Don’t throw them in that briar patch, Democrats. Whatever you do, don’t throw Donald Trump’s incoming administration in that there briar patch!
Trump has vowed to slash the bloated US government sector. So, when Democrats threaten a government shutdown, they’re only threatening the president-elect with a good time.
US President-elect Donald Trump urged Republican lawmakers Wednesday to scupper a cross-party deal to avert a fast-looming US government shutdown.
Staring down a Friday night deadline to fund federal agencies, party leaders in Congress had agreed on a "continuing resolution" (CR) to keep the lights on until mid-March and avoid having to send public workers home without pay over Christmas.
Oh, no. Whatever will Americans do without three million federal workers hanging around their necks? Remember when Elon Musk sacked 80 per cent of Twitter’s staff and the site completely collapsed? Oh, wait… no, it went on as well as ever.
Remember the last government shutdown, when the country was plunged into chaos and anarchy without those millions of government workers to micromanage the country.
Oops… that didn’t happen either.
The compromise was pilloried by numerous Republicans – most notably tech billionaire Elon Musk, whom Trump has charged with slashing government spending in his second term.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has emerged as a major voice in US politics and took to his X platform with a flurry of posts – many of them inaccurate – denouncing extra spending in the text that ballooned costs.
Trump holds huge sway over Republicans and his intervention makes it almost certain that the bill will fail.
Which sounds like an early Christmas present for American taxpayers, frankly.
Suggesting that concessions to Democrats in the text were “a betrayal of our country,” Trump called in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance for Republicans to “GET SMART and TOUGH.”
Trump and Vance said they would be against any package that does not include an extension to the federal borrowing limit, which the country is on track to hit just as Republicans take total control of Congress in January.
At the heart of the issue is, yet again, out-of-control government spending.
The current federal debt is $36.2 trillion and Congress has raised the limit more than 100 times to allow the government to meet its spending commitments. The next extension was not part of the shutdown negotiations and the demand took lawmakers by surprise […]
Rank-and-file Republicans typically object to temporary funding agreements because they keep spending levels static rather than introducing cuts and are invariably stuffed with "pork" – extra spending shoehorned in without proper debate.
The suspicion that the bill is over-stuffed is only deepened by its gargantuan size.
“This bill should not pass,” [Elon Musk] said in one message, before posting a photo of all 1,547 pages piled up, and asking: “Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?”
As an American friend once said to me, if Congress had presented George Washington with a 1600-page bill, ‘He’d had dick-punched them clear to the other side of the Louisiana Purchase.’
If the elite think they’re making a good case for not shutting down the government, they really need to step out of their echo chambers for once.
