Elmo’s not getting the speakership. This is about as serious as when the same idiots were blathering about making Trump speaker this time last year. It’s not a job he has the skills or patience for and it’s not a job that can be done part-time.
I similarly thought it was straight up trolling. It’s especially well received in Canada after those, ‘fifty first state’ remarks he made.
Agree. Even if it’s offered on a platter to him, he will not take it. His ego is too big and he considers(imo) speakership waaaaay below his stature.
Yes, people are trolling Trump and more power to them. But the best thing about it is that it’s going to drive him crazy and there isn’t anything he can do about it. The greatest grifter in history is not going to break up with the world’s richest man.
That’s kind of been my question all along; how devoted to Trump are the houses of Congress? Are they really willing to put his interests ahead of the power/influence of their own?
It would seem that the House electing Musk Speaker would kind of illegitimize the whole thing, and I don’t really see the House writing themselves out of that sort of power just because Trump says so. It wouldn’t take many dissenters to block the whole thing after all.
Not that I think the speaker idea is going anywhere, but Musk has made clear to the GOP that anyone who gets out of line will face a primary challenger. And staying in office is their interest. They sure as hell aren’t doing it for the people.
If you were able to get them to candidly (and off the record), I think that many (possibly most) GOP senators, and a lesser proportion of GOP representatives, strongly dislike Trump, but generally fall in line with him because, as already noted, they like being in power, and they like their jobs.
They largely recognize that taking an anti-Trump stance will be unpopular with many of the voters who elected them to office, and will lead, at a minimum, to being primaried by a Trumpist opponent. An anti-Trump GOP congressperson also opens themselves up to harassment (and worse) by Trump’s followers (see Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger).
Remember - Republicans are going into the new Congress with a House majority of two. That means that they essentially can’t afford any defections if they plan on electing a Speaker without any Democratic votes. McCarthy had a bigger margin than that and couldn’t keep the job, so there’s no way someone as controversial as Musk could possibly get and keep it.
If Johnson doesn’t get reelected (which is highly likely considering how ungovernable the caucus has become) then the next Speaker is likely to be another milquetoast backbencher who isn’t prominent enough to have made any enemies yet.
Right, I’m not talking about just garden-variety resistance, but rather larger, more structural changes to how business is done in the Federal government.
I don’t see the House, or especially the Senate being willing to do that for Trump. Pass all manner of odious bills, sure. But actually change things to the point where they’re actually giving up their power? Extremely unlikely to happen, IMO.
More shades of fascism. Most legislators and leaders hated Hitler, von Hindenberg derided him as “that Austrian corporal” and considered him a clown, and von Papen thought he could manipulate Hitler from behind the scenes to achieve his own goals, and. so they all boosted the little goon with a stupid toothbrush mustache to power, much to the regret and dismay of the rest of Europe and later most countries in the world.
Most of the rejection of Trump’s demands in his first presidential term in the Senate came from Mitch McConnell who, as odious and venal as he is, did not accord with or bow to Trump’s demands. McConnell is, if anything, even further resistant to Trump’s desires (in no small part due to his choice of RFK Jr wanting to pull government support for the comprehensive distribution of polio vaccines) but his influence has severely waned and he will be retiring after his current term expires in 2026. Whether they are ‘willing’ to “[give] up their power” or not, Trump’s embrace of “unitary executive theory” is going to be pressuring legislators to agree to concessions, and frankly most of the GOP seems to have little interest in governing anyway, so as long as they have enough influence to keep lobbyists—particularly oil & gas, banking, health care, and ‘Big Agri’—at their door they may be quite willing to give away a lot of political authority in areas where monied business concerns have little interest.
Stranger
Indeed – the GOP in Congress had been doing a lot of huffing and puffing about “reclaiming Article I” i.e. affirming that the executive has to execute the law as Congress says, limiting the emergency declaration power, supporting the courts’ overturning of the Chevron doctrine, etc.
Now watch them turn right around and adopt the position that if the nation chose Trump, they therefore chose that the federal government should “do what he says”, and who are we to refuse the people’s choice?
McConnell, say what you will, at least was a form of Lawful Evil. He had specific, thought-out vile things that he wanted to impose and he played the existing structures and forms as needed to do so, understanding that simply nuking the whole edifice to the ground just for the very sake of nuking it to the ground may give you a big rush but is bad for business and also leaves you with no further rush to be had. As opposed to the incoming gang who just keep craving a bigger dopamine hit and don’t care as long as their own pocket is filled. But by this term he got to the point that he was no longer in a condition to lead, and he knew it. Good luck to Thune trying to become the GOP Senate leader, we’ve seen the House hasn’t had one for 2 years.
As to Elon, there’s also the small detail of how the Speaker can be removed by vote of the whole of the House (the next House’s rules are planned to raise the number of sponsors of a Motion to Vacate from one to nine, bit still, they should not be hard to find). Musk would not tolerate being in such a position, that people less personally powerful than him can punish him.
More to the point, Elon has no patience for parliamentary procedure, or indeed, any rules that constrain his knee-jerk impulses, and frankly the Speaker of the House is an almost completely powerless position that basically involves running back and forth between different polities to get some kind of acceptable compromise only to be undermined at the last minute by one or two spoilers who throw a tantrum because they aren’t getting everything they want. Musk enjoys far more power by just wielding his wealth, his connections to well-heeled venture capitalists, his coterie of law firms SLAPP-suing the ever-loving shit out of critics, and his legions of adoring sycophant who literally believe his claims of self-professed brilliance and that he alone has designed massive complex automotive and rocket launch systems during brief interludes between ketamine-fueled serial Twitter rants and screeds against how regulators are the fetid minions of evil government forces aligned against him.
Being “Speaker of the House” would, at most, be a novelty for a day, after which he would abandon the post without so much as a resignation letter. Indeed, if offered the role, he would be smarter to turn it down on the rationale that “Government is useless,” further eroding any trust in democracy and demonstrating his influence to manipulate things without actually being involved in the details of making them work.
Stranger
The republican side is like 20-30% totally 100% MAGA.
Yep.
Which if I’m doing the math right, means the body as a whole is roughly 10-15% 100% pro-Maga. Leaving the remaining 85-90% to oppose any attempts by Trump to somehow usurp their power and to resist any bills that would diminish their power and/or do anything too crazy.
I mean, they’re not going to put some jackass who’s not a member of the House into the Speakership, just because that’s’ what Trump wants. That robs them of their power to choose their OWN speaker, which is kind of a big deal.
Right – Elon and Donald both share having no patience for being in a position that is not Boss or the concept of a strictly procedure-bound system where you don’t just do whatever crossed the chief official’s mind as of right now, the way he feels like right now.
I know I’m always persuaded analysis performed with made up statistics.
It may well be that a majority of Congressional Republicans privately dislike or even despise Trump, but only a very few would be prepared to risk their careers to defy him, and even fewer will go against the GOP leadership, knowing that they will be ‘primaried’ by the party. ‘Lone maverick’ Susan Collins can cosplay at being as ‘concerned’ as she likes but in the end she will bend to Trump and the GOP headmaster on any issue of significance. The rest of them will get in line because they’ve seen what happens to those who don’t. The Republicans in Congress will overwhelmingly support anything Trump or the Heritage Foundation hacks demand.
Stranger
Agreed.
Being speaker of the house requires being able to compromise, negotiate, plead, flatter and otherwise wrangle with a bunch of unruly caucus members. Its a royal pain in the ass (just ask the last 4 Republican speakers), and would probably rankle Musk even more since he is not used to people talking back to him. No way would he want it.
And it’s a full-time job, not something that can be done by someone with multiple companies to run.
Upvotes are the new democracy
I heard a joke that Musk is the real president and Trump is VP.