz. The photo was flagged Friday in a Daily Beast article that found the president hit the links 88 times.

"It’s also a day more than Trump spent playing golf in 2017, the first year of his first term, and the most in any year he’s otherwise sat in the Oval Office," the report said.

Trump's 2025 golf outings cost taxpayers a cool $110.6 million, according to the Trump Golf Tracker, which monitors presidential motorcade sightings at his clubs. December and New Year's Day tacked on another $14 million to that tab.

If Trump continues on his pace, he’ll likely top former President Barack Obama's eight-year total of 333 rounds of golf in just his second term alone, the report said.

The White House pushed back, arguing that Trump is "working 24/7 to Make America Great Again and make the world a safer place."

"Nobody works harder than President Trump who has delivered a record number of historic achievements in only a year," a spokesperson for the White House told the Beast.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson holds the all-time record for visits to the greens. From 1913 to 1919, Wilson played nearly 1,200 rounds of golf, according to The Washington Post.