By a vote of 174-235, the House of Representatives rejected the Trump-backed package, hastily assembled by Republican leaders after the president-elect and his billionaire ally Elon Musk scuttled a prior bipartisan deal.
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.”
So, this is an emergency thing. Not a proper budget. And because it’s an emergency – paychecks stop going out if it doesn’t pass – therefore all sorts of boondoggle gets added. Each and every representative ends up being bought with “earmarks”. Speshul spending just for their district. And, sure, $50 million here, $75 there, it’s not that much. But when there are 435 of them it does, sorta, add up.
And it’s because it’s this “continuing resolution” (I think?) that has to be passed in a hurry that the boondoggles are so important. It’s gotta, gotta, be passed so the price of every vote rises. This is how The Republic is held to ransom for the Congressman H P Trousershorts Memorial BLM Shelter etc.
The only way out of it – if it is indeed a way out – is to call the bluff. No, fuck off.
Dunno. Might work…..
– “Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”
It was the Democrats that voted against the package that would have prevented the shutdown, therefore it is the Democrats driving America to a government shutdown. This time, that truth has a chance of getting through. Musk is, of course, doing the job the President-elect hired him to do: highlighting government inefficiency.
– This is how The Republic is held to ransom for the Congressman H P Trousershorts Memorial BLM Shelter etc.
I think this is always how politics in US democracy will work. “You want my support on big issue X, you send $$$ to my district / project.” Quite right too; it’s the scale that’s the problem.
Apparently, “A.I.” (Grok?) was used to speed read and extract the details from the 1500 pages, quickly exposing the corruption that previously would have sneaked through the last minute rush. Not surprisingly, a massive pay rise for congresscritters was included.
When was the last actual budget passed in the US Congress? My impression was that they’ve been running on continuing resolutions for quite a while now.
Saw a Dem crying about Fed workers being “furloughed” – which means many of them are given time off with pay, although they may have to wait an extra week or two to collect the paycheck they didn’t have to actually work for.
Unless you have no savings or options to bridge a week or two delay in your paycheck this is extra vacation time.
I believe that mandatory items (social security, Medicare, Medicaid etc) keep getting paid irrespective. That’s around two thirds of the total accounted for.
Debt interest is what it is.
Discretionary spending (a huge part of which is on the military) is the real question mark. So is it possible that after inauguration President Trump can repeatedly refuse to sign off anything unacceptable to his DOGE bros?
The Pentagon, arms manufacturers and numerous neo-cons who never sniffed an overseas war they didn’t like (or saw as an opportunity for further self-enrichment) will have a fit while various hopelessly inefficient if not unnecessary state departments will shut down (oh dear, how sad, never mind) and as for all the earmarks………
Meanwhile, to quote Obama, the President has a phone and a pen.
Unfortunately we are probably doomed to seeing a notionally republican budget being rushed through before close of play today by the democrat block vote supported by a few squishy RINOs. Then the real fun starts in January as the republicans repeatedly fail to elect a replacement speaker while the democrats (taking a leaf out of Bercow’s playbook) try to flip the script with Hakeem Jeffries.
Littlefinger saw chaos as a ladder. I wonder if Trump47 might be thinking along the same lines as he strives to avoid the mistakes and obstruction of his first term.
Caveat – if the government ‘shuts down’, there is a good chance that I will lose money, directly and personally. At the very best, payment will be delayed by months, possibly years. Not a lot of money, but then I don’t have a lot. And – guess what? I’m fine with that. With a $37 trillion debt, everyone’s going to have to take some sort of a haircut.
To the main point – the Democrats are losing this fight. For once/at last, the Republican leadership is taking the fight to them, and presenting the issue directly to the public in highly-relatable ways. Yesterday’s ‘before and after’ picture was a fine example, as was the laser-like focus on the Congressional pay raise. I suspect this may be Musk’s killer insinct for messaging, but whatever it is, this is what the people voted for when they elected Trump, and for the first time in many years, the voters are seeing that there’s a pathway to actually getting what they voted for – reduced spending, and specifically, reduced pork spending. Speaker Johnson might do well to either a) get with the programme or b) start collecting spare cardboard boxes behind his desk.
llater,
llamas
PJF – tbf, the pay rise was tiny – $174k to $180k – and they’ve been on the same salary since 2009.
But it doesn’t look good to award yourself more money while the country is drowning in debt and average Americans are being economically crushed.
Also wonder why a pay increase is necessary – every longstanding national politician in the US is a multimillionaire. Many have wealth in the hundreds of millions, like the Obamas. The salary is just a Brucie bonus, the real money comes from insider trading, selling favours and access, and collecting huge bribes in the form of book advances or Netflix commissions or “donations” to their “charities”.
From an American associate rather than the Grundys biased blame Trump viewpoint:
“The Continuing Resolution story of the last 48 hours is indicative of what I think we are going to continue seeing as Trump’s new team moves in. Let’s quickly review.
Johnson drops a 1500 page monstrosity full of the usual ‘lame duck’ pork and some really bad ideas. Musk attacks it. Trump agrees with Trump. Johnson realizes it will go down in flames as the MAGA base floods the phone lines and social media.
Johnson then drops a 116-page bill that still has some D priorities plus R priorities like disaster relief. Trump supports it. Chip Roy opposes, then Trump lowers the boom on him directly…firing a shot into the bow of the potential R opposition.
It requires a 2/3 vote to pass, but if most all Rs support, Ds will have to kill it and then run the risk of going home for Christmas blamed for a government shutdown, no Baltimore bridge funding and no disaster relief.”
@M
It appears the last time the US has an actual budget passed was 1997.
@Steve
The congressional pay increase in the Cramnibus bill was from $174k to $234k. Far from tiny. It also has an add on effect in that the top salaries of government managers is tied to that number. This would give a large pay increase for highly paid government employees, but not the lower level ones.
Congressional pay is chump change compared to the magical enrichment (in the actual rather than the more widely used sarcastic sense) which sees relative incoming paupers rapidly become multi-millionaires.
I’m only surprised one or two haven’t copied Trump or at least the late Dennis Skinner by giving away much if not all of it. I guess their little piggy noses are too firmly embedded in the taxpayer trough.
But they still want their pay rises.
MG – huh. Thanks, I was reading an American website that claimed otherwise. They said the maximum uplift they’d get was 3.8%, and that Elon Musk’s numbers were based on it being backdated to 1992.
Anybody wanting a pay rise should first be forced to stick their hand in Timothy Dalton’s Wood Beast Challenge.
FWIW, that’s how Reuters is reporting it; I had also read the earlier claim that the resolution provided an increase to $234K, or about 35%
This will be the 22nd gov shutdown in 50 years. Not a huge deal.
It’s mostly performative. All the mandatory things still get done. Obama made a big show of roping off all of the tourist attractions in Wash DC and in some federal parks, with signs basically saying “thank the R’s for ruining your vacation.”
He had to pay extra security to enforce it – thus spending more to close them than it took to keep them going.
In every single shutdown, fed employees have been paid for all of their furloughed time afterwards.
I spend winters living on federal land. You have to buy a permit to do this. The big difference we’ll see here is, the office selling permits will be closed. But so will the permit enforcement office. It’s kind of goofy.
Australias Constitution makes the practice of attaching all kinds of ‘ pet projects ‘ to appropriation bills simply impossible:
Section 55 of the Constitution requires that laws imposing taxation shall deal only with the imposition of taxation and furthermore with only one subject of taxation. The importance of sections 54 and 55 is that they protect the Senate’s right to amend non-financial measures.
Unfortunately we are probably doomed to seeing a notionally republican budget being rushed through before close of play today by the democrat block vote supported by a few squishy RINOs
I wish everything in life was so easy to predict. Every single Democrat (bar one who merely voted present) supported the final version so now they can all go wee wee wee back to their little piggy homes.
As for a new speaker this was so easy for the dems that I confidently predict they will ensure Johnson survives the January vote in return for an unofficial power-sharing agreement meaning Hakeem Jeffries becomes the de facto leader of Congress while Johnson is merely his b1tch.