Dec.20

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

The Clock Is Ticking...

Yesterday, our lead item had the headline "President Musk Kills Stopgap Spending Bill." Reader D.M. in Wimberley, TX, wrote in to point out, quite rightly, that the headline was extremely inappropriate: "I am sorry to have to quibble with you about terminology, as you are usually so conscientiously correct in these matters, but I believe the proper designation is President-elect Musk." We don't know what got into us; please accept our apologies.

In any event, as far as politics goes, President-elect Musk has proven to be quite adept at tearing things down. Of course, that's the easy part. He's shown no particular ability, or interest, when it comes to actually getting something done. And so, while Washington burned yesterday, the South African sat on eX-Twitter and fiddled.

Musk's co-President-elect (or maybe it's his assistant), Donald Trump, is not much better at getting things done. He was clearly caught by surprise when Musk torpedoed the previous spending deal, and he's since flopped around like a beached whale, firing off demands and counter-demands, largely at random. That means it's up to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to try to figure something out.

During the day yesterday, Johnson labored mightily to work some sort of miracle, and hammered out a "Plan B." This Plan B essentially had four provisions: (1) keeping spending at current levels, until March; (2) allocating $100 billion in disaster aid; (3) allocating $10 billion in Farm Aid; (4) suspending the debt ceiling for 2 years. The Speaker then brought the bill up for a vote, and... it went down in flames so hard that you could have mistaken it for the Hindenburg. The final vote was 174-235.

As he tried to find a way forward yesterday, and as he tries again today, Johnson has all kinds of problems. In no particular order:

• Two-Thirds Majority: At the moment, Johnson is endeavoring to pass the legislation under a suspension of the normal rules. The upside to doing it this way is that it stops troublemakers from throwing wrenches into the works by demanding procedural votes or trying to add amendments. The downside to doing it this way is that it requires a two-thirds vote to pass anything. Take a look at that vote tally again; Johnson needed 275 votes, and he came up... 101 short. He's not within a country mile of getting the kind of support he needs.
  
  Johnson could revert to normal order but, assuming no support from Democrats, he would essentially need a unanimous Republican conference. Good luck with that (and keep reading).
  
  
• Democrats Holding Firm: In a development that will undoubtedly gladden the hearts of many partisans on the left, the House Democratic Caucus is digging in, and is showing no particular inclination to help the Republicans clean up their mess. It is true that the package that failed yesterday had $100 billion in disaster funding, which is a goodie the blue team wants. It is also true, however, that the Democrats negotiated a much fuller package, with a much more balanced mix of Republican and Democratic priorities, and they don't intend to roll over and accept new, much less favorable, terms just because Elon Musk threw a temper tantrum.
  
  It is further true that Donald Trump initially called for a permanent end to the debt ceiling, and then changed his tune and called for a 2-year suspension. Many Democrats would be on board with getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently, since it's an unnecessary obstacle that primarily serves to put the federal government at risk of a default, and is primarily used as a weapon by Republicans. However, a 2-year suspension is a different beast entirely. That would essentially give the Musk-Trump administration a 2-year blank check to do whatever it wanted, fiscally, and then austerity would return just in time for a potential Democratic takeover of the House. Here's what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) blueskied out yesterday:

  GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check.
  
  Hard pass.

  In case you are trying to make sense of Jeffries' point, expressed in 360 characters or less, the general idea is that under a suspended debt ceiling, the incoming administration would pass deep tax cuts for rich people and corporations. Then, once the Democrats regained some amount of power in 2 or 4 or 6 years, the federal balance sheet would be so out of whack, Social Security would have to take a hit, just to try to right the ship.
  
  Jeffries' caucus appears to be almost entirely on board with him. Only two Democrats voted for the spending bill yesterday. One of them, naturally, was Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA). The other was Kathy Castor (FL). That means that Jared Golden (ME) did NOT vote for it. You know that you're not even close to cracking the Democrats' armor when you can't even get Jared Golden's vote.
  
  
• Elon Musk: Musk, as we note above, continues to stir the pot. And, as we noted yesterday, he takes the view that a government shutdown is not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing. So, he continues to encourage Republican members to rebel, with the implied promise that he'll have their backs when it's time to run for reelection.
  
  
• Republican Rebels: Many Republican members, especially the Freedom Caucusers, have heard Musk's message loud and clear. Yesterday, a staggering 38 members of the House Republican Conference joined the Democrats in voting against the spending bill. They, and several Republicans who voted for the bill yesterday, say they want much more in the way of spending cuts, or they'll be nays again, and again, and again.
  
  
• Trump Neutered: Donald Trump is certainly not leading from the front here, and he's not even leading from behind. He gave his full-throated endorsement to the Plan B spending bill, only to see it fail spectacularly. Put another way, when Elon Musk wants one thing, and Donald Trump wants another, thus far... Musk wins. Will that continue? And, if it does, how will Trump react? There's no predicting, since American politics has never seen anything remotely like this dynamic.
  
  It has occurred to us that the more people talk about "President Musk and his assistant Donald Trump" the angrier Trump is going to get. He does not like being mocked or upstaged and might do something about the current arrangement.
  
  Trump tried to reclaim a bit of... power, we suppose, by threatening to primary Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). But the first problem here is that Trump's not going to find someone able to out-crazypants Chip Roy. And the second problem is that Trump cannot sustain withering fire on 30 or 40 or 50 different members. A small handful, maybe up to half a dozen? OK. But much more than that, and his venom is too watered down. Further, the more frequently members of Congress defy him and get away with it, the more emboldened they will be.

Johnson and his leadership team are reportedly burning the midnight oil in search of some sort of creative solution. The most... probable, such as it is, is to split the various maneuvers into separate bills, and to try to cobble together four different two-thirds majorities. Seems like a steep hill to climb, from where we are sitting. And whatever the Speaker does, it remains the case that he's got dug-in Democrats on his left, intransigent Freedom Caucusers on his right, and not one but two cooks stirring the pot. Johnson's getting no help from Joe Biden, who is joining his fellow Democrats in letting the Republicans hang themselves, and he's beholden to a Dear Leader whose powers look to be slipping.

Eventually, of course, they will figure something out. It's true that, absent a deal, the government shuts down tonight at 12:01 a.m., but it's also true that a weekend shutdown isn't all that damaging. The rubber will really start to meet the road on Monday morning, and will do so even more aggressively next Monday morning, once the Christmas holiday is in the rearview mirror. The point is, the fire under Johnson is intense, but if he needs another day or two or three to hammer something out, he's not likely to see that as the end of the world.

But once he navigates this crisis, another big one looms. Trump is never to blame for anything, ever, and if the government shuts down for any meaningful amount of time, he's going to look to pass the buck. He doesn't dare displease his co-president, so he's surely going to stick Johnson with the blame. Already, the relationship between the two men has taken a frosty turn. It's also the case that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has said he will not vote for Johnson to keep the speaker's gavel. And two members told The Washington Post, off the record, that Johnson has already lost enough votes that he will not be reelected.

If Johnson is cashiered, who might replace him? It is not going to be easy to find someone who: (1) wants the job and (2) can get the votes of nearly every Republican member. That calculation might be the thing most likely to save the Speaker; the Republicans really don't want to start the 119th Congress off with a leadership struggle that makes the one at the start of the 118th Congress look like a Sunday social. That said, the whackadoodle faction of the Republican Party is already salivating over a possible alternative. You guessed it: Speaker Elon Musk.

As we have pointed out countless times, there are zero requirements for the speakership, other than being elected by a majority of the House. A Speaker does not have to meet any age, residency or citizenship requirements. Musk would be ineligible to succeed to the presidency, as he is not a natural born citizen, but other than that, he could indeed be chosen as Speaker. We think it is very, very, very unlikely that 218 or so House Republicans would support that, in part because they don't want any outsider to come in and take over, and in part because they don't want to give a loose cannon like Musk even more power. However, if Johnson gets taken down, and if the House Republican Conference simply cannot agree on a replacement, and if the time for certifying the presidential results gets near, and if Musk uses his social media platform to really put on the full-court press, well... maybe you can squint just right, and see it happening. It's a very, very long longshot, but it's not absolutely inconceivable, which really says something about the current state of the Republican Party, the Congress, and the country.

Another conceivable, but only slightly less unlikely possibility is this. After 50 failed votes for speaker, half a dozen moderate Republicans go to Hakeem Jeffries and make a deal. If all the Democrats vote for the leader of the moderate Republicans, along with the half a dozen moderate Republicans, the new (moderate Republican) speaker will run the House according to the rules and allow Democrats to introduce bills, amendments, etc.

We are not going to pretend that we have any real insight as to what happens next, but we will note that the betting markets had the chances of a shutdown at 75% yesterday, before dialing it back to about a two-thirds chance. Meanwhile, the odds that Mike Johnson is still the speaker on Jan. 1, 2026 are 50/50. That actually seems a bit overly optimistic about his chances, to us, but what do we know? (Z)