Here’s some Christmas Eve entertainment for you. By perhaps making Mike Johnson unelected as Speaker (not a done deal but a real possibility) last week’s Trump/Elon drama may leave Republicans JanSix’ing themselves this year this time. Ironic! This Roll Call article gets into the details. But the gist is that if they can’t elect Mike Johnson (or someone else between January 3rd and 6th) they can’t properly constitute themselves to officially receive the electoral votes. There won’t be a properly constituted or sworn-in House, at least not in the way it’s been done the few couple centuries-plus. The Roll Call article makes clear there are probably workarounds, maybe, largely because the constitution leaves it to the House to make up its own rules. So the House can probably, maybe?, make up a new rule to resolve the problem. But it won’t be pretty.
Just an update: There are currently 47 tickets remaining for TPM’s first live podcast taping, which will take place on January 15th in Washington, D.C. You can get your tickets here. Remember, tickets are $75 but if you are a Prime or Prime AF member, tickets are $50. If you are an Inside member, they are free. (You should have received a discount code via email. If not, feel free to email me directly Joe at talkingpointsmemo dot com.)
As of Friday evening it appears that the Trump/Musk GOP has managed to put out, or at least move to “controlled” status, the wildfire they lit for no particular reason earlier in the week. We will soon see that this three or four day drama is a microcosm for most of what is going to unfold over the next two and likely four years: an always chaotic and often destructive jostling between different versions of far-right state transformation. Here on the one hand is Trump’s autarkic and transactional MAGA, seeking to channel power, adulation and beak-wetting all toward the person of Donald Trump. There you have Elon Musk with his more chaotic and futurist/Randian version of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. What unites them is their personalist character, something Donald Trump and his politics brought to the national dance. We shouldn’t doll either of these variants up too much as ideologies. They’re just different versions of post-civic democracy America from the world of billionairedom, each guy’s particular wants and needs, etc., and also with some broader constituency beyond them personally.
I admit I’ve been saying mostly the same thing in my last few posts on events on Capitol Hill. I must think that if I keep writing it it will finally be clear. Oh well. I just noticed someone say they were surprised that almost 40 House Republicans defied not only Trump but Elon Musk as well.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Was Musk for this Trump/Johnson clean up effort that went down to defeat last night? That doesn’t seem clear at all. It’s way over-literal, over-determined. He wasn’t really for it or against it. He blew the deal up and then just moved on to something else.
If you haven’t seen the details, the meltdown on Capitol Hill went from bad to worse this evening. Or awesome to awesomer, depending on your perspective. Let’s review. Donald Trump wanted a smooth ride to January 20th. He allowed the leaders of the congressional GOP to negotiate a government funding extension to smooth that ride. That was about to pass before Elon Musk stepped in with a tweet storm and blew up the whole thing. That sent Speaker Johnson and Trump back to the drawing board to come up with a new GOP-only plan to meet Musk’s objections. To get it through today it needed a 2/3rds vote in the House. It didn’t come close to 50%. For the next ten days or so the Senate is controlled by the Democrats. So the House isn’t even the only problem. Trump told House Republicans today they had to vote for this new plan. Then 38 House Republicans voted against. Now they’re barreling toward a government shutdown.
President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of all but three death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, briefly citing Donald Trump’s bloodlust as a motivating factor.
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