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.
