The Government Is Shutting Down Because Elon Musk Has Factories in China [View all]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-20-government-shutting-down-elon-musk-factories-china/

In a sense, Donald Trump is picking up where he left off. Most of us remember the last official act of his presidency as the Capitol Riot, but just before that, just before Christmas 2020, he inserted himself late into a government funding fight that he had been previously disinterested in. Congress had agreed to a bipartisan year-end omnibus spending bill that included the first COVID relief measures in nine months. The bills were already passed, until Trump decided that some of the spending sounded funny, and individuals should get $2,000 checks instead of the $600 on offer. He refused to sign the omnibus without them.

Within hours, Democrats wrote an expanded checks bill and passed it through the House, but Mitch McConnell refused to let it advance, and Trump grudgingly signed the omnibus anyway, climbing all the way down. The $2,000 checks became an issue in two special elections in Georgia that Republicans lost. The road to the Biden agenda went through Trump’s anger-fueled, failed gambit to renegotiate a congressional deal after it was complete.

Almost four years to the day, we’re back here again. But this time, Trump is a side player in the show. He and his transition team reportedly had no problem with the 2024 version of a year-end spending bill until this week. Then Elon Musk starting posting into a frenzy about how a perfectly normal bipartisan agreement represented a total betrayal, lying about the contents in the process. Trump had to be roused to back up his co-president, getting House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to construct a partisan solution while inserting an eleventh-hour, two-year suspension of the debt limit to prevent the Republican trifecta from having to deal with that nuisance in the next Congress.

The remaining gasps of the Tea Party right, who see the debt limit only as an opportunity to force spending cuts, refused to go along with that piece, with 38 of them opposing the Johnson bill on the floor yesterday. Democrats weren’t about to vote for a bill they had no say in (if the offer was to eliminate the debt limit for all time, they should go for it, but this is not that), and it failed. House Republicans are vowing to try again today, but they will likely need a two-thirds vote on anything today (it’s procedurally complicated; suffice to say that they can’t wait for the Rules Committee to report out a rule, forcing a vote under suspension of those rules). That means any bill will need Democratic votes, and nothing suggests that there are any negotiations with Democrats afoot. So the government will shut down at midnight.

*snip*