DAVID MARCUS: Saving America from bad spending bills is exactly why Trump recruited Musk.
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It was earlier 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 get the government’s books in order.
Now, just days before Christmas, the United States is facing a federal government shutdown as Democrats cling to power as the hourglass ticks down on the 118th Congress, all because Musk exposed the bloated spending that to be proposed to finance the government.
“We had a deal!” The Democrats whine. And they had a terrible, pork-laden, censorship-riddled, unnecessarily long book at 1,500 pages Disaster of a billwhich the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, should not have agreed to at all.
The purpose of the continuing resolution that Congress is trying 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, then at least an omni-minivan bill bloated to the limit.
UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 12: House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol after the final votes of the week on Thursday, September 12, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
In Washington, the most common path is the path of least resistance, and Republicans assumed they could give in to one last big Biden spending package before Trump takes power. But then Musk and Ramaswamy intervened.
On Wednesday, just hours before a scheduled vote in the House of Representatives, Musk began firing off X-posts about every 30 seconds denouncing the congressional pay raise hidden in the bill and money to fund the Global Engagement Center, a farcical operation , which censors conservatives along with a host of other pigs.
The ship of state demonstrated the power of Trump and new forms of media like
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, speaks with Fox News Digital about the end of the emergency border protocol “Title 42.” (Fox News)
On Thursday night, every single Democrat in the House of Representatives voted against this bill, along with 38 bloodthirsty opponents in the Republican caucus.
First, as far as Republicans’ recalcitrant “no” votes go, let’s take Rep. Chip Roy as an example. If he died and Congress voted on a bill to save Chip Roy’s life, the Texas congressman would be a resounding “no” if there were no spending offsets. It’s just who he is.
That means the Republicans’ “no” votes were baked into the cake and the Democrats thought they could use them to push through their CVS bill with absurd and expensive demands.
And they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those pushy kids Musk and Ramaswamy.
The government could be closed next Saturday. If that’s the case, it’s not the fault of the Republicans, who have now put forward a perfectly reasonable bill, but of the Democrats, who care more about their own power than paying federal workers during Christmas week.
Elections have consequences, and Trump understood that if elected, outsiders like Musk and Ramaswamy would have not just a seat at the table, but real power and influence in furthering the Trump agenda.
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Perhaps more than anything, when voters returned the keys to the state to Trump on Election Day, they demanded change. Anything but more of the same. And this week, that’s exactly what voters got.
Make no mistake, Trump is taking a real political risk here. Democrats will now do everything they can to blame him for the shutdown, portray him as Musk’s puppet, and stoke partisanship to dampen optimism and enthusiasm ahead of the inauguration.
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But Trump and Musk both reckon that this kind of radical change, as much as it looks like chaos, is exactly what voters demanded.
Politicians are ultimately judged by results, not tactics. As ugly as the scene in Congress is right now, the outcome, the death of a terrible spending package, is likely to produce results that Americans will eventually cheer.
