School House Rock 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️  

How a Bill Doesn’t Become a Law:  Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, but he clearly never saw Jack Black’s School of Rock.  He did however spend somewhere north of $260 million on Trump’s presidential campaign.  Yesterday he made it clear that he didn’t give Trump all that money out of the goodness of his heart and that chairing the DOGE efficiency committee isn’t the only thing he wants in exchange.  Musk wants to be in charge and apparently the Orange Dude who won the election, is okay with that, or at least he was until yesterday when, with his help, Musk blew up the continuing funding resolution that had been painstakingly negotiated between House and Senate Democratic and Republican leadership. Musk did that by spending Wednesday night tweet trashing it relentlessly on his X platform. In one of those tweets, many of which were false and misleading, Musk said that “any member of Congress who voted for the outrageous spending bill deserved to be voted out in 2 years,” a threat to be taken seriously given Musk’s willingness to bank roll campaigns. Trump, who until Musk weighed in had been onboard with the funding resolution, then made it clear to Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of the Republicans in Congress that he was withdrawing his support putting Johnson’s Speakership in jeopardy. Trump, or in reality Musk, then demanded a new continuing resolution, a “Plan B,” with cuts in funding as well as the addition of a provision lifting the debt limit so that it won’t be reached for two years.  On the face of it raising or even eliminating the debt limit all together sounds like a good idea, but Trump’s motive is far from pure, he wants it lifted to make it easier for him to pass all those tax cuts he’s promised without any offsets. Since eliminating the debt ceiling takes away the Democrats remaining cudgel to rein him in, they are almost uniformly against doing so.  Among other things, Plan B also included the elimination of funding for pediatric cancer research, early cancer detection, requirements that pharmacy plans pass rebates back to consumers, and a Congressional pay raise, a provision that no one will admit to including in the first place. Without consulting Democrats, whose votes are always needed to pass any funding bill largely because Republicans who can’t even get funding bills out of the Rules committee are incapable of passing funding bills by themselves, Johnson acceded to Trump and shadow president-elect Musk’s demands. The Plan B funding bill was brought up for a vote last night and as expected it went down in flames by a vote of 235 to 174 with 38 Republicans joining all but two Democrats in voting against it. As a result, we are now hours away from a midnight government shutdown and this time it feels like that shutdown is really going to happen because not only do House Republicans need to come up with a Plan C, they need to get a significant number of their House Democratic colleagues on board, and then they need to get Chuck Schumer and the still Democratic controlled Senate to sign off.  Closing the government is not the holiday present that anyone expected or wants but whether it happens or not, just the fact that it’s a real possibility is an indication of how chaotic the next four years will be. Republicans of course are blaming the chaos on President Biden because that’s what they do.  To be clear, this mess is all due to Trump and his boss Musk.  Any bets on how much longer the Musk-Trump bromance continues?  Those memes of Musk behind the Resolute Desk with Trump shining his shoes have got to have Trump launching ketchup bottles right about now.

Ethical 🐄 🐄 :  The House Ethics Committee quietly voted to release the Matt Gaetz ethics report before they go home for the holidays so assuming they ever go home, we should see it shortly. By resigning Congress, Gaetz had thought that the report would remain squashed so he’s far from pleased.  He is now admitting that he slept around, “partied” a lot, and sent a few women, even a few he didn’t know, money via Venmo as one does?  He continues to insist that none of the recipients of his cash or his other favors were underage. He’s now threatening to do whatever he can to get the House to release the names of all the members who’ve settled harassment suits because why should he be the only one to be exposed? Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is another one who is not having a good week.  Yesterday, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified her from continuing to prosecute the election interference case against Trump.  Their decision overturns the ruling of the trial court judge who’d said that despite her inappropriate relationship with one of her prosecutors she could continue. Given presidential immunity, the case against Trump wasn’t going anywhere anyway but by tossing Fani and her entire team aside, the Appeals Court also made it unlikely that the remaining cases against Trump’s co-defendants will ever be prosecuted.  Willis is appealing. California’s cows 🐄 🐄 are also suffering, not because of any ethical lapses though who really knows what Elsie and her pals have been up to, but because so many of them have tested positive for H1N1 bird flu which some in the state are now calling Cow COVID.  The good news is that pasteurization still protects the milk supply, the bad news is that RFK Jr who could be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services is still all in on eliminating restrictions on raw milk and vaccine development and a few people have already gotten bird flu, one of whom is currently very ill.        

#BringThemAllHomeNow