After Trump was elected and started surrounding himself with weirdos for his cabinet and advisory roles, people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik, and Pete Hegseth, I expected that come January 20th when he actually takes office would be when the chaos started.
But it looks like he decided to get an early start and has chosen the budget process to throw his weight around. The current budget authorizes funding only until midnight on Friday and Republican speaker Mike Johnson thought he had worked out a deal to keep the government running. But then Elon Musk waded in and said the bill was not good enough and effectively scuttled it yesterday. Johnson then tried to get another bill that had the main thing that Trump wanted, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for two years so that he could give his wealthy friends a big tax cut. In order to get it passed in the House of Representatives, Trump vowed that any Republican who voted against it would face primary challengers supported by him.
But earlier today, the House defeated that proposal by a surprisingly large margin of 235-174 with 38 Republicans defying Trump and joining Democrats in voting against.
Critics described the breakdown as an early glimpse of the chaos to come when Trump returns to the White House on 20 January. Musk’s intervention via a volley of tweets on his social media platform X was mocked by Democrats as the work of “President Musk”.
“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, told reporters. “It’s laughable. Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
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The defiance from within Trump’s own party caught many by surprise.
Republican concern about the deficit has always been bogus. They use it to cut spending on anything that does not benefit the wealthy while ignoring it whenever they want to cut taxes on the wealthy. What they want to do is suspend the debt ceiling before Trump takes office so that it can be blamed on Biden.
Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, told reporters that the package would avoid disruption, tie up loose ends and make it easier for Congress to cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars when Trump takes office next year. “Government is too big, it does too many things, and it does few things well,” he said. But Democrats dismissed the bill as a cover for a budget-busting tax cut that would largely benefit wealthy backers such as Musk, the world’s richest man, while saddling the country with trillions of dollars in additional debt.
Jeffries said during the floor debate: “How dare you lecture America about fiscal responsibility, ever?”
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman, told reporters: “So who is our leader Hakeem Jeffries supposed to negotiate with? Is it Mike Johnson? Is he the speaker of the House. Or is it Donald Trump? Or is it Elon Musk? Or is it somebody else?”
Some Republicans objected that the bill would clear the way for more debt while failing to reduce spending. Congressman Chip Roy said: “I am absolutely sickened by the party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility.”
This chaos threatens Johnson’s position as speaker.
The tumultuous turn of events, coming as lawmakers were preparing to head home for the holidays, sparks a familiar reminder of what it’s like in Trump-run Washington.
Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance tried to blame Democrats, though rank-and-file Republicans helped sink Trump’s plan.
“They’ve asked for a shutdown,” Vance said of Democrats. “That’s exactly what they’re going to get.”
For Johnson, who faces his own problems ahead of a Jan. 3 House vote to remain speaker, Trump’s demands left him severely weakened, forced to abandon his word with Democrats and work into the night to broker the new approach.
Trump’s allies even floated the far-fetched idea of giving Musk the speaker’s gavel, since the speaker is not required to be a member of the Congress. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted she was “open” to the idea.
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While Democrats have floated their own ideas in the past for lifting or even doing away with the debt limit caps — Sen. Elizabeth Warren had suggested as much — they appear to be in no bargaining mood to save Johnson from Trump — even before the president-elect is sworn into office.
The current debt limit expires Jan. 1, 2025, and Trump wants the problem off the table before he joins the White House.
This is nuts.
I think that promoting the idea that it is really Musk who is running the show is a good idea because it will infuriate Trump who hates to be upstaged.
