Congress hits spending stalemate

Congress is once again trying to avoid a holiday-eve government shutdown by ramming through a last-minute continuing resolution to fund the government through the new year. The process, per usual, is angering various factions within the House of Representatives as Democrats, budget-hawk Republicans and the establishment GOP are at odds over how much to spend and what to spend it on and whether or not to raise the debt ceiling.

Johnson’s “Plan A,” which was a 1,500-page boondoggle negotiated primarily with Democrats, would have funded the government until March. It included $100 billion in disaster relief and farm aid and, much to the chagrin of conservatives, continued funding of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which the right has accuses of being a government-run censorship tool. The controversial package also gave a raise to members of Congress. Representative Dan Crenshaw had a meltdown on X over conservative activists criticizing him for his stunning success on the stock market amid his support for a congressional pay raise. “Plan A” failed as the GOP’s right flank slammed the last-minute nature of the deal, pointing out that there wasn’t even enough time to meaningfully go through the 1,500-page bill. Killing the bill was pushed along by Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump, who objected to the high levels of spending and the refusal to keep the debt ceiling open for Trump’s first year in office. 

Enter “Plan B.” The new plan was a smaller CR that included the disaster funding and farm relief but also extended the suspension of the debt ceiling so that Trump could make permanent his middle-class tax cuts and begin mass deportation operations without running into what he considered an arbitrary limit on spending (tax cuts count as government spending because they reduce revenue). That failed as deficit hawks like Representatives Chip Roy and Thomas Massie said they would not vote to continue suspension of the debt ceiling, though Trump pointed out the Republican Party in Congress had already extended that benefit to President Joe Biden.

Johnson is now on his “Plan C,” which breaks up spending into smaller, individual bills. There would be one vote on a stopgap spending, one on farm aid and one on disaster relief. There is no word yet on whether this new plan would address the debt ceiling question, but it would fund the government until March and would tamp down Democrat criticism that objecting to the 1,500-page bill means opposing children’s cancer research or giving money to states affected by recent hurricanes.

In order to prevent a shutdown, a deal needs to be reached by midnight. The bigger question is why Congress always waits until the last minute to hash out these differences and ultimately agrees to a plan that makes nobody happy. As Roger Kimball writes, “A ‘Continuing Resolution’ is the fig leaf Congress stitches together in order to conceal, or at least divert attention from, its failure to do its job and provide a fiscally sound budget in a timely manner.”

-Amber Duke

On our radar

MUSK MOUNTS A CHALLENGE Billionaire Elon Musk revealed he will be funding moderate challengers to Democrats he views as too progressive, such as Massachusetts representative Richard Neal, who criticized Musk’s similar promise to oust Republicans who do not vote with President-elect Donald Trump on a Continuing Resolution for government funding through March. 

SINEMA SAYS STUFF IT Senator Kyrsten Sinema gave an exit interview with Semafor on Friday in which she dismissed critics, saying she doesn’t “give a shit” about leftist Democrats who accused her of being too friendly with the GOP. “I know some people think I’m, like, this enigma or whatever, but I don’t think that’s true at all,” she said. 

TRUMP DIVESTS President-elect Donald Trump moved his $4 billion stake in social media site Truth Social into a trust ahead of his second term as president. Trump launched the platform in response to being permanently suspended from Twitter (now X) and Facebook after his supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. 

Biden missing in action

While many are eager to blame President-elect Donald Trump or Elon Musk for any looming government shutdown, sitting President Biden is somehow avoiding much of the blame — because, as it turns out, he remains as missing in action as he’s been for much of his presidency.

Following the great switcheroo of 2024, where Democrats ousted Biden in favor of VP Kamala Harris, and her subsequent defeat by Trump, all can apparently now be revealed. The Wall Street Journal published a banner piece this week documenting how Biden’s decline was evident from almost the moment he took office.

“The president’s slide has been hard to overlook,” the Journal noted — despite the eagerness with which many did in fact overlook it. Canned CNN commentator Chris Cillizza recently issued “an apology: as a journalist, I should have pushed harder on the very real questions about Joe Biden’s physical and mental health as president.”

Of course, the Biden team insisted that everything was fine and that he would be the Democrats’ nominee in 2024, and that he would even defeat Trump again. All the meanwhile, “Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble,” per the Journal story.

“If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether,” the exposé continued. “On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”

This diminished capacity had real world effects, including how the administration presided over the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Congressman Adam Smith, a Democrat who was chairing the Armed Services Committee, told the Journal that the only time Biden ever called him was after he fiercely criticized the administration’s communications about Afghanistan. “The Biden White House was more insulated than most,” he said. “I spoke with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”

These problems impacted Biden on the campaign trail in addition to his time in the White House. Donors (and allegedly journalists) were instructed to pre-submit questions for him to answer ahead of fundraising stops. And yet, “even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time,” the story claimed.

Biden’s loyal servant, rapid response director Andrew Bates, remained defiant in the face of the reporting, like the last Japanese soldier to surrender in World War Two. Biden “earned the most accomplished record of any modern commander-in-chief and rebuilt the middle class because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of lives,” he insisted. At ease, Private…

–Cockburn

Luigi’s perp walk

Luigi Mangione, the twenty-six-year-old accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was hit with federal charges Thursday. The big story, however, hasn’t been the terrorism and murder indictments.

Mangione, who now shares a lawyer (Marc Agnofilo) and a home (Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center) with Sean “Diddy” Combs, was flown to New York City from Blair County, Pennsylvania, earlier that morning. As he stepped off the helicopter, clean-cut and donning an orange jumpsuit, the UPenn graduate was photographed surrounded by heavily armed officers and NYC Mayor Eric Adams.

The images have gone viral. The perp walk was clearly intended to send a message and did exactly that. Whether it’s the one Adams intended to send is the question. 

“Are they escorting him to Arkham Asylum?,” “a sexy Michael Bay-style perp walk” and “the greatest perp walk since Hannibal Lecter” are just some of the reactions online.

When asked about his appearance at the transfer by a reporter Friday morning, Adams said, “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we are leading from the front.”

“I am not going to allow [Mangione] to just come into our city, I want to look at him in the eye,” Adams explained.

–Juan P. Villasmil

Roger Kimball: The ever-Continuing Resolution
Freddy Gray: Oligarchs board the Trump train