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Good morning. I'm Anna Palmer. And I'm Jake Sherman.

And welcome to The Daily Punch, brought to you by Punchable News. It's Thursday,

December 12th, 2024. Let's get into the mix. Here are your Washington headlines of the day.

Number one, inside speaker, Mike Johnson's role on steering. Number two, next up on Trump's nominees. And number three, who will get

the House Financial Services gavel? All right, Jake, let's get into it. We are leading punchpole

news, AM with the top focused on speaker Mike Johnson and the steering committee, a secretive

panel that is important for who gets the gavel and who doesn't and who has power and who wields it.

There are 33 members of the House Republican Steering, and when they entered the downstairs basement room of the Capitol Monday, many of the GOP lawmakers and their top aides were certain that Representative Anne Wagner, the Republican from Missouri, would be picked as the next chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

That did not happen, and a lot of people are saying it's because they were looking at signals

for what Johnson wanted.

Yeah, Anna, so listen, the House Republican Steering Committee is a very secretive

spot in which committee chairs are chosen.

And this foreign affairs race was something that I thought,

and with Mel, with Melanie Zanona, our colleague here, Punchball News, the way Johnson handled

the Wagner race against Brian Mass, Darrell Issa, Joe Wilson, I thought, and

Mel thought was illustrative of a larger truth about Mike Johnson and about how he handles

things in the Capitol. This isn't a criticism. This is just an observation. Johnson did not, he was backing in Wagner, and so was Steve Scalise.

...