Republican legislators heard “Do Not Obey In Advance” and like the obedient supplicants they are showed oppositional defiance by immediately capitulating with a squeak of dissent. The only bright spot is how frustrated Mike Johnson must be that he’s spent the last several months scuttering around the House like the invertebrate he is trying to put a budget deal together and now the carpet is being yanked out from underneath him, showing how being an obedient little toady is insufficient to avoid being undermined by Trump’s grievance-fueled desire to burn everything to the ground.
The GOP is doing this under Biden’s remaining term at Trump’s and Musk’s behest because they can blame the impact upon Biden, even though Biden has no control over passing a budget or continuing resolution except to sign or veto it. Neither Trump nor Republican representatives will be held to account just as they have not over the last umpty-ump government shutdowns. Social Security payments will keep going out and ATCs will keep operating with ‘essential’ government employees just not getting paid (or paid out of discretionary ‘rainy day’ allocations until those run out) which just fucks over civil servants and federal contractors who Trump thinks are useless and Elon Musk wants to fire because neither of them understand how anything actually works.
I’ve been warning people for over a decade about how full of hype-fueled bombastic narcissism Elon Musk is and more recently how he aspires to be a fine little fascist with a role as a leading industrialist under the MAGA banner, and even at that I didn’t imagine the kind of political influence he would garner with Trump and the GOP writ large, backed of course by Peter Thiel, who is also responsible for JD Vance’s unlikely meteoric rise from Trump critic to Chief Lickspittle. People have asked what price would you pay for democracy and freedom, and now we at least have a definitive ceiling in the form of the $277M that Musk invested in winning more of Donald Trump’s affection than he has ever shown to all of his children combined.
Except this doesn’t just impact obstructive Republican House members, if indeed it impacts them at all; it will hurt real people: government employees and contractors who need a paycheck, people who depend on non-obligatory entitlements, schools and other state and local agencies and institutions dependent upon federal funding, and the overall integrity and trust that the majority of Americans already don’t gave in government, all directed by a ‘leader’ (which I use only in the broadest terms) and his unelected industrial backer who is already telling investors of his plans to use his influence to dismantle all competitors in space launch industry because apparently what is good for Musk & Musk Enterprises is good for America. It is corruption in plain view of the kind unseen outside of failing oligarchies, brought home thanks to Fundamentalist religious freaks and giddy Musk fanbois, because what the county really needs is to be run how a Silicon Valley venture capitalist would operate a megachurch.
Stranger