Rep. Thomas Massie is getting no apparent pushback from either party in the House after a social media post that suggested Congress was more interested in “Zionism” than “American patriotism.”

The Kentucky Republican posted a meme on X on Tuesday that put the two concepts at odds — drawing condemnation from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who called it antisemitic, as well as from the Biden White House. But among Massie’s House colleagues, the move is attracting little if any attention.

Interviews with nearly a dozen House members from both parties on Wednesday revealed a lack of concern and awareness of Massie’s post. Some fellow Republicans defended Massie, who has opposed recent U.S. aid to Israel since its Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and staunchly defended critiques of its conservative government as not equivalent to antisemitism.

“Massie doesn’t have any antisemitic bones in his body,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) said, adding that he had not seen the Tuesday post.

House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) spoke for most colleagues in an interview, saying that “I don’t know anything about it.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a fellow conservative and vocal supporter of Israel, also brushed off Massie’s post.

Massie voted against a resolution the House passed last week that affirmed Israel’s right to exist, citing language in the resolution that he said equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The lack of internal criticism of his stance contrasts starkly with the backlash faced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — who voted “present” on last week’s resolution — after she publicly invoked a slogan that’s widely perceived as calling for the elimination of the Jewish state.

A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not return a request for comment on whether he had discussed the post with Massie.

Despite Schumer amplifying the post — and urging Massie to take it down — there’s also no sign that Democrats have discussed the image.

“I didn’t see this,” said Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), a member of the caucus’ leadership.

The Kentucky lawmaker responded to Schumer’s call to delete his post on Tuesday by indicating that he had meant to draw a contrast between Congress’ support for Israel and its treatment of migration on the southern border.

“If only you cared half as much about our border as you do my tweets,” Massie replied to Schumer.

The House could hold Hunter Biden in contempt if he refuses to appear behind closed doors as part of a sweeping investigation into President Joe Biden, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) warned on Wednesday.

“He’s been subpoenaed. We expect him to show up. They don’t get to make the rules,” Comer said in a brief interview with POLITICO.

Asked what the next step would be if Hunter Biden does not meet with his panel, Comer added: “I would expect Congress to hold the president’s son in contempt.”

Comer and Hunter Biden’s legal team are locked in a standoff over the latter’s requested appearance before the Oversight Committee. The Oversight chief subpoenaed Hunter Biden to appear for a closed-door deposition on Dec. 13.

But Abbe Lowell, an attorney for the president’s son, instead offered public testimony on the same day, or any other day in December that could be agreed to. House Republicans rejected that offer; Comer hasn’t ruled out eventual public testimony by Hunter Biden, however, as long as he meets with the committee privately first.

Typically, House panels insist on a private deposition before allowing a public appearance. The Jan. 6 select committee denied several requests by high-profile potential witnesses to testify publicly, including one from Donald Trump ally Rudy Giuliani.

Lowell, in a letter to Comer sent on Wednesday, doubled down on his offer that Hunter Biden would appear before the committee for a public hearing – arguing that a meeting behind closed doors would run the risk of details getting selectively leaked.

“He is making this choice because the Committee has demonstrated time and again it uses closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort, the facts and misinform the American public — a hearing would ensure transparency and truth in these proceedings,” Lowell wrote on Wednesday.

The committee can publicly release deposition transcripts. Comer and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) previously pledged that they would do so for a closed-door Hunter Biden interview “soon after its completion.”

Hunter Biden is one of several targets of House GOP impeachment inquiry subpoenas or interview requests made as Republicans enter the final stage of their months-long investigation. They are looking to make a decision early next year on whether or not to pursue impeachment articles against the president.

Republicans have found examples of Hunter Biden involving his father to try to boost his own profile, in addition to poking holes in some of Joe Biden’s and the White House’s previous statements, but they’ve yet to find a direct link that shows Joe Biden took official actions as president or vice president to benefit his family’s businesses.

Westchester County Executive George Latimer on Wednesday officially launched his Democratic primary challenge against Rep. Jamaal Bowman with a video contending that the second term congressman hasn’t done enough for the suburban New York City district.

Latimer, as expected, attacked Bowman for his pro-Palestinian positions and his focus on “rhetoric” rather than “results.”

“We’re all fed up with the chaos and the dysfunction down in Washington where nothing ever seems to get done,” Latimer said in a video that mixed videos of Bowman with ones of Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Because up here, from Westchester to the Bronx, we do things differently. We work together and we get results.”

Latimer included a clip of Bowman voting against a resolution to condemn Hamas. And he attacked his opponent for voting against President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill.

“Instead of helping our communities with flooding and infrastructure, he put his own personal politics ahead of progress,” the county executive says. “One of six Democrats to vote against it, just to stick it to our Democratic president.”

The launch video officially kicks off what is expected to be one of the country’s most contentious primaries in 2024. The vote is currently scheduled to be held in June, barring any complications arising from the ongoing legal battle over New York’s congressional district lines.

His supporters have attacked Latimer for the support he has received from AIPAC, which has also helped raise money for Republican congressional candidates who are supportive of Israel.

Emma Simon, a spokesperson for Bowman’s campaign, said it’s focused is on winning reelection and to “deliver” for the 16th District. She knocked AIPAC’s involvement.

“Congressman Bowman’s focus remains first and foremost on delivering for the people of his district and standing up to powerful special interests in Congress,” Simon said in a statement.

“It’s not a surprise that a super PAC that routinely targets Black members of Congress with primary challenges and is funded by the same Republican mega-donors who give millions to election-denying Republicans including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz, has recruited a candidate for this race.”

The Senate’s top Democratic appropriator is warning that accepting Speaker Mike Johnson’s fallback idea for government funding would be “absolutely devastating” for federal agencies and families across the country if bipartisan spending negotiations falter.

“It’s dangerous and a non-starter,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray said in an interview on Wednesday. “Everybody needs to understand that it’s dangerous, and we can’t go there.”

Johnson has floated an extension of the current stopgap spending bill through the end of the fiscal year, with “appropriate adjustments,” if House Republicans and Senate Democrats can’t reach a government funding deal for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.

While the speaker’s proposal sounds innocuous, Murray stressed that it has never been done and would result in major cuts to critical domestic programs, including nutrition assistance for women and children, federal hiring, food safety and medical research.

“That’s not negotiating,” Murray (D-Wash.) said. “That’s holding hostage, and we’re not going to bow to that.”

Key context: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the Senate’s top Republican appropriator, and military officials have also warned that a full-year stopgap would hurt military personnel, Navy shipbuilding, readiness investments and other defense priorities.

Thanks to the funding limits set by the bipartisan debt limit deal earlier this year, non-defense funding would plummet from $777 billion to $704 billion if the current stopgap spending bill is extended through the rest of the fiscal year, resulting in a $73 billion cut. Defense funding would increase from $860 billion to $886 billion, forgoing more than $26 billion allowed under the debt limit agreement.

Murray said Johnson must accept the numbers and terms established by the debt deal so that House and Senate appropriators can move forward with bipartisan, bicameral negotiations over a dozen annual funding bills, with federal cash set to expire for a chunk of the government on Jan. 19.

“We’re absolutely stuck,” Murray said, “because we don’t have his agreement to write these bills to the agreement that’s already been signed into law.”

What’s next: Johnson’s staff is quietly negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s staff on overall government funding totals to allow that process to begin. But Murray said she is concerned about those topline talks, particularly after House conservatives recently demanded scrapping a handshake agreement accompanying the debt limit deal, which would add tens of billions of dollars to non-defense funding.

“It’s reneging on what was already agreed to,” Murray said, stressing that the Senate has written its annual spending bills in line with the debt limit deal.

“You don’t go back and say, ‘Oh now that you’ve done all the work, we’re going to take away one of your hands.’ That’s not how you negotiate,” she said. “We need this deal, and we need it now.”

The Senate is poised to vote Wednesday afternoon on advancing a $110.5 billion bill for Ukraine, Israel, humanitarian aid to Gaza and border security. But GOP opposition over disagreement over border security is expected to doom the package.

Republicans said Tuesday they expect the vote to fail, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is encouraging his members to vote down the procedural motion.

“I’m advocating, and I hope, all of our members vote ‘no’ on the motion to proceed to the shell to make the point, hopefully for the final time, that we insist on meaningful changes to the border,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday.

McConnell panned a proposal from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to allow Republicans to offer a border security amendment of their choosing at a 60-vote threshold to the national security package — an enticement for the GOP to back the procedural vote.

The text of the supplemental spending bill released Tuesday night includes border security provisions including funding boosts for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But a bipartisan deal hasn’t been struck on the issue, and Republicans have called the effort unserious.

Schumer has accused Republicans of “hostage taking” for derailing his preferred path to passing aid to Israel and Ukraine.

Any lingering hope of the package making progress in the Senate evaporated when a briefing on Ukraine and Israel devolved Tuesday afternoon, with Republicans demanding updates on the southern border instead of the international conflicts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle left the briefing angry and frustrated.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pushed Rep. Thomas Massie to take down a post with a meme accusing Congress of putting “zionism” over “American patriotism.”

“This is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous, and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address,” Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in U.S. history, wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Schumer spoke at length on the floor last week on rising cases of antisemitism around the United States, describing the surge in incidents as “a matter of survival” and “very personal for me.”

“If only you cared half as much about our border as you do my tweets,” Massie (R-Ky.) responded to Schumer.

The Kentucky Republican has condemned the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but has opposed additional aid to the closest ally the U.S. has in the Middle East. He is broadly opposed to foreign aid, including to Israel and Ukraine.

Massie has suggested before that support for Israel diminishes loyalty to the United States. He was one of two House lawmakers to oppose a resolution last week reaffirming Israel’s right to exist.

POLITICO has reached out to Massie’s office for further comment on Schumer’s call for the post to be taken down.

A classified briefing on the national security supplemental package went south on Tuesday due to a fight over the border, prompting normally level-headed GOP lawmakers to storm out of the meeting on Ukraine and Israel early.

The Tuesday briefing, which featured Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was meant to focus on Democrats’ pitch for $111 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the southern border. But it hit a snag before it even got started when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was supposed to appear via teleconference in, pulled out.

About 40 minutes into the briefing, several Republicans left the classified session fuming. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) — a defense hawk and Ukraine aid supporter — complained to reporters that the administration was offering bland, repetitious answers on Ukraine and not answering Republican questions about the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Many of us just walked out, we’ve had it, we’ve had it,” Fischer, a senior Senate Armed Services Committee member, told reporters. “When you have Deb Fischer walking out, you have a problem.”

Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) conceded: “Feelings were running high.”

The fact that the frustrations extended beyond the usual critics of additional aid to Ukraine and Israel shows how poorly the classified briefing went down among Republicans, further endangering hopes of approving more international aid to those countries and Taiwan before the end of the year.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer argued that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “hijacked” the meeting by calling on Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), the lead GOP negotiator on border talks, to discuss the border.

“I understand our Republican colleagues are under tremendous pressure with the vote we’re going to have,” Schumer told reporters.

Schumer plans to hold an initial vote Wednesday on the supplemental, which Republicans are widely expected to block.

“They’re in a box. They don’t know what to do,” Schumer said. “Hopefully they’ll come to a conclusion that the best thing to do is for them to offer an amendment and try to get 11 Democratic votes, get 60.”

“We’ll see how it works out,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who chairs the Appropriations panel on defense. “I mean, hopefully, everybody will come together because the aid, particularly for Ukraine, is very, very time-sensitive. And if we screw up on this, there’ll be people’s lives at stake in Europe, I think, within a year or so.”

Fischer made clear Republicans would be galvanized around their border demands no matter what arguments the administration presented on Ukraine and Israel.

“When the border was brought up … there was spirited discussion, and I don’t think Democrats realized there will be no movement on a supplemental unless we have policy changes on the border, our own border,” Fischer said.

“We don’t know who’s coming into this country, and we’re supposed to tell Americans that the United States can’t balance being a leader in the world … and yet we’re not able to protect our own country at the southern border?” she said. “That is baloney.”

Added Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), the second-highest Republican in the chamber: “They didn’t have answers to some of the questions our members had, specifically about the broad national security crisis we face including at the border. They didn’t want to respond to that.”

Even some of the most ardent GOP backers of additional aid to Ukraine left the briefing upset.

“Their clear lack of preparedness to discuss and clear apprehension to utter a word as it pertains to border security policy was not just an oversight,” said Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a defense hawk. “It was intentional.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) called the briefing “ridiculous,” “unserious” and offering no new information to senators.

“Chuck Schumer is doing everything he can to flush this whole thing down the drain,” he said. “Keeping the southern border wide open is so important to him he’s willing to kill the supplemental to do it. And that’s exactly what he’s gonna do.”

McConnell didn’t respond to reporters’ questions following the briefing. It came mere hours after Schumer made his offer of a border security amendment to the supplemental package during a weekly press availability — albeit to a cool immediate reaction from Republicans.