A couple of programming notes: Professional obligations being what they are, today's post is a bit on the short side, and we did not put a headline theme together.

Also, between professional and personal obligations, as well as the election, we can use a bit of a breather. So, the posts from Christmas Eve through New Year's will be a little light, too. We still expect to post something on most (or all) days, but it will be mostly "fun stuff" that is backlogged, and that we can put together in advance, as needed. There won't be much news for us to write about, anyhow. And if there IS something big, well, then THAT we'll write about.

The Clock Is Ticking...

Yesterday, our lead item had the headline "President Musk Kills Stopgap Spending Bill." Reader D.M. in Wimberley, TX, wrote in to point out, quite rightly, that the headline was extremely inappropriate: "I am sorry to have to quibble with you about terminology, as you are usually so conscientiously correct in these matters, but I believe the proper designation is President-elect Musk." We don't know what got into us; please accept our apologies.

In any event, as far as politics goes, President-elect Musk has proven to be quite adept at tearing things down. Of course, that's the easy part. He's shown no particular ability, or interest, when it comes to actually getting something done. And so, while Washington burned yesterday, the South African sat on eX-Twitter and fiddled.

Musk's co-President-elect (or maybe it's his assistant), Donald Trump, is not much better at getting things done. He was clearly caught by surprise when Musk torpedoed the previous spending deal, and he's since flopped around like a beached whale, firing off demands and counter-demands, largely at random. That means it's up to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to try to figure something out.

During the day yesterday, Johnson labored mightily to work some sort of miracle, and hammered out a "Plan B." This Plan B essentially had four provisions: (1) keeping spending at current levels, until March; (2) allocating $100 billion in disaster aid; (3) allocating $10 billion in Farm Aid; (4) suspending the debt ceiling for 2 years. The Speaker then brought the bill up for a vote, and... it went down in flames so hard that you could have mistaken it for the Hindenburg. The final vote was 174-235.

As he tried to find a way forward yesterday, and as he tries again today, Johnson has all kinds of problems. In no particular order:

• Two-Thirds Majority: At the moment, Johnson is endeavoring to pass the legislation under a suspension of the normal rules. The upside to doing it this way is that it stops troublemakers from throwing wrenches into the works by demanding procedural votes or trying to add amendments. The downside to doing it this way is that it requires a two-thirds vote to pass anything. Take a look at that vote tally again; Johnson needed 275 votes, and he came up... 101 short. He's not within a country mile of getting the kind of support he needs.
  
  Johnson could revert to normal order but, assuming no support from Democrats, he would essentially need a unanimous Republican conference. Good luck with that (and keep reading).
  
  
• Democrats Holding Firm: In a development that will undoubtedly gladden the hearts of many partisans on the left, the House Democratic Caucus is digging in, and is showing no particular inclination to help the Republicans clean up their mess. It is true that the package that failed yesterday had $100 billion in disaster funding, which is a goodie the blue team wants. It is also true, however, that the Democrats negotiated a much fuller package, with a much more balanced mix of Republican and Democratic priorities, and they don't intend to roll over and accept new, much less favorable, terms just because Elon Musk threw a temper tantrum.
  
  It is further true that Donald Trump initially called for a permanent end to the debt ceiling, and then changed his tune and called for a 2-year suspension. Many Democrats would be on board with getting rid of the debt ceiling permanently, since it's an unnecessary obstacle that primarily serves to put the federal government at risk of a default, and is primarily used as a weapon by Republicans. However, a 2-year suspension is a different beast entirely. That would essentially give the Musk-Trump administration a 2-year blank check to do whatever it wanted, fiscally, and then austerity would return just in time for a potential Democratic takeover of the House. Here's what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) blueskied out yesterday:

  GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check.
  
  Hard pass.

  In case you are trying to make sense of Jeffries' point, expressed in 360 characters or less, the general idea is that under a suspended debt ceiling, the incoming administration would pass deep tax cuts for rich people and corporations. Then, once the Democrats regained some amount of power in 2 or 4 or 6 years, the federal balance sheet would be so out of whack, Social Security would have to take a hit, just to try to right the ship.
  
  Jeffries' caucus appears to be almost entirely on board with him. Only two Democrats voted for the spending bill yesterday. One of them, naturally, was Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA). The other was Kathy Castor (FL). That means that Jared Golden (ME) did NOT vote for it. You know that you're not even close to cracking the Democrats' armor when you can't even get Jared Golden's vote.
  
  
• Elon Musk: Musk, as we note above, continues to stir the pot. And, as we noted yesterday, he takes the view that a government shutdown is not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing. So, he continues to encourage Republican members to rebel, with the implied promise that he'll have their backs when it's time to run for reelection.
  
  
• Republican Rebels: Many Republican members, especially the Freedom Caucusers, have heard Musk's message loud and clear. Yesterday, a staggering 38 members of the House Republican Conference joined the Democrats in voting against the spending bill. They, and several Republicans who voted for the bill yesterday, say they want much more in the way of spending cuts, or they'll be nays again, and again, and again.
  
  
• Trump Neutered: Donald Trump is certainly not leading from the front here, and he's not even leading from behind. He gave his full-throated endorsement to the Plan B spending bill, only to see it fail spectacularly. Put another way, when Elon Musk wants one thing, and Donald Trump wants another, thus far... Musk wins. Will that continue? And, if it does, how will Trump react? There's no predicting, since American politics has never seen anything remotely like this dynamic.
  
  It has occurred to us that the more people talk about "President Musk and his assistant Donald Trump" the angrier Trump is going to get. He does not like being mocked or upstaged and might do something about the current arrangement.
  
  Trump tried to reclaim a bit of... power, we suppose, by threatening to primary Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). But the first problem here is that Trump's not going to find someone able to out-crazypants Chip Roy. And the second problem is that Trump cannot sustain withering fire on 30 or 40 or 50 different members. A small handful, maybe up to half a dozen? OK. But much more than that, and his venom is too watered down. Further, the more frequently members of Congress defy him and get away with it, the more emboldened they will be.

Johnson and his leadership team are reportedly burning the midnight oil in search of some sort of creative solution. The most... probable, such as it is, is to split the various maneuvers into separate bills, and to try to cobble together four different two-thirds majorities. Seems like a steep hill to climb, from where we are sitting. And whatever the Speaker does, it remains the case that he's got dug-in Democrats on his left, intransigent Freedom Caucusers on his right, and not one but two cooks stirring the pot. Johnson's getting no help from Joe Biden, who is joining his fellow Democrats in letting the Republicans hang themselves, and he's beholden to a Dear Leader whose powers look to be slipping.

Eventually, of course, they will figure something out. It's true that, absent a deal, the government shuts down tonight at 12:01 a.m., but it's also true that a weekend shutdown isn't all that damaging. The rubber will really start to meet the road on Monday morning, and will do so even more aggressively next Monday morning, once the Christmas holiday is in the rearview mirror. The point is, the fire under Johnson is intense, but if he needs another day or two or three to hammer something out, he's not likely to see that as the end of the world.

But once he navigates this crisis, another big one looms. Trump is never to blame for anything, ever, and if the government shuts down for any meaningful amount of time, he's going to look to pass the buck. He doesn't dare displease his co-president, so he's surely going to stick Johnson with the blame. Already, the relationship between the two men has taken a frosty turn. It's also the case that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has said he will not vote for Johnson to keep the speaker's gavel. And two members told The Washington Post, off the record, that Johnson has already lost enough votes that he will not be reelected.

If Johnson is cashiered, who might replace him? It is not going to be easy to find someone who: (1) wants the job and (2) can get the votes of nearly every Republican member. That calculation might be the thing most likely to save the Speaker; the Republicans really don't want to start the 119th Congress off with a leadership struggle that makes the one at the start of the 118th Congress look like a Sunday social. That said, the whackadoodle faction of the Republican Party is already salivating over a possible alternative. You guessed it: Speaker Elon Musk.

As we have pointed out countless times, there are zero requirements for the speakership, other than being elected by a majority of the House. A Speaker does not have to meet any age, residency or citizenship requirements. Musk would be ineligible to succeed to the presidency, as he is not a natural born citizen, but other than that, he could indeed be chosen as Speaker. We think it is very, very, very unlikely that 218 or so House Republicans would support that, in part because they don't want any outsider to come in and take over, and in part because they don't want to give a loose cannon like Musk even more power. However, if Johnson gets taken down, and if the House Republican Conference simply cannot agree on a replacement, and if the time for certifying the presidential results gets near, and if Musk uses his social media platform to really put on the full-court press, well... maybe you can squint just right, and see it happening. It's a very, very long longshot, but it's not absolutely inconceivable, which really says something about the current state of the Republican Party, the Congress, and the country.

Another conceivable, but only slightly less unlikely possibility is this. After 50 failed votes for speaker, half a dozen moderate Republicans go to Hakeem Jeffries and make a deal. If all the Democrats vote for the leader of the moderate Republicans, along with the half a dozen moderate Republicans, the new (moderate Republican) speaker will run the House according to the rules and allow Democrats to introduce bills, amendments, etc.

We are not going to pretend that we have any real insight as to what happens next, but we will note that the betting markets had the chances of a shutdown at 75% yesterday, before dialing it back to about a two-thirds chance. Meanwhile, the odds that Mike Johnson is still the speaker on Jan. 1, 2026 are 50/50. That actually seems a bit overly optimistic about his chances, to us, but what do we know? (Z)

Willis Is out...at Least for Now

When it comes to the question of whether or not Fani Willis can continue to oversee the prosecution of Donald Trump, et al., for election interference under Georgia law, given that she commenced a romantic relationship with one of her (freelance) underlings, the Georgia appeals court has spent plenty of time futzing around and not making a decision. Yesterday, however, the futzing came to an end, as the all-Republican-appointed 3-person panel ruled 2-1 that Willis has to get off the case.

As soon as the ruling came down, Donald Trump got busy claiming that this marks the end of this particular "witch hunt," and that justice has been done. Not long thereafter, CNN was on the air with legal analyst Elie Honig, agreeing that the case is now dead in the water. Honig is a lawyer, and we are not, so maybe you should go with his opinion. On the other hand, he's made confident assertions like this before, and has been wrong.

It seems to us that there are still two rather important, unresolved matters. The first is that Willis can, and already said she will, appeal the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court. That body is made up of 9 members, 8 of them Republican appointees, one elected in a nonpartisan election. Thus far, Willis has been sustained by one Republican-appointed judge, at the district level, and then lost a 2-1 vote on the appeals level. By our admittedly hasty count, she's gotten two judges' votes in support, and two judges' votes in opposition. That would seem to suggest this case is a leaner, and could go either way, even in the hands of Republican appointees. We'll also add that Georgia law is pretty clearly on Willis' side, and that yesterday's ruling from the appeals court involved some creative interpretation and some hand waving, based on the notion that Willis has created the "impression" of impropriety.

Second, even if Willis loses on appeal, it's possible for her office to hand the case off to outside counsel. Honig said that would not happen, because it's so difficult, and it takes so much time to get someone new up to speed. Maybe that's generally true, but there are two things that are unusual about this particular case: (1) at least a part of it (the Trump part) wasn't going to go forward for 4 years anyhow, meaning there's plenty of time to get someone new up to speed; and (2) Fulton County has invested vast resources in this matter, and seems not likely to give up without a fight.

The only thing that really appears certain, to us, is that there will be no certainty in this case for months, at the very least, and possibly for years. (Z)

This Week in Schadenfreude: Hey, Hey, NRA, Time for You to Go Away

Regardless of your views on the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association is not your friend. They are, and have long been, a gun lobby funded primarily by the gun manufacturing industry, and their mission is to do everything possible to keep gun sales brisk. That means the NRA has often adopted positions that are entirely at odds with safe and sensible gun ownership, because the industry fears that any regulation, no matter how commonsense, will reduce gun sales.

This being the case, the demise of the NRA—which has been going on for something like a decade, courtesy of corrupt leaders like Wayne LaPierre—is certainly cause for some schadenfreude. And now, it looks like the organization has entered a death spiral. There's really a triple whammy that is going on. First, the legal bills have been through the roof, as the NRA tries to wrestle with all the corruption. Second, the gun manufacturing industry has been sending its money elsewhere. Third, many of the nation's gun enthusiasts mostly don't see much point in NRA membership anymore, which means revenue from that source is way, way down.

With income down, and operating costs up, the organization has taken the drastic step of liquidating most of its investment portfolio, so as to pay its debts. It had $72 million in stocks and bonds and the like at the end of 2023, and by the end of this year, that will be down to $25 million or so. That's the NRA's rainy day fund, and the day is not far off when there will be a bunch of rainy days, and no fund left to turn to.

There is one person who might be able to right the ship, and that's Donald Trump. He's spoken at various NRA conventions, and he once hugged the organization close. If he tried to rally the base, and told them that anyone who is True MAGA is also an NRA member, that might lead to an injection of capital. But there are two problems here. The first is that Trump doesn't like losers, and the NRA is a loser in bright, red letters right now. The second is that if anyone is going to fleece the rubes, Trump wants it to be Donald Trump and not, well, a bunch of losers.

Maybe the organization should check with Elon Musk, and see if he's interested in writing them a nice, fat check. He is something of a gun nut, after all. But assuming that this (very) white knight does not come riding to the rescue, there's every chance there will be no more NRA by the end of the Musk-Trump administration. (Z)

This Week in Freudenfreude: Be the Change You Wish to See in the World

The quote in the headline is supposedly from Mahatma Gandhi, though it doesn't appear in any of his published writings. We're actually pretty sure he borrowed it from Winston Churchill, who got it from Mark Twain, who stole it from Abraham Lincoln, who heard it from George Carlin. That said, our research into the matter is still ongoing, and it's possible there are one or two holes in our hypothesis.

In any event, it's a nice sentiment, regardless of who came up with it. And yesterday, there was a very good illustration of the general concept. We've written a little bit about this before, but in 1972, language was added to the Montana Constitution that says this: "The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations..." If you'd like to read the actual verbiage, along with a lot of information about how this came about, then this is the webpage for you.

In any case, a group of Montanans between the ages of 12 and 21, backed by an environmental activist group, decided that global warming is not consistent with "a clean and healthful environment in Montana," and so they filed suit, insisting that the state legislature do its constitutionally mandated duty to try to combat climate change. Among the 50 states, Montana is one of the most egregious producers of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis, so there's certainly room for improvement.

The suit was successful at the lower levels of the Montana court system and, yesterday, it prevailed at the state Supreme Court. In a 6-1 ruling, the all-Republican court decreed:

The District Court's conclusion of law is affirmed: Montana's right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system, which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers inclusion of the right to a clean and healthful environment.

Actually, this doesn't quite do it justice; the six justices absolutely eviscerated every argument made by the state, and by "interested parties" who filed amicus briefs.

Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-MT), whose top five campaign donors just so happen to include four companies with significant interests in petroleum (Bolch companies, Koch Enterprises, BK2 Holdings and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association), pitched a fit when he learned of the Court's decision, and complained that it would just increase regulations and energy costs. So, don't expect vigorous compliance from him or anyone who works for him. That said, even if the state's leadership digs its heels in, the plaintiffs still came out ahead here, as the Court struck down several recent laws, most obviously one that pretty strongly limited the circumstances under which a new energy project was required to undergo an environmental review. So, the ruling isn't just a moral victory—though it's certainly that, as well.

Have a good weekend, all! (Z)

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