The Witness Chronicles, 12/19/24

Sure, why not shut down the government right before Christmas?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

House Speaker Mike Johnson Has a New Boss, and It’s Not Trump

It sure looks like Elon Musk has engineered a takeover of the White House

Well, the chaos got kickstarted this week as the Speaker of the House announced a deal to keep the government open until March with conditional funding negotiated with the Democrats. He needs their votes to override the destructors in his party who only live to shut everything down.

That agreement did some things that normally would be viewed as good for Trump voters, including money for FEMA disaster relief in North Carolina and other states decimated by hurricane Helene. But no, that was an unacceptable concession to the Dems, screamed the Freedom Caucus goons, verifying that the right could care less about all their MAGA rubes.

And then President-elect Elon Musk and his toadie Vivek Ramaswamy marched in and declared the deal dead and that the government must close down just days before Christmas. Somehow no one in the Republican Party seems to care that neither of them were elected to anything and that Musk cannot become President because he is an immigrant, a pesky fact.

Even Trump, the shadow President-elect, probably knows that shutting down things at Christmas time is politically a very bad look, but Musk, who recently bought the Party with some spare change he had lying around, started ordering Mike Johnson around, despite having exactly zero right to do so.

And we are still a month from inauguration, meaning Trump is not yet President, yet he is already creating a firefight within his own party, aided and abetted by Musk, whose enormous fortune seemingly gives him the right to pretend he knows anything about governing.

The presence of this man in all of this is bewildering but bewildering may be the tenor of this entire presidential term at the rate they are going. I have exactly zero sympathy for Speaker Johnson but at least he attempted to run the government, sort of, the way it is supposed to work. You know compromise, when you have to have Democrat votes to get anything done.

Unacceptable, yelled the Chip Roys of the world, the Texas Representative who always opposes everything while offering up no solutions of his own, a disease shared by all of these people.

So, we may very well have no government funding this weekend as they face a Friday deadline for passing something. And if Johnson bucks the outsiders like Musk and manages to get something through, he will almost certainly lose his position as Speaker, putting us right back to where we were when he came.

Totally dysfunctional, which appears to be exactly what Mr Musk and Vivek, whoever he is, wants. It should be mentioned that Musk earns billions from government contracts, though why he should care is a question. He has an inconceivable amount of money and those government billions actually look like chump change.

And if Johnson gets fired, there are people suggesting Musk could be Speaker, which is apparently somehow possible despite, as I keep repeating, the fact that no one voted him in to do anything.

It’s hard to say where Trump is with all of this or even what he wants. We know why he ran again, it was to avoid jail plain and simple and it seems to have worked. But does he really care about running things now that he has solved that problem or has he passed the reins to Musk?

The one contribution to the chaos that came directly from Trump was removing the debt ceiling, which many Dems support. But I question his logic since it appears that he wants that to make passing his next huge tax cut for the wealthy easier.

It hurts my brain to think about all of this because it is so utterly stupid. These people don’t want to drain the swamp, they want to infest it with giant imported pythons like Musk who will slowly crush to death any semblance of government or responsibility to the people. To hell with the little guys. We got your vote, now go away.

Seriously, can this really go on for four more years? We’re not even started yet and everything is a total mess already. Don’t say we didn’t tell you so over the past years. Unfortunately I can’t take any pleasure in being right about another Trump term, but I wasn’t alone in sounding alarms more than I ever wanted to.

Among people paying attention to all this there is the temptation to simply shut our eyes and ears and join the rest of the low information voters. But if we do that we concede our lives to men like Musk and the troupe of bozos Trump has nominated to take down the most powerful government on the planet, just to satisfy a few men’s massive egos.

Virtually everything Trump promised his people at those endless rallies was false and he is openly admitting it. Yesterday I heard rumblings that he wants to keep having rallies because he likes the adoration. But my suspicion is that if they do that it will be to get him away from power while the Musks, Bannon, Patels, and the rest tear things apart.

After all, why should Trump care? He got what he wanted, to be called a winner and get the perks of power without having to do any work. And we gave it to him, not most of us as he claims, but enough to make it legal.

Four years? I don’t want four more days of this.

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