Politics Random, Random

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A government shutdown looked unlikely. Then Elon Musk took to X.
In a show of power, the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” pushed House Speaker Mike Johnson to scrap a compromise spending bill.

December 18, 2024 at 7:22 p.m. ESTToday at 7:22 p.m. EST

By Faiz Siddiqui, Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein and Tony Romm
Congressional leaders had lined up on Tuesday to approve a spending bill that would avert a government shutdown — before Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” injected himself into the conversation in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

With a five-word post on X, Musk threw the process into chaos.

“This bill should not pass,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote at 4:15 a.m. Eastern time, a message that reverberated across Washington, where some took it as the strongest signal yet of the new reality under the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” Trump’s nongovernmental panel charged with finding ways to slash federal spending.

Over the ensuing 12 hours, Musk went on a prolific tirade against the bill — with more than 60 updates, some of which boosted false claims — that stood out even for a chronic poster who has commanded an audience of more than 200 million followers by broadcasting his largely uninhibited views on the site he owns.

By midday, Musk’s barrage was increasingly acerbic, decrying the bill as “terrible,” “criminal,” “outrageous,” “horrible,” “unconscionable,” “crazy” and, ultimately, “an insane crime.” He also took aim at those who would support it.

“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday.

To leaders in Washington, it appeared he was serious. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s word on the funding extension ricocheted around Capitol Hill, as lawmakers jockeyed to invoke his DOGE as reason to reject the legislation that would put off a Christmastime government shutdown.

“It’s good that they’re seeing this, that they’re seeing the failure of Congress now, so they can start and so they can understand how to come after us when they get here,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri), an active member of the House’s DOGE Caucus.

About an hour after Musk’s threat of retribution, the billionaire followed up with a new directive: “No bills should be passed Congress until Jan. 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office.”

“None,” he added. “Zero.”

The approach appeared to work, as support fractured even among some establishment Republicans who earlier appeared inclined to support the measure. (A large bloc of conservative rebels already opposed the bill before Musk got involved.)

Burlison posted on X that Johnson’s funding bill was “the very thing the incoming Department of Government Efficiency is trying to put an end to. A vote for this monstrosity is a vote against DOGE.”

Musk endorsed the sentiment: “Absolutely,” he responded.

Alerted to the tech entrepreneur’s endorsement, Burlison grinned and snickered.

“It’s awesome,” he said, fist-bumping with a staff member while riding the subway in the Capitol basement.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), chair of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus, told The Washington Post that Musk’s opposition aligned with DOGE’s goals — and he was getting results even before Trump takes office.

“He’s been given a huge responsibility to try to control the size and growth of the federal government, and, I guess, like a lot of people who are used to running businesses, they don’t wait until tomorrow to start,” Harris said. “They’re given a goal, and they start as soon as possible.”

Underscoring the rapid pace of events, less than 12 hours after Musk first condemned the spending bill, the billionaire was taking a victory lap.

“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead,” he said. “The voice of the people has triumphed!”

Longtime political observers were stunned by the swift impact of Musk’s intervention.

Trump stayed largely silent on the measure through Wednesday afternoon, putting Musk in the unusual position of exerting more influence on the bill than the incoming president. Finally, by late afternoon, Trump, too, aired his opposition.

“Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” he said in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance. “… THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL PRESIDENT. WE WILL IN 32 DAYS!”

But it was Musk who seemed to force the tipping point.

“Elon is having an incredible effect,” said Gordon Gray, executive director at Pinpoint Policy Institute, a center-right think tank, who noted the “real-time” shift. “I am struggling to recall another instance where an unelected public figure has exercised that kind of influence.”

Still, Musk’s campaign relied on or repeated at least some false claims.

He reposted a claim that the legislation includes a “40% pay raise for Congress,” calling it “unconscionable.” The DOGE account also said on X that the legislation would raise pay for members of Congress to $243,000, up from $174,000.

It is unclear where that number came from. The legislation includes language allowing a 3.8 percent pay bump to take effect, which would result in a pay raise for lawmakers of $6,600 — far short of what Musk claimed, according to a statement from Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who said he would oppose the bill because it allowed the pay raise. Congress has blocked its own cost-of-living allowance increases since 2009.

Musk also amplified false claims that the legislation included $3 billion in federal funds for a new football stadium in the District. In fact, the provision would transfer the land where RFK Stadium sits to the local government, but it provided no funding, and the city would still have to negotiate with the National Football League’s Washington Commanders over a stadium deal.

Similarly, Musk shared allegations that the legislation included $60 billion in new aid for Ukraine. Two congressional aides and Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said that they had no idea where the number came from and that the bill appeared to have no major new funds for Kyiv. Congress approved $60 billion in aid for Ukraine this spring.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about — where is that even coming from? Maybe the bill that passed in April?” said one of the aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. “It’s not in there — if you have any evidence of that, I’d like to know.”

But the damage was already done.

Little over a month after an election in which Musk put $277 million behind supporting Trump and other Republicans, the tech entrepreneur appeared to have successfully sunk a continuing resolution to shut down the government.

“A guy who dropped $250 million in the last election and doesn’t blink an eye, and can mobilize Republican voters through his social media platform, that’s an intimidating guy,” said Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that supports limits on corporate spending in politics. “Having demonstrated his willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, every politician knows they could be next. And the ones most vulnerable are Republicans who might be primaried.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... down-bill/

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What the article doesn't mention:

[Suliso]

So who will run the show - Trump or Musk? The former has all the titles, but the latter has far more money and is much smarter (a low bar).

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So who will run the show - Trump or Musk? The former has all the titles, but the latter has far more money and is much smarter (a low bar).

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The Tennessee Holler‬ ‪@thetnholler.bsky.social‬
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Hey @RandPaul — maybe not a great idea to install a guy as speaker who can’t get security clearances in part because of his ties to a murderous dictator who openly wants America’s economy to crash and the country to fall apart? www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

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House votes down Trump-backed spending bill as government shutdown looms
Updated
December 19, 2024 at 7:26 p.m. EST 37 min ago

The House fell short of the 2/3 votes needed to pass a bill spearheaded by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to avert a government shutdown. The bill would have extended federal spending for three months and suspended the debt limit for two years in a bid to satisfy President-elect Donald Trump, adviser Elon Musk and the rowdy House GOP conference. Next steps on funding the government remain unclear as Congress faces a weekend deadline to avoid a shutdown.

Mariana Alfaro
“The Musk-Johnson government shutdown bill has been soundly defeated,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said in a social media post on Bluesky shortly after the failed vote. “MAGA extremists in the House GOP are not serious about helping working class Americans. They are simply doing the bidding of their wealthy donors and puppeteers. Unacceptable.”

Mariana Alfaro
Texas Rep. Chip Roy (R), who voted against the continuing resolution, said he’s happy to talk to Speaker Johnson about his decision, but “is not going to go vote for another debt ceiling increase without the actual specifics of what the cuts will be.”

Roy has long opposed raising the debt ceiling.

Vote shows Republicans can’t pass funding bill on their own

Marianna Sotomayor

Thursday evening’s House vote total, 174-235, tells us something more than just the funding bill failed: House Republicans cannot pass this on their own.

Republican leaders were considering passing this bill through the Rules Committee, which would require a simple majority — or 218 votes — to send the bill to the Senate.

Thursday evening’s House vote total, 174-235, tells us something more than just the funding bill failed: House Republicans cannot pass this on their own.

Republican leaders were considering passing this bill through the Rules Committee, which would require a simple majority — or 218 votes — to send the bill to the Senate.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) doesn’t have to waste time persuade dozens of Republicans to back his proposal. Three hard-liners who sit on the Rules Committee, which green-lights legislation, say they would vote against it reaching the floor.

As of now, groups of Republicans are huddling to figure out what’s next now that two plans Johnson has proposed have failed.

Marianna Sotomayor and Mariana Alfaro
As he left the House floor following the failed vote on the funding bill, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters that House Republicans will regroup and “come up with another solution” to avert the looming government shutdown.

Johnson also said it is “very disappointing that all but two Democrats voted against” the continuing resolution that House Republicans introduced Thursday evening, which included a two-year debt ceiling suspension at the behest of President-elect Donald Trump. In his comments to reporters, the House GOP leader, however, didn’t mention the 38 members of his caucus who voted against the measure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ransition/

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"He who pays the piper calls the tune."

[ponchi101]

What a strange invasion of America.
The owner of Fox is an Aussie. He does well hurting American.
Elon is South African. And now he also hurts America.
Can Melania be a mole? One of those really well planted Manchurian candidates?

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House plan to avert government shutdown passes vote without Trump’s debt limit demand

By a vote of 366-34 with one lawmaker voting present, the House has overwhelmingly passed a bill that averts a government shutdown hours before the government runs out of funding. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said earlier Friday that the new spending plan does not include President-elect Donald Trump’s demand to suspend the debt limit. The legislation would extend current fiscal levels until mid-March, provide $110 billion in relief to help natural-disaster survivors and aid farmers, and grant an extension for the farm bill, which must be reauthorized. The bill now goes to the Senate.

8 policies stripped from GOP bill after Trump-Musk rebellion

Jeff Stein, Tony Romm and Daniel Gilbert

The House of Representatives approved legislation Friday to keep the government funded — but it was far narrower than the package lawmakers initially considered.

The original plan negotiated between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Democrats in both chambers ran more than 1,500 pages, while the legislation the House approved on Friday was just over 100 pages and dropped some policies unrelated to government spending. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where it is likely to also receive bipartisan support, although timing for passage was unclear.

President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk helped defeat the original bill, arguing it included government waste. Johnson’s first attempt to pass a smaller funding bill failed on Thursday, but his second attempt succeeded on Friday after he dropped a demand from Trump to suspend the debt ceiling for two years.

“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances. It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces,” Musk said on X, the social media platform he owns.

Both the original measure and the one that passed kept the government operating until mid-March and devoted about $110 billion in aid to victims of natural disasters and farmers.

Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, pointed out that the revised legislation wouldn’t really have saved taxpayers any money, despite the shorter page count.

Here are eight policies included in the original bill that Johnson and GOP leaders left out of the revised proposal.

A fix for stolen food stamp funds

One provision taken out of the initial bill was aimed at ensuring that states replenish food stamp funds for Americans who rely on the program whose benefits are stolen.

Starting in 2023, the federal government has reimbursed states that provide benefits to the victims of food stamp theft. That measure is set to expire on Friday. Since the reimbursement began, states have reported paying $150 million in benefits to more than 300,000 households, according to Dottie Rosenbaum, an expert in the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left think tank.

Pharmacy benefit overhaul

The original bill called for a series of changes to the operations of pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen in the medicine business that negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and help determine what medications are covered by insurance firms. (Dropping these provisions shaved hundreds of pages out of the legislation.)

The bill would have ended in Medicaid plans the practice of “spread pricing,” where PBMs charge a health plan more for a drug than what they pay to the pharmacies that dispense it, pocketing the difference. For Medicare plans that cover seniors, the bill required PBMs to pass along all rebates and fees that are based on a percentage of a drug price to their health plan clients, a reform commonly called “delinking” designed to eliminate incentives to promote expensive drugs over cheaper ones.

RFK Stadium transfer

The original legislation included a provision that would transfer control of the land in Washington, D.C., where RFK Stadium sits from the federal government to the District government. That would have enabled Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to negotiate with the Washington Commanders about a possible new stadium for the NFL team on the site near the Anacostia River, moving from their current home in Maryland. It also would let the District decide the future of the property even without a new stadium deal.

Musk on Wednesday, before the provision was dropped, recirculated a claim on X that the legislation included $3 billion for a new NFL stadium in the District. The provision, however, included no new federal funding — it even specifically banned the use of federal funds for a new stadium.

Pay raises for members of Congress

The original legislation would have allowed a 3.8 percent cost-of-living pay bump for lawmakers to take effect, which would result in a pay raise of $6,600. They make $174,000 a year now.

Musk reposted a claim that the legislation includes a “40% pay raise for Congress,” calling it “unconscionable.” He also cited an account that had said on X that the legislation would raise pay for members of Congress to $243,000, up from $174,000.

Congress has blocked all of its pay increases since 2009, adding language to spending bills each year that cancels the otherwise-automatic raises.

Targeting ‘junk fees’

The original version of the spending package included two bipartisan bills that aimed to crack down on so-called “junk fees,” specifically by requiring ticket sellers and hotels to disclose any service charges and other add-ons up front to customers, rather than waiting until the end of the checkout process.

Lawmakers have been focused on ticket fees, in particular, since Ticketmaster botched early sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022.

Childhood cancer research

The revised resolution dropped the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, which was named for a 10-year-old Virginia girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor. The legislation was signed into law by President Barack Obama, has historically drawn bipartisan support and has put about $125 million toward childhood cancer research over the past decade. The language in the now-abandoned resolution would have reauthorized the program for another seven years. The House had passed a version of it in March.

The funding for the childhood cancer research program is set to expire now, according to a spokesman for Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Virginia), the key sponsor of the measure in the House. The bill would have included more than $170 million over the duration of the extension.

Criminalizing some ‘deepfake’ images

The revised legislation also jettisoned a bipartisan provision that would have criminalized the publication of nonconsensual, intimate images, known as revenge porn, as well as sexual images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, called deepfakes.

The proposal would have also required social media sites to have policies in place to remove such imagery.

Restrictions on investment in China

Congress was initially set to pass as part of the legislation a measure restricting U.S. investments in China, expanding existing rules currently being implemented by the Treasury Department. The legislation also would have affirmed presidential authority to impose economic sanctions on advanced technologies in China, according to the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.

Dan Diamond contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... alth-debt/

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Seth Abramson
‪@sethabramson.bsky.social‬
CNN confirmed on-air just now that top Trump aides are furiously calling journalists to insist that Elon Musk has been following the orders of Trump rather than the other way around. As predicted, Trump is horrified and enraged at the idea that Musk is now seen as the President of the United States.

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‪Sahil Kapur‬ ‪@sahilkapur.bsky.social‬
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WEDNESDAY: Trump threatens to primary "Any Republican" who votes for a clean continuing resolution without a debt limit extension.

FRIDAY: 170 Republicans vote for a clean continuing resolution without a debt limit extension; the bill passes overwhelmingly.

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Kyle Griffin
‪@kylegriffin1.bsky.social‬


In a rare move, Republican senators are calling for Pete Hegseth's FBI report:

The Senate Armed Services Committee usually limits who can view these types of background checks.

Lawmakers want to see this one. www.politico.com/news/2024/12...

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/1 ... t-00195191