TROUBLE IN MAGADISE?

 Ah yes, adults in the room. Every dictator’s nightmare.

After the incoming—but not yet official—Musk-Trump administration managed twice to tank legislation to avert a Christmas season government shutdown, there was a frantic flurry of bipartisan activity this weekend on Capitol Hill in which cooler, or perhaps just more highly determined heads prevailed, and a bill was passed that will keep the government open and operating into March of next year.

There is really no urgency to pass a debt-ceiling measure. Except that Trump wants there to be for questions of his personal political expediency. The crisis of this past week was an invention of Elon Musk to keep himself from looking bad in his new role as the supposed budget-cut czar of the incoming Trump administration.

How so? By using government shutdown as a bargaining chip to get President Biden’s lame duck administration to approve a higher debt ceiling before Trump takes office. That way, Musk and Trump could blame higher spending on their predecessor and provide themselves with a veneer of fiscal responsibility, while squandering huge sums on more tax cuts for the wealthy. Bernie Sanders could explain this much more eloquently than I can, but you get the picture.

The fact is that the extended tax cuts that Trump has promised his billionaire cohorts, including Musk—Elonius Rex as budget czar is really like putting the fox in charge of chicken-house security—will actually add an estimated four trillion dollars to America’s burgeoning thirty-six-trillion-dollar national debt. That, of course, will come in addition to the nearly seven trillion dollars that Trump already added to the deficit during his first four years, from 2016 to 2020, much of which was also the fault of the veritable tax holiday that he provided then, as well, to his euphoric fellow billionaires.

But this weekend’s vote to leave the debt-ceiling discussions on hold until next year and thus to avert a shutdown tends to show that the “mandate” Trump claims to have been given by American voters isn’t translating to the Senate. The third vote that finally pushed back against Musk-Trump bullying reveals resistance to Trump’s dictatorial bent—after Republicans in Congress caved to him repeatedly in the past as he sought to keep running the show from Mar-a-Lago once voted out of office.

To be clear, this was, by no means, a close vote. The Senate passed the eleventh-hour legislation that will avoid a disastrous government shutdown by a margin of eighty-five to eleven. And the bill—backed by Speaker Johnson—had already been approved by the House by a margin of three hundred sixty-six to just thirty-four. That’s basically the entire bi-partisan population of Congress opposing MAGA on Trump’s attempt to once more savage the whole country for his own advantage. (Some of us are still sufficiently un-amnesiac to recall the last government shutdown fostered by Trump and his congressional  cronies, which tanked Wall Street and laid waste to people’s 401K savings investments—and here I speak from personal experience during that time).

Apparently, only a fanatical fringe joins Team Don & Elon in relishing the chaos that a shutdown would breed.

Perhaps the difference this time has been how Trump’s message reached the Senate GOP. It didn’t come from him. It came from his (world’s wealthiest) handler, Elonius Rex. And, finally, some folks in the GOP “grew a pair” and weren’t having it. Maybe some of that party’s number are finally getting sick of having their party hijacked, not just by Trump, but by any super-magnate who happens along.

Wishful thinking? Yes, maybe. Probably, in fact. Once Trump is back in office, they’re apt to all go back to sleep again. But for now, it has worked.

They’s good reason to believe that Senate Republicans were shamed into action by a week of their being portrayed by opposition  politicians and the media as weak-kneed vassals being manipulated by a not-yet-inaugurated president—one president at a time, please—and his super-billionaire buddy, who holds absolutely no position in government and who has zero government experience.

Alexander Pope once wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Dare we hope Republicans will rein in a would-be dictator and his gazillionaire Rasputin, and manage to keep the wheels on democracy over the course of the next four years?

I have my doubts. But only time will tell.