Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the chair of the China Select Committee, announced he will resign from Congress on April 19th.

“After conversations with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position as a member of the House of Representatives for Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District effective April 19, 2024,” Gallagher said in a press release.

Gallagher’s exit will leave Republicans with an ultra-thin one-vote majority in the House of Representatives.

“This is calculated. Gallagher could leave now, and allow his safe Republican seat to be filled quickly. Instead, he is deliberately leaving on a timeline that will leave it empty until November, leaving the GOP majority even smaller and making a Democrat House takeover a real possibility. Gallagher is a traitor to his party and to the people who voted for him. What a spiteful, repulsive creature,” Charlie Kirk wrote.

“Like Buck, Mike Gallagher carefully timed his departure. Under Wisconsin law, congressional vacancies occurring ‘prior to the 2nd Tuesday in April’ in an election year get filled on a faster timeline. An April 19th resignation will keep Gallagher’s seat vacant until November,” Aaron Fritschner noted.

“Gallagher is in an R+15 district so he isn’t protecting his seat from a Democrat winning a special election. He’s purposely leaving it vacant through November to sabotage the Republican majority. Really letting you know what he actually thinks of conservatives on the way out,” Greg Price commented.

Fox News reports:

Gallagher revealed in February that he would not be running for a fifth term in the House, a shocking announcement for someone long considered a rising star within the Republican Party.

His early departure will mean that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., can only afford to lose one GOP lawmaker on any vote that falls along party lines. That will likely remain the case until June, when there’s a special election to replace ex-Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio.

A special election to replace ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is set to take place in May. McCarthy’s former seat in California’s 20th Congressional District is a safe red seat, so it’s likely going to give Johnson a GOP win.

Before that, however, is an April 30 special election to replace Rep. Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., a longtime left-wing lawmaker who departed earlier this year. That election will likely see Democrats add to their tally, which would keep the House majority at one seat.

According to reports, Gallagher intends to take a job at Palantir, which has contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense.

“@RepGallagher has told people that he is planning to take a job at Palantir, I’m told by two sources. The Wisconsin GOP anti-China hawk announced today that he is leaving Congress next month. May not be 100% done, but that’s what he has told people he is doing next,” Puck News’ Teddy Schleifer writes.

Alex Bruesewitz noted:

For those who aren’t tracking:

First: Palantir says “Congress should ban TikTok.”

Second: Congressman Mike Gallagher introduces legislation to ban TikTok.

Third: Mike Gallagher quits congress, reportedly got hired by Palantir.

Nothing to see here folks!

“Palantir has been aggressively lobbying for the TikTok ban. Gallagher intro’ed the bill that could do just that,” Axios reporter Sophia Cai commented.

“The U.S. Army awarded Palantir Technologies a contract worth as much as $250 million to research and experiment with artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Defense News reported last year.

From Defense News:

The arrangement, announced by the Department of Defense on Sept. 26, runs through 2026. Exactly where work will be done and from where funding will be pulled will be determined with each order, it said.

Interest in AI and ML in the defense world has exploded in recent years, with military officials lauding their potential battlefield applications and industry matching the energy.

The Defense Department was juggling more than 685 AI-related projects as of 2021, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. At least 232 were in the Army’s bailiwick.

Palantir in 2016 won a lawsuit against the service concerning procurement procedures. The company has since secured multiple multimillion-dollar contracts.

“I’d like to thank all of the people yesterday who called me crazy for suggesting that the interests of Palantir and the anti-TikTok lobby had merged,” technology reporter Sam Biddle wrote.

Per The Intercept:

Repeated often enough, anti-TikTok rhetoric from tech luminaries serves to reinforce the notion that China is the enemy of the U.S. and that countering this enemy is worth the industry’s price tags — even if the app’s national security threat remains entirely hypothetical.

“Just like tech had to convince people that crypto and NFTs had intrinsic value, they also have to convince the Pentagon that the forms of warfare that their technologies make possible are intrinsically superior or fill a gap,” Shana Marshall, an arms industry scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, told The Intercept.

Marshall said bodies like the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission can contribute to such conflicts because advisory boards that encourage revolving-door moves between private firms and government help embed corporate interests in policymaking. “In other words,” she said, “it’s not a flaw in the program, it’s an intentional design element.”

“The tensions with China/Taiwan are tailor made for this argumentation,” Marshall added. “You couldn’t get better cases — or better timing — so grifters and warmongers like Helberg and Schmidt are going to be increasingly integrated into Pentagon planning and all aspects of regulation.”

Forcing divestiture or banning TikTok outright would not trigger armed conflict between the U.S. and China on its own, but the pending legislation to effectively ban the app is already dialing up hostility between the two countries. After the House’s overwhelming support last week of the bill to force the sale of the app from Chinese hands, the Financial Times reported that Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the U.S. of displaying a “robber’s logic” through legislative expropriation. An editorial in the Chinese government mouthpiece Global Times decried the bill as little more than illegal “commercial plunder” and urged TikTok parent company ByteDance to not back down.

Of course, self-interest is hardly a deviation from the norm in the military-industrial complex. “This is the way Washington works,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”

Although it’s common for governmental advisory boards like Helberg’s U.S.–China commission to enthusiastically court the private sector, Amey said it would be important for Helberg to make clear when making policy recommendations whether he’s speaking as an adviser to Palantir’s CEO or to Congress, though the disclosure wouldn’t negate Helberg’s personal interest in a second Cold War. Such disclosures have been uneven: While Helberg’s U.S.–China commission bio leads with his Palantir job, the company went unmentioned in the February hearing. Given the ongoing campaign to pass the TikTok bill, Helberg’s lobbying “certainly raises some red flags,” Amey said.

“If you’re a conservative arguing for the TikTok ban, all you were doing was helping Mike Gallagher improve his Palantir compensation package and his timely exit from the GOP. Go figure. Turns out if you were for the TikTok ban you were a useful idiot for the Dems,” Adam Townsend commented.

The legislation to ban TikTok overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives.

Numerous public servants and online commentators warned the legislation is a trojan horse that would allow the government to ban other platforms.

House Passes Legislation That Could Ban TikTok

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