A lot of things did not happen yesterday, but the thing that did not happen the most is the American government not shutting down.
This is good news for the over 3 million families that would have gone without a Christmas paycheck, of course, and it’s good news for those of us who like it when our politicians do the basic bare minimum of the job we pay them to do. It is also the most significant political event since November 5th. We just gained a lot of information about our new political landscape, and that news could be a whole lot worse. Let’s talk about what happened, then look at what it means.
What The Hell Happened?
This is going to be long, but it’s important.
If you follow American politics, you are familiar with our semi-annual ritual of almost shutting down the government. But though the celebrations look the same, there are actually two different genres of this holiday: budget passing and debt ceiling raising. Failing to pass a budget is like failing to pay for your electric bill even though you could put it on your credit card if you wanted to. Failing to raise the debt ceiling is like maxing out your credit card so you can’t pay your electric bill. The lights are going off either way, but for different reasons.
We last celebrated this holiday on September 30th, when Congress needed to both pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. As usual, the Republicans threatened a shutdown over America’s profligate spending, economists tore their hair and gnashed their teeth, and Congress passed an eleventh-hour bill that kept the lights on until December 20th, plus raised that debt limit so we wouldn’t have to worry about it again until next summer.
Fast forward to this week, when Congress needed to pass a budget but did not need to raise the debt ceiling. This bill needed a simple majority the House and the Senate, which means the bill needed to be something both Democrats and Republicans could vote for.[1] We call this process “politics.” It’s a disgusting business, really: you negotiate with people you disagree with on a fundamental level, come up with a solution everyone hates but that a majority can live with, and make that solution into law. I despise unnecessary political compromise and oppose compromise on basic human rights, but support necessary compromise on things like budget bills. The only way to avoid that altogether is authoritarian government, and that’s much worse.
And so, after much negotiation, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson unveiled a bipartisan budget bill on Tuesday, December 17th, just three days before deadline. The bill was over 1500 pages and included a lot of spending provisions Republicans did not like. It felt to them an awful lot like an omnibus bill, with a bunch of pork packed to bribe politicians into voting for it — something Mike Johnson had explicitly promised not to do last September. Some of the things it included ared:
Over $100 billion in disaster relief, largely for victims of this summer’s devastating hurricanes, farmer relief, and funds to rebuild America’s crumbling roads and highways
Funds to repair the Francis Scott Key bridge, a critical piece of infrastructure that collapsed in Maryland in March of last year and cut off a major artery to and from the Port of Baltimore
Transferring RFK Memorial Stadium and 171 acres around it to Washington DC, which would allow the district to develop that land into anything other than a grim wasteland
A cost-of-living pay raise for Congress, which has not seen any pay adjustment since 2009 (there has been some inflation over the last 15 years)
Funds for pediatric cancer research
A 500-page section of healthcare legislation with broad bipartisan support that included a measure to stop insurance companies from forcing clients to buy medications through pharmacies they own for jacked-to-the-ceiling prices
I happen to support all of those things (even, begrudgingly, the congressional pay raise), but I understand why the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus was annoyed. Mike Johnson promised them a stripped-down budget bill and then dumped a War-and-Peace-length tome on their desks 72 hours before the deadline. Congressmen like Chip Roy and Thomas Massie authentically lost their shit, other Republicans made generic grumbling noise for their constituencies, and everyone prepared to sign the bill to fund the government until March, when the Republicans will have a majority in both the House and Senate and be able to pass whatever goddamn thing they want—at least, in theory.
Everything was going more or less to plan until the President got involved. No, I’m not talking about Biden — that old man’s been playing shuffleboard throughout the negotiating process. I’m not even talking about Trump, who’s largely filled that vacuum since November. I’m talking about the real President: Elon Musk, the unelected South African centibillionaire who spent $250 million to get Trump elected, then appointed himself “first buddy” and began to call the shots.
Musk took to Twitter, the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022, and began to broadcast artificially-boosted outright lies about the bill. Here are some of those lies:
The bill would supposedly give Congress a 40% pay raise (False: the maximum raise would have been 3.8%)
The bill would supposedly give Washington DC $3 billion to build a new NFL stadium (Untrue! No federal funds were to change hands and the land is currently going to waste, bringing value to no one)
The bill would supposedly shield the January 6th commission from prosecution (I wish that were true. It’s not)
The bill would supposedly send $60 billion to Ukraine (I wish that were true also. It isn’t)
The bill would supposedly provide funding for bioweapons labs (read: research facilities to better prepare for future pandemics)
This one is especially dire because he got that lie from Libs of Tiktok, the Twitter account run by the childless Chaya Raichik who has dedicated her miserable life to siccing violent maniacs on hospitals, educators with purple hair, and children’s libraries through misinformation and outright lies
While Musk spent Tuesday the 17th manically typing over a hundred tweets attacking the bill, Trump was blissfully reposting puff pieces and articles about his wonderful cabinet picks on Truth Social.
At 4:28 PM on Wednesday, December 18th, JD Vance tweeted what he claimed was a “statement from President Donald J. Trump and Vice President-Elect JD Vance” that read, in part:
Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country.
-Vance, Twitter, Dec 18th, 4:28 PM (emphasis mine)
Republicans tend to be fiscally conservative. They want to cut spending so that we don’t have to raise the debt limit anymore. Democrats tend to be fiscally liberal. They want to raise the debt ceiling or, better yet, eliminate it entirely so we don’t have to go through the pageantry of raising it every year or so (we inevitably do it, it’s a formality, why pretend?). These positions are basically carved in stone at this point. Now, suddenly, JD Vance was calling for a debt ceiling increase in Donald Trump’s name. What?
Trump remained completely silent on the issue for nearly an hour. At 5:13 PM Trump finally Truthed about the bill in a post that quoted the last two lines of Vance’s Twitter post:
“….Republicans must GET SMART and TOUGH. If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF. It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief.
THIS CHAOS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING IF WE HAD A REAL PRESIDENT. WE WILL IN 32 DAYS!”
-Trump, Truth Social, Dec 18 5:13 PM (ellipses in original; this is the full post)
Trump couldn’t bring himself to Truth about the debt limit for another hour, but when he did, he leapfrogged Vance by calling for the abolition of the debt ceiling entirely.
I posted about this on Twitter and Bluesky, and the river in Egypt began running through my mentions immediately. He must not have meant it! Who trusts lying mainstream media? No way did our platonic arch-conservative American savior just advocate for unlimited government spending!!
Yes, he did, repeatedly, in the clearest and most unambiguous language imaginable:
Sounds like the ridiculous and extraordinarily expensive Continuing Resolution, PLUS, is dying fast, but can anyone imagine passing it without either terminating, or extending, the Debt Ceiling guillotine coming up in June? Unless the Democrats terminate or substantially extend Debt Ceiling now, I will fight ‘till the end.
-Truth Social, Dec 18th, 6:27 PM
For years Congress, and everyone else, wanted to terminate “the Debt Ceiling,” and this is the time to do so!
-Truth Social, Dec 19th, 2:33 PM
Congress must get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling. Without this, we should never make a deal. Remember, the pressure is on whoever is President.
-Truth Social, Dec 20, 1:16 AM
Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.
That last sentence is Trump quoting directly from the statement Vance posted and is breathtaking in its naked manipulation. It fully gives away the goal of the game: an all-gas-no-brakes approach to spending in Trump’s second term with the fig leaf of debt limit abolition during Biden’s term, not Trump’s.
Is it a fig leaf if you flash the dick, though? Cock and balls in the face of America: we are going to do whatever we want and manipulate events so the Democrats get blamed for it. They are telling you this directly.
Imagine, if you will, the faces of the fiscally conservative House Freedom Caucus when Trump began to call for the abolition of the debt ceiling late Wednesday night. Unlike Vance, a man who believes in naked power and nothing else, Republicans like Chip Roy and Thomas Massie have real principles. I disagree with them on almost everything, but they are true believers. Not even the gravitational pull of the Sun King himself can divert them from their mission of cutting government spending down to nothing:
Congratulations, you’ve added to the debt since you were given the majority again on November 5th. It’s shameful…I’m absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible.
-Chip Roy, congressional floor, Dec 19th
My position is simple - I am not going to raise or suspend the debt ceiling (racking up more debt) without significant & real spending cuts attached to it. I’ve been negotiating to that end. No apologies. @realDonaldTrump @SpeakerJohnson @SenJohnThune @freedomcaucus
-Roy, Twitter, Dec 19th (Senator Thune is the presumptive Senate Majority Leader for next term)
Trump heard the message loud and clear. He threatened to primary Roy on Truth Social, Roy told him to fuck himself in that tweet quoted above, and now Roy is on the shit list for standing for something. Leopards, faces, etc.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, also told the incoming administration to go fuck itself, which was absolutely correct no matter what you believe about the bill. When you carefully negotiate a solution with someone and then they rip up that solution and demand you sign something very different, you either surrender all self-respect or tell them exactly where they can stick that new solution. Mike Johnson presented a streamlined “Plan B” version of the bill that incorporated Trump’s demands, including a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling, which almost every Democrat and 38 Republicans aborted with extreme prejudice. At that point, Congress had just 29 hours to figure out Plan C and avoid a government shutdown.
Not that this phased Elon Musk in the slightest. This master of cutting costs thinks a shutdown would have been good actually:
No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office.
None.
Zero.
-Musk, Dec 18, 2:13 PM (three hours before Trump weighed in at all)
A government shutdown from now until January 20th would mean that over three million workers receive no Christmas paycheck. Some of them would be stuck at home without work for a month, but many more would have to keep working for no pay until a budget passes — a month without pay, if Musk had his way. Why should he care? Musk makes between $1 and $2.2 billion per month, and already has more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes. He’s a 5-year-old boy frying ants with a magnifying glass. He is one of the most evil men alive.
And then, something amazing happened.
Johnson, who is a very good politician even if he is also a loathsome Christian extremist with no respect for the constitution and human rights, placated Trump. He presented a Plan C bill that had no debt ceiling increase and restored several of the provisions missing from the Plan B bill. The Democrats agreed to vote for it. Most of the Republicans agreed to vote for it. With the exception of 34 fiscal hawks and one Jasmine Crockett (who voted “Present”) every congressperson voted yes. The bill passed on December 20th at 5:59 PM, leaving the Senate and Biden just six hours and one minute to pass and sign the bill. They did. Everyone gets Christmas pay after all. Happy ending?
What Does It Mean?
It’s not all good news.
Bad News: Good Provisions Fell Out Of This Bill
All things considered, I’m willing to file this under “unfortunate but expected.” This new bill includes disaster relief and funds to fix the Baltimore bridge, but does not include:
Reform that prevents insurance companies from scalping customers by forcing them to buy drugs from their higher-priced pharmacies (interesting choice)
Pay raises for lawmakers (whatever)
Transferring the RFK stadium (which ended up passing separately)
Restrictions on investments in China (jeez, I wonder who that benefits)
Pediatric cancer research (UPDATE: that passed separately too)
The AI deepfake porn ban (on brand for the Trump administration, honestly)
Worse News: Elon Musk is President
I do not recall seeing President Elon Musk on the ballot this year. No one voted for him, he simply bought Twitter, then bought his way into his First Buddyship, and now he can throw a shit fit online and bend policy to his whim.
I don’t care what you think of Elon Musk the businessman and engineer. Let’s assume that he is solely responsible for SpaceX and Tesla, that he developed these things himself these achievements give him no right to dictate policy. He is, politically speaking, a moron: one of the stupidest people to ever live. The only reason he has this kind of pull is because he has an amount of money so large that it has its own gravitational field , a development our founding fathers never considered because it was unimaginable at the time. Forgive my newfound obsession with TikTok but here’s a great visual illustration of just how much money Elon Musk possesses at this point:
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It is bad, actually, that one man has this much power. Even if Elon Musk were democratically elected it would still be a problem because he would have access to the entire executive branch, control of a platform still widely used by journalists and politics junkies as a source of information, a de facto monopoly on launching satellites into space, and enough money to buy essentially everything. This is bad! This is bad even if Elon Musk really is a once-in-a-lifetime scientific genius. This is a despotic level of power and I don’t care whether the thing that put him there was the Invisible Hand, the Divine Right of Kings, or the Mongol Hoards: this is untenable, intolerable, and anti-American.
And yet, here we are.
Good News: People Know Elon Musk is President
Elon Musk and JD Vance just made Trump look like a bitch on the national stage. And if there’s one thing Trump hates, it’s being made to look like a bitch.
Elon Musk led the charge on this entire failed fiasco. He singlehandedly caused problems on purpose, got fellow tech bro JD Vance to back it up, and seems to have forced Trump’s hand on the issue. Observe that none of the Truths Trump Truthed about the debt ceiling itself have any of his signature capitalized words. They’re short on exclamation points too. Does it mean anything? No idea, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?
Either way, this situation is extremely funny, and very embarrassing for Trump.
I am not just saying that Musk is the de facto president to get under Trump’s skin, though to be clear I hope it gets under Trump’s skin and disrupts that toxic and dangerous alliance. I am also saying it because it is true. Trump should be ashamed. No President should be led like a doge by a drug-fueled billionaire so Online that he averages over 67 tweets per day (assuming he still sleeps six hours a night, that’s almost 4 tweets per hour). It is genuinely humiliating for Trump the man and for our country as a whole. This relationship needs to end, and if Trump’s ego continues to be what it has always been, it will end. And a world where Trump and Musk are enemies is good for everyone.
Good News: Kevin McCarthy Part 2?
I don’t know how I forgot to include this in the first draft, but if you had fun back in 2023 when Kevin McCarthy lost his speakership, strap the hell in because the sequel could be even more fun than the original. The House Freedom Caucus is furious at Mike Johnson’s betrayal, and Thomas Massie has sworn not to vote for him. The Republicans will, at best, have a 5-seat majority this go-round: narrower even than this session. If Massie can sway two other people we are going to have the most fun anyone has ever had watching CSPAN next month.
Rand Paul and MTG are calling for Elon Musk to become speaker. This would be the funniest thing that has ever happened and I for one think it would be amazing if the First Buddy spends all day every day fumbling through congressional procedure while SpaceX continues much as it always has, because it is the engineers, not Musk himself, that make the company successful.
Good News: Trump Lost
By the end of this fiasco Trump was all-in on defeating the bill. He threatened to primary anyone who voted for the bill. His final Truth on the subject, fired off at 7:52 AM on the 20th, endorsed a government shutdown. Now he’s back to promoting his bible and various appointments like nothing happened. But something did happen, and even if his fanboys will never know it and never accept it, politicians and pundits do.
And who made Trump lose? The First Buddy himself. This was an unforced error, it didn’t have to happen, Trump could have carried on with his aura of invincibility and uncrossable authority through the beginning of his term if Musk wasn’t such a goddamn idiot. I love that for him. I love that for both of them.
Good News: Republican Schism
This one has been a long time coming. There are two distinct and incompatible wings of the Republican Party: the fiscal conservatives who want to drown our government in the bathtub and the populists who want to expand social safety nets and boost birth rates in the name of Making America Great Again while doing away with those declared enemies of the people (national populism? Socialist nationalism? It’ll come to me). The two sides agree on deporting undocumented people, exterminating transgenderism, transforming America’s secular government into a Christian theocracy, and eliminating the right to bodily autonomy, and so far that’s been enough, but it isn’t enough anymore. Trump is a populist who chose a poster-child populist for a running mate. I thought the Chip Roys of the world would roll over for them but to their credit, I was wrong. As mentioned above, Republicans only have a 5-person majority. They cannot afford to alienate the fiscal hawks, which means the two sides are going to have to keep fighting.
Mostly this will affect fiscal policy, not social policy, but the benefits extend beyond that. Every time Trump’s wing of the party is publicly thwarted, it sends the message that he can be effectively challenged and encourages further resistance. We are seeing a lot of obeying in advance right now, a lot of corporations knuckling under to pressure of an administration that hasn’t even taken power yet. Trump just had the first defeat of his administration, and he hasn’t’ even been sworn in yet. It sends a message.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Government employees get paychecks, military families can still celebrate, and the Republicans are battered and sad. We are still in very bad trouble, I am still extremely concerned about Trump’s clearly-broadcast plans for an authoritarian crackdown, but there is also disunity — and that means there is hope.
[1] This explainer is too long already, but a quick note on the requirements for passing these funding bills. Plan A went through committee and therefore needed a simple majority to pass. There was no time for B or C to go through committee which meant the House needed to move to suspend the rules and vote on it anyway. This maneuver requires a 2/3rds majority.
That, right there, was one of your best ones and is why I send you money. Doing a concise, pithy , long form is not an easy thing and I commend you for it. Brava!
Thank you. I needed this.