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Anarchy Begins: Republican spending bill to avert government shutdown fails in House

Old_JoeOld_Joe
edited December 19 in Other Investing
From a current report in The Guardian:
Donald Trump suffered a humiliating setback on Thursday when Republicans in Congress failed to pass a pared-down spending bill – just one day before a potential government shutdown that could disrupt Christmas travel.

By a vote of 174-235, the House of Representatives rejected the Trump-backed package, hastily assembled by Republican leaders after the president-elect and his billionaire ally Elon Musk scuttled a prior bipartisan deal.

Critics described the breakdown as an early glimpse of the chaos to come when Trump returns to the White House on 20 January. Musk’s intervention via a volley of tweets on his social media platform X was mocked by Democrats as the work of “President Musk”.

“The Musk-Johnson proposal is not serious,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, told reporters. “It’s laughable. Extreme Maga Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.”

Despite Trump’s support, 38 Republicans voted against the new package along with nearly every Democrat, ensuring that it failed to reach the two-thirds threshold needed for passage and leaving the next steps uncertain.

The defiance from within Trump’s own party caught many by surprise.

Comments

  • Old_JoeOld_Joe
    Like old times- Trump sends Congress scrambling to avoid a shutdown

    From a current NPR report:
    President-elect Donald Trump hasn't been sworn in yet but he's already running Washington again in his familiar style of upheaval and intraparty drama, starting with the decision to kill a bipartisan spending bill without a strategy to avoid a government shutdown.

    House Republicans spent much of the day on Thursday working to salvage a plan to prevent a government shutdown that would would take effect days before Christmas. Members emerged from talks with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., with an agreement amongst themselves on a stop-gap spending bill and a plan to rush the bill to the House floor for a vote.

    Members wouldn't disclose many details of the agreement and staff admitted that Democrats have not signed off. Democrats still control the Senate and the White House and their buy-in will be necessary for any spending bill to become law.

    Trump and his newest top lieutenant, Elon Musk, upended the bipartisan agreement on Wednesday designed to keep the government running into next year largely by mounting an opposition campaign on X, Musk's social media platform.
  • CrashCrash
    Par for the course. Anarchy. Kakistocracy. Plutocracy. Oligarchy. And an orange felon, soon to be at the helm. What (else) could possibly go wrong?
  • rforno
    IMO 2016-20 was a preview of 2025-2029 and had various guardrails around this town to help mitigate things a bit .... but if you thought it was crazy bad before, you probably ain't seen nothin' yet.
  • JD_co
    "What's your prediction for the fight?"
    Clubber Lang: "Pain"
  • rforno
    Just in case you had any doubt as to what Orangina's priorities are here....this morning he's totally down with shuting the government down "on Biden's watch" to get his way.

    Sure -- because he wants the elimination of the debt ceiling now to allow him unlimited spending when he becomes 'president' and so that his people can blame Biden for approving it when the country goes bankrupt down the road. And if the government shuts down *now* because of the farcical antics of TrumpunMusk to explode the nearly-done bipartisan budget deal, he'll be more than happy to blame Biden for that in the short-term, too.

    Orangina has no concern for the country whatsoever.
  • JD_co
    rforno said:

    Just in case you had any doubt as to what Orangina's priorities are here....this morning he's totally down with shuting the government down "on Biden's watch" to get his way.

    Orangina has no concern for the country whatsoever.

    His loyalists (40% of the population) don't care about this. They allow themselves to be brain-washed - Biden is the sole reason for inflation issues, or so they now believe.

    Orange is going to FIX EVERYTHING!!! LOL. Yeah. Tariffs, govt shutdowns and Project 2025. Then he just blames Dems for all the world's woes in the next 4 years.

    And he avoids jail time.

  • msf
    And he avoids jail time.

    As president to be,
    He doth go free.

    Remember OJ (If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.) He still lost money ($33.5M) in civil court.

    Le Grande Orange (with apologies to Rusty Staub) is not absolutely immune to civil procedure (thank you Paula Jones). There are plenty of civil suits in progress, and he has more assets at risk than Giuliani.

    The 2017 tax law included provisions especially favorable to the real estate business (including provisions that won't expire). The Trump Organization is real estate. Wih Speaker (?) Musk in charge, we might see a different set of priorities in the next tax bill - invest accordingly. Or perhaps sell investments if expecting an extended government shutdown.

    As Yogi (the other one:-)) is often credited with saying, it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
  • hank
    edited December 20
    JD_co said:

    "What's your prediction for the fight?"
    Clubber Lang: "Pain"

    I don’t have a prediction. But Republican commentator David Brooks on PBS today predicts Musk will be gone in 3 months and the parting unpleasant with acrid barbs hurled in both directions. You don’t suppose? :)

  • davidrmorandavidrmoran
    Let us hope!

    but Brooks for many years has been the prizewinning chump of ultra-equivocal quasi-prog / wannabe-con handwringing nambypambies

    and just two days ago admitted an astounding essay discovering, or claiming to discover, numinosity

    Quite something
  • BenWPBenWP
    @davidrmoran: Brooks is dreadful, no doubt. On what foundation does his moralizing rest?

    As the year ends, I take solace in Krugman’s last column that left us with the unforgettable addition of “kakistocracy” to our floundering efforts to describe WTF is going on in Washington.
  • Mona
    hank said:

    JD_co said:

    "What's your prediction for the fight?"
    Clubber Lang: "Pain"

    I don’t have a prediction. But Republican commentator David Brooks on PBS today predicts Musk will be gone in 3 months and the parting unpleasant with acrid barbs hurled in both directions. You don’t suppose? :)
    And the more the jingle "President Musk" sinks in, the sooner he will be gone.

  • hank
    edited 2:42PM
    Mona said:

    hank said:

    JD_co said:

    "What's your prediction for the fight?"
    Clubber Lang: "Pain"

    I don’t have a prediction. But Republican commentator David Brooks on PBS today predicts Musk will be gone in 3 months and the parting unpleasant with acrid barbs hurled in both directions. You don’t suppose? :)
    And the more the jingle "President Musk" sinks in, the sooner he will be gone. /blockquote>

    It would make for some interesting DNC Ads. Maybe a clip of Mr. Musk smokin’ weed on Joe Rogan’s show? New slogan - MAHA

    Politics sure does make for some strange bedfellows.
  • sma3
    Rep Mike Levine from California has a copy of a leaked slide from House GOP planning $2.5 Trillion cuts in " mandatory spending" in Medicare, Veteran's benefits, food stamps, school lunches etc to fund Trumps Tax cuts. BTW did you know the 2017 changes in tax code benefiting real estate do not expire, like most of the rest of the law ?

    I wonder how parents of children with cancer felt about the GOP trying to remove additional funding for childhood cancer research?

    Hope none of you have a pre-existing condition if GOP cancels prohibition of pre-existing condition coverage

    Unfortunately a lot, a lot, of people are going to suffer badly
  • catch22catch22
    edited 4:42PM
    Hi @sma3

    xxx(The pediatric cancer research funding was indeed cut from the spending bill.)xxx

    CORRECTION: My initial write on this is incorrect, apologies. I had followed voting on C-SPAN and missed this.

    The pediatric cancer research funding was indeed added back via the Senate vote.
  • AndyJ
    edited 7:32PM
    The NYT story on it is that the Senate passed a previous bill that had already passed the House "in the spring" with the cancer research and other provisions. I looked for an article on what happened because if the Senate added any provisions to the bill the House just passed, it would have to go back to the House for another vote, which luckily didn't have to happen. So this whole affair involved passing two separate bills.

    Note in the article that bringing the older bill to a vote required unanimous consent in the Senate. The fact that the entire Senate agreed to a vote on it is a hopeful sign that some level of sanity may prevail in the budget process in March.

    NYT article here.
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