It was former President Obama who famously quipped that "elections have consequences," and one of the consequences of the 2024 election is that President-elect Donald Trump asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to help him straighten out the government’s books.
Now, just days before Christmas, the United States is staring down a federal government shutdown as Democrats cling to power while the hourglass runs out on the 118th Congress, all because Musk exposed the bloated spending being proposed to fund the feds.
"We had a deal!" the Democrats whine. And they did have a terrible, pork-laden, censorship-riddled, and at 1,500 pages, needlessly long disaster of a bill, that Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson never should have agreed to in the first place.
The purpose of the continuing resolution that Congress is struggling to pass is to keep the lights on until March, when a new Republican-controlled Senate will be in power and Trump will be in the White House. Instead, as Musk rightly pointed out, we got, if not an omnibus bill, at least an omni-minivan bill, bloated to the gills.
In Washington, the most typical route is the path of least resistance, and Republicans figured they could give in to one last big Biden spending package before Trump takes over. But that was when Musk and Ramaswamy stepped in.
On Wednesday, just hours before a planned vote in the House of Representatives, Musk started firing off X posts about every 30 seconds or so, decrying the congressional pay raise hidden in the bill, and the money to fund the Global Engagement Center, a sham operation that censors conservatives, along with a plethora of other pork.
Proving the power of Trump and new media forms such as X, the ship of state started to turn almost immediately, away from the shambolic "everything" bill towards a cleaner, "plain" continuing resolution that just funds the basics.
On Thursday night, every single Democrat in the House voted against that bill, along with 38 bloody-minded objectors in the Republican caucus.
First, as to the recalcitrant Republican no votes, let's take Rep. Chip Roy, as an example. If he was dying, and Congress voted on a "save Chip Roy’s life" bill, the congressman from Texas would be a hard ‘no’ if there weren't spending offsets. It's just who he is.
This is to say that the GOP ‘no’ votes were baked into the cake, and Democrats thought they could use them to push through their CVS receipt of absurd and expensive demands.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddlesome kids, Musk and Ramaswamy.
Come Saturday, the government may be shut down. If it is, it will not be the fault of Republicans who have now put a perfectly reasonable bill on the floor, but of Democrats who prize their own power more than federal employees being paid on Christmas week.
Elections have consequences, and Trump was clear that, if elected, outsiders like Musk and Ramaswamy were going to have not just a seat at the table, but real power and influence in furtherance of the Trump agenda.
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Perhaps more than anything, what voters were asking for when they handed the keys of the state back to Trump on Election Day was change. Anything but more of the same. And this week, that is exactly what the voters got.
Make no mistake, Trump is taking a real political risk here. Democrats are going to do all they can now to blame him for the shutdown, paint him as Musk’s puppet and to stir up rank partisanship to dampen the optimism and enthusiasm ahead of the inauguration.
But what Trump and Musk are both counting on is that this kind of radical change, as much as it looks like chaos, is exactly what voters asked for.
Politicians are ultimately judged on results, not tactics. As ugly as the scene in Congress is right now, the result, the death of a terrible spending package, should bring results that Americans will eventually cheer.
