PERMISSION TO SPEAK: Congressional chaos looms today as the House Republicans vote on whether to keep Mike Johnson of Louisiana as Speaker. Despite Johnson having the backing of Donald Trump, the loss of just two Republican votes in the thin House majority could throw open the contest. And one Republican has already said his vote is “no.”

  Johnson has been on shaky ground with his party hardliners because of his willingness to compromise with Democrats on funding the government and helping Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

  If the Republican majority doesn’t pick a Speaker by Monday, they won’t be able to certify the election of Donald Trump to the presidency

  The Republicans took 15 votes two years ago to elect Kevin McCarthy of California, and he lasted only 269 days before he was ousted. Johnson was elected in a single vote as a candidate after others were shot down.

NEW YEAR’S TERROR Investigators in New Orleans say they now believe the man who ran down and killed 14 people on Bourbon Street early New Year’s Day acted alone and had no connection to the man who died in the explosion of a Tesla cybertruck at the front door of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas later on Wednesday morning.

  The FBI originally said they believe Jabbar “was not solely responsible.” 

  The New Orleans driver, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a US Army veteran and recent convert to the Muslim faith, was killed in a gunfight with the police after crashing his electric pickup truck at the end of his assault. Jabbar’s attack injured an additional 35 people. Authorities said he was hell bent on hitting as many people as possible.

  Two improvised explosives were found in coolers left in the French Quarter following the attack. 

  The victims ranged in age from 18 to 63. Among those killed were a 19-year-old woman who planned to go to nursing school, a mother of a four-month-old, and a young graduate who had played football at Princeton. 

  Jabbar was married three times and had children with two women. He was behind on child support payments.

  Christopher Raia of the FBI’s counterterrorism division told reporters  Jabbar “was 100 percent inspired by ISIS,” although he did not say Jabbar was working in cooperation with or on the orders of the Islamic State. Raia said that shortly before the attack, “He posted several videos to an online platform proclaiming his support for ISIS.” 

  A search of Jabbar’s home found a bomb-making station and a copy of the Koran open to a passage about martyrdom.

   The city revealed that some of the vehicle-stopping bollards designed to prevent such incidents were under repair in advance of the Super Bowl and not deployed on New Year’s Eve. The hard-partying Bourbon Street re-opened yesterday and the Sugar Bowl was played after being delayed a day.

  Investigators also are looking into what appears to be the coincidental explosion of the cybertruck that set off a chain reaction of fireworks in the cargo bed. The driver, who is reported to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot, was identified as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger of Colorado Springs, who was on leave from his Special Forces unit in Germany.

  The explosion of one of Elon Musk’s Tesla trucks in front of a Trump hotel would appear to be some kind of message, but investigators have not said that’s the case. 

  The cybertruck was rented through the same app “Turo” that was used to rent the pickup used in the New Orleans attack.  Turo allows private owners to rent out their vehicles, something like airbnb for cars. 

THE SPORTING NEWS: Dartmouth college basketball players, who voted to form a union last March, have given up efforts to organize fearing that a Trump administration would not honor their claim to be recognized as hourly workers. Their vote to unionize had been seen as a turning point in college sports.

THE OBIT PAGE: Aaron Brown, who was a founding anchor for  the ABC News overnight broadcast “World News Now” and opened his anchor tenure at CNN leading coverage of the 9/11 attacks in New York, died in Washington at age 76. No cause was given.

 Brown was a former colleague of mine at ABC. He was one of the more felicitous writers in broadcast news, a serious journalist with a wry sense of humor that kept viewers awake and paying attention in the middle of the night for ABC.

  Brown had just moved over to CNN in September of 2011 and had not been on the air before he was drafted to be the face of 9/11 coverage. He went on to host CNN’s 10 pm “NewsNight” from 2001 to 2005 before he was replaced by Anderson Cooper. 

  Brown could be tough to work with and also had a talent for dividing viewers. He told Adweek in 2002 that, “They found me interesting; they thought I was a jerk; or, they loved to hate me. But no one is ever neutral about me. I can live with that.”

THE SPIN RACK: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called for cancer warnings on alcoholic beverages citing a number of maladies linked to drinking. Congress would have to act for that to happen. — With only days left in office, President Joe Biden plans to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel of Japan as a matter of national security. That’s counter to open investment policy. Nippon has indicated it will sue if the transaction is stopped.

BELOW THE FOLD: Actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt finally settled their divorce. Yeah, they were still married eight years after she filed. Jolie and Pitt lived as a married couple only two years and spent the last eight fighting over custody of children and a French winery. Brad is 61 and now has a 32-year-old girlfriend. 

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