The Obvious Lessons of the Continuing Resolution Saga

Sometimes it’s worth stating the blindingly obvious-vast spending bills of thousands of separate funding commitments have to end.

In many ways the New Dawn will look a lot like the Old Sunset. There’s a Trump administration on the way, and an eager army of outsiders, rebels, brilliant minds and pure hearts ready to assume the reins of power and Make America Great Again. We should not immediately underestimate the value of that or the sincerity of Trump, Vivek, Musk, Kennedy, Gabbard and Vance to chart a new course regardless of the howls and squeals of the usual suspects.

But at the same time things will look very familiar for awhile yet to anyone who is aware of just how many Republican Senators are still working for the enemy and just how powerful the entrenched Washington mindset (and accompanying corruption) remains. This is the context for everything we are seeing so far. For clarity let’s pin down exactly how the Swamp, the Democrats, and the Establishment Republicans have responded to Trump’s sweeping electoral mandate:

1. Bitch McCarthy continued as he has always been-a purely corrupt, purely obstructionist thorn in the side of any real progress, and an arch-manipulator working at all times to ensure the continuance of the business as usual, big spending free for all that is Washington DC. While publicly celebrating the Trump victory, he immediately started working with his Democrat counterparts and RINO Trump hating Republican Establishment Rump to take counter measures designed to limit the options of the incoming administration.

2. These moves for instance got the McCarthy clone Thune in place as the new Senate Majority Leader. Thune’s record of weakness, institutional D.C. loyalty (ie corruption) and standard conformity to every RINO assumption long since proven wrong does not bode well, however much he has more recently adopted a conciliatory tone towards Trump personally (the kind of ingratiating move that many RINOs have adopted in periods of Trump ascendancy).

3. McCarthy himself intends to head an Appropriations sub-committee on defence, in other words personally overseeing efforts to protect the military-industrial complex from the ramifications of a far less belligerent, much more war averse Trump period of foreign policy changes. The thought here seems to be that if the vast spending levels can be protected the ‘damage’ of a Trump term can be mitigated for the donor class who have controlled Republican hawks for so long. No doubt Lindsay Graham and Liz Cheney will approve of that.

4. The lead role on the main Appropriations Committee looks like it will be going to Senator Susan Collins as the next ‘seniormost’ Republican there after McCarthy. Collins has already stated in November that one of her priorities will be “funding biomedical research to save and improve lives”. In other words, protecting the second main corporate source of vast government spending and vast government corruption, Big Pharma. What we see with these two ‘appointments in waiting’ and expressions of interest is that Establishment Republicans are positioning themselves to try to mitigate and lessen any spending impact from things like the Vivek and Musk efficiency drive and the Kennedy anti-corruption pro-health agenda when these really get to work.

5. In a mirror play of the early removal of General Flynn from the first Trump administration, the intended Trump appointment of Gaetz was blocked. The standard Swamp tactic of ludicrous and extreme sex smears was trotted out (underage sex and see trafficking claims from a source with an established record of false sex smears against political opponents). The kind of pearl clutching moral disapproval of the accused we see from Establishment Republicans (who always treat these things as proven and a stain on the character of the accused no matter the source or the lack of substance to them) is really a tactic more than a reaction. Moral censure plays well to people who have real morals (the Republican base) while allowing you to basically collude in the removal of a Republican candidate who will be too good and too anti-corruption for your liking. The only good from it is that Gaetz may be free for some other role and now has an added incentive to bring a torch and pitchfork with him.

6. The Biden administration have responded to their loss with a frantic throw the money out the door approach, desperately trying to spend as much as is inhumanely possible to spend on everything except things the American people actually need. So vast trenches of additional spending have of course gone to climate change, African development, the usual roll call of foreign nations and alien causes. It seems that a few billion here and there can be assigned at will but for the transfer of trillions you still need a big spending bill.

7. Hence the Continuing Resolution Saga, the most business as usual part of all of it. In the original 1500 odd page monster we saw clauses that would have effectively prevented any real investigation of Biden era crimes, particularly such instances as those of the J6 Committee. Hidden in there was a huge 2.5 billion dollar Biolab Fund pumping more money to the same psychopathic bastards who created COVID and pushed the mRNA death jabs with the accompanying 4 trillion dollar wealth transfer of the COVID years. As usual, the Establishment Republicans were very happy with this.

Now to the rest of the CR Saga, and here we see some of the features that are different from the Bad Old Days. The standard features are these-a huge spending bill wrapping up multiple things and funding corruption, the attempt to push this through rapidly, the collusion of Swamp Republicans with their Democrat partners in crime to get it through, and the attempt to cast opponents as wild-eyed lunatics. This is all the usual stuff and the now very familiar parts of the ‘Threatened Shutdown’ playbook. Again and again we are told the government will shut down altogether unless huge extra spending is passed….as if such a shutdown really would be a bad thing (rather than a temporary suspension of vast theft).

So if that’s all far too familiar, what’s different?

Well this time the Trump Ascendency is so fresh and determined that there were actually parts of the CR that are good. The SAVE provisions to enshrine voter ID checks (to some extent) and the disaster relief for hurricane hit areas within the US are perfectly sensible and decent examples of things worth paying for, for example. This is what government spending is for if it has any justification at all (the smooth running of fair elections and the use of resources to help your own citizens where that help is both necessary and limited).

Different too is that the original monster with all its corrupt additions didn’t get through despite the Establishment efforts to pretend that it was all reasonable and necessary. It did get voted down. Trump made it clear first that the bit that couldn’t be ditched was ID electoral security, and that the rest was open to debate and attack. Just as importantly, Musk intervened. His intervention is really the very novel part of this. First, the existence of X allows real time comment and influence from the public on what is happening. That makes it much harder to confine everything to back room negotiations following the standard Swamp procedures. Rather than irate letters from Republican voters that some intern can chuck in a bin and rather than Swamp controlled mainstream media narrative you have millions of eyes on proceedings and millions of voices applying pressure as events unfold. Second, Musk intervened even more directly by threatening to fund primary campaigns against Republican representatives who voted on a Swamp mandated basis.

There seems to have been a real impact from that. Some social media commentary perhaps exaggerates the level of power X confers to the public and the level of threat Musk can bring to bear…but it is united with Trump’s mandate a definite huge positive and a potential tipping factor when the balance of a choice hovers between what the public wants and what the Swamp wants. This unites with and helps the bluntness of figures like Vance who are perhaps less likely to negotiate away a victory than Trump himself is and certainly less patient when dealing with Swamp Republicans playing pro Big Spending games.

Vance for instance came right out and condemned parts of the CR as “global censorship bullshit” which is a refreshingly and thrillingly blunt way to describe the kind of pork and tyranny additions Democrats always demand and Establishment Republicans always agree to.

Musk’s pressure is something Democrats are frightened of. This isn’t the GOP type they can have a dinner with and divide up spending spoils with. It’s not even the ‘art of the deal’ version of Trump. This is a new breed of people who actually do want to reduce spending and concentrate spending where it can actually get results for the nation instead of results for the private bank accounts of donors and politicians. Several squealed that Musk is ‘President Musk’. That kind of attack only comes when you are both effective and doing the right thing.

What we got that is unusual is Swamp Republicans largely forced into line, not behind a bad deal but in forcing a second slimmed down, more pork free version of the original CR. That was voted down primarily by the Democrats meaning that even the “you shut down the government causing chaos” line would be less effective if that occurs-Democrats voted for that.

What’s the biggest lesson of all? It’s three-fold.

First, what Musk did is vital. Primaries can’t be threatened as an abstraction. You have to show that you will do it and fund it and that Swamp creatures WILL be removed. Applying pressure on bad Republicans will be as vital to the success of this administration as applying pressure onto Democrats (or doing the opposite of what they want and ignoring their smears and howls) will be.

Second, there has to be the kind of bluntness and determination that Musk, Vivek, Gaetz and Vance possess, hopefully with the clear-headedness, the intellectual clarity, that Kennedy beings to national health and that Rand Paul beings to government spending. You have to really want those key tasks of reducing spending, reducing corruption and improving results to be things you hold to with a burning intensity. That intensity, by the way, can sometimes be reliant more on people enabled by Trump than by Trump himself. With the CR second version, some fat was trimmed, but a lot of bad was kept. Those saying Republicans voting against Trump were RINOs are missing the reality that Trump will sometimes accept a compromise that should not be accepted. In this case, rejecting the CR altogether was more in line with the spirit of MAGA and what the term can offer at its best.

Third, the days of multi-pronged spending bills wrapping up thousands of pages of different spending on different things have to be ended. There should be a budget that is adhered to. There should be emergency spending only as a very rate occurrence, not as a recurring feature. There should not be any last minute scrambles to shove through huge amounts of spending under the threat that everything will shut down unless you pass thousands of pages you haven’t read. That is a recipe for corruption.

How do you end that recipe? By doing what Musk did, but also by the very basic common sense that Thomas Massie proposes:

“This isn’t complicated. Separate the bills and vote on them individually. one vote on the clean CR one vote on the debt limit one vote on disaster relief one vote on farm bailouts Radical right? Individual bills for each issue.”

Here is as well an excellent summary of the kind of things that get stuffed into an emergency spending bill or an omnibus spending bill:

End omnibus spending bills and you don’t have this issue of huge amounts of spending being passed in order to get the one bit you want, and you don’t have a means by which the Swamp can insert endless funding for itself and its donors that builds a 36 trillion dollar debt in the first place. Make it so nobody can quid pro quo a herd of pork through the pigsty of Congress and you have an automatic mechanism for allowing necessary spending to pass while blocking unnecessary and corrupt spending at every turn.

An Act that specifically prevented a departing, detested and defeated administration from going on an immediate vast spending spree like a divorcee emptying the joint account might be a good idea as well. If there’s nothing within existing legislation stopping a transition period splurge that needs addressing. In the UK some years back the departing Blair administration left a gloating note for the incoming Cameron Conservative Party stating that the money had all gone. The Biden administration are currently acting as one would predict an administration headed by a crook would act in its final weeks and hours by spending madly and pardoning thousands of their friends and accomplices. That adds to the long list of Biden era crimes that will need addressing.

But Massie those spending bills and Musk those Swamp Republicans. That’s how you get your Better Days in the second term.