It is the weekend. You have heard rumors of a shutdown in the federal government. What’s going on?
Well, sit back and watch a video. This explains it pretty well:
Kaizen D. Asiedu, the tweeter/video commentator, calls the whole process broken. He is not alone.
He is also not alone in thinking Elon Musk’s influence on the process this time around is largely beneficial.
But Nick Catoggio, at The Dispatch, does not seem so appreciative. Here is how Catoggio summarized the politics of it all:
What really happened here, in all probability, is exactly what it looks like. Musk wanted to flex his populist muscle by inciting a grassroots rebellion against Johnson’s bill, and he succeeded so spectacularly that even Donald Trump was caught off-guard and feared ending up on the wrong side of it. It wasn’t just congressional Republicans this time who were politically intimidated into abandoning a bill they supported. It was Trump himself.
The obsequiousness that some GOP members of Congress showed Musk as he pushed them around was also striking, as that sort of thing is typically reserved for the cult leader. “My phone was ringing off the hook. The people who elected us are listening to Elon Musk,” crowed Rep. Andy Barr. After Musk replied to a Twitter follower who blamed Rep. Dan Crenshaw for the congressional pay raise in the bill, Crenshaw corrected him — while carefully prefacing his response with “I love you Elon.” Sen. Rand Paul proposed formally replacing Johnson with Musk, reminding followers that the speaker needn’t be a member of the House.
Never before in the Trump era has another populist commanded the political and financial capital needed to credibly threaten Republican politicians into doing his bidding. This is entirely new.
“Folie à Deux: President Trump and Speaker Musk,” The Dispatch (December 19, 2023).
Jonah Goldberg, also at The Dispatch, attempted a general overview of the problem with a carnival metaphor (among others), lamenting that “nobody wants to grapple with the hard things and hard truths that you have to face when you get home from the amusement park. Because that stuff is actually hard, requiring an attention span that risks the horror of boredom.”
But this read like an attempt to express some alarm about Musk’s role in killing the CR. And Mr Goldberg somehow seemed to suggest that the Republican and Democratic establishment (as the two factions have existed in our lifetime) as somehow, just possibly, hard-working and not clownish.
And that is impossible to believe, isn’t it? “Get Us Off This Roller Coaster,” he demands, but it was the establishment that put us on it, not Trump and Musk. It was the run of the oh-so-serious political mill that produced a 1547-page Continuing Resolution bill!
Oh, and about that shutdown, with the last vote of the 118th Congress, the much-feared outcome was averted.
Stay tuned….