The World’s Richest Man Wants to Burn It All Down
We knew Elon liked strategic acquisitions. We didn’t know the spines of House Republicans came quite so cheap.
Per NBC News, the Republicans who welcomed Elon Musk into their tent as a key decision-maker and thought leader are having an excellent time:
Musk helped lead a revolt Wednesday to try to stop a bipartisan funding bill in a direct challenge to the authority of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and others in Republican leadership who helped craft the measure. And in a remarkable turn, the revolt appeared to succeed at least for a day, throwing budget negotiations into chaos and increasing the odds of a government shutdown this weekend, . . .
Musk posted to X about the funding bill more than 100 times over the course of the day. He repeatedly called the bill “criminal” and asked his followers to call their representatives . . . Musk also issued a midday warning: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!”
Happy Thursday.
The Kent Brockman Republicans
by William Kristol
Yesterday’s chaos on Capitol Hill was primarily a story about Donald Trump and Elon Musk, these two unfit humans who will, more than anyone else, influence the fate of the world’s oldest democracy and only superpower over the next four years.
But let’s take a moment to note the other players on stage, the neglected players with minor roles, what one might call the extras. I’m speaking of course about our elected representatives—in particular our elected Republican representatives. They played their part in yesterday’s theater of the absurd, in which an agreement their own House leader had crafted to fund the government was blown up by Musk’s disapproval of it, and then Trump’s 11th-hour demand to add a debt ceiling hike to it.
Their capitulation was necessary to the success of Trump’s and Musk’s willful bullying.
One might note that these representatives actually hold current government office, unlike Trump and Musk. They have actual responsibilities, unlike Trump and Musk. Indeed they have sworn an oath to the Constitution that they will “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office” they hold.
Yet, needless to say, their priority isn’t to well and faithfully discharge their duties. Their priority is to listen closely so that when Trump and Musk say, “Jump,” they promptly ask, “How high?”
They are the Kent Brockman Republicans. As you will recall, in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, Brockman, the pompous local news anchor, was convinced that the Earth was about to be invaded and conquered by giant space ants. He fearfully announces his willingness, his eagerness, to submit to the invaders:
One thing is for certain: There is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Brockman presumably feared for his life. Or feared the terrible torture of enraged ants. What do these Republican representatives fear?
Loss of office through primary challenges. That was Musk and Trump’s threat on social media: “Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this [support the continuing resolution to keep the government open] should, and will, be Primaried [sic].”
Is the prospect of a primary challenge as awful as being devoured by ants? Apparently so, judging from the behavior of our Republican representatives.
One could try to reason with those elected representatives, pointing out that any primaries are over a year away; that it’s unclear Trump would even follow through on this threat, let alone win scores of primaries against incumbent Republican members; that their voters may actually be more upset if they willingly shut down the government over the holidays at the behest of the world’s richest man. But making such arguments would be in vain. When fear has taken over, reason goes out the window.
The House Republicans fear their incoming insect overlords. So they capitulate to them before they’ve even taken office.
In recent years it’s become a Republican talking point, when attacking some reform that might strengthen our democracy, to say, But we’re a republic, not a democracy. It’s true that the Founders made the case for a representative republic as opposed to direct democracy. Part of that case, as explained in Federalist No. 10, is that “the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest” should have the effect
to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.
Republicans once claimed to admire Madison and Hamilton. But the Founding Father for today’s Republicans is Kent Brockman.
Preferring Not to See
by Andrew Egger
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t exactly hidden his anti-vaccine views over the years, as hundreds of hours of video footage, numerous books, and many documentaries show. And yet, on the cusp of being considered for the top health post in the country, Senate Republicans are suggesting they’re reassured Kennedy has moderated his views based on their brief, one-on-one conversations.
“I think he’s done a good job of answering a lot of the questions about his views on vaccines,” incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told CNN after meeting with Kennedy this week. “I think he understands the values and benefit that vaccines play and have played through the years preventing disease.”
We don’t know exactly what Thune and Kennedy discussed. (Neither party opted to fill me in, although I did ask.) But come on!
Kennedy may well have denied—as he has in public for years—that he is truly “anti-vaccine.” Like many other anti-vaxxers, Kennedy prefers to be thought of as a stickler for vaccine safety.
But one would have to be deliberately obtuse or willingly naïve to think that Kennedy has suddenly seen the light about the benefits of vaccines. He has spent years arguing that the vaccines currently on the market are harming more people than they help. And he’s actively campaigning against their continued use, pending a brand-new regimen of placebo-controlled testing.
In one interview, Kennedy made the case against the measles vaccine by noting what a great time he had when he and his siblings caught the disease, which can have gruesome complications including brain swelling (you don’t say?), gastrointestinal issues and fever, sepsis, and septicemia.
“My 11 brothers and sisters, we all had measles and it was a great week” he said, describing the cure for measles as “chicken soup and vitamin A.”
He has declared that “the polio vaccine does not work” and argued that it in fact could be responsible for a wave of cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.”
In 2021, he told podcaster Alec Zeck that he tries to actively convince people not to get their kids vaccinated. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not to get him vaccinated.’”
Last year, he went further while speaking to podcaster Lex Fridman: “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
A few months later, in a CNN appearance, he tried to clean those comments up:
What I meant—which was a bad use of words in this—none of the vaccines that are currently on the mandated schedule for children, the 72 vaccines for children, have ever been tested in a pre-licensing safety study. What that means is that we do not know what the risk profile is for those products.
When Kennedy argues that he just wants to “test” vaccines—or when Donald Trump says, as he did last weekend, that “there are problems” surrounding pediatric vaccination and “we’re going to find out what those problems are”—what he is saying is actually quite drastic.
In the worst case, Kennedy could try to suspend authorizations of these vaccines pending the outcomes of such trials. Even if he were to leave those authorizations in place in the interim, he’d still be calling for new large-scale vaccine trials involving hundreds to thousands of participant children, half of whom would be getting saline injections instead of the shots that we’ve already known have been safe and effective for years.
Thune and his compatriots should, and probably do, know all this. It’s all just a Google search away.
But Republican senators appear enormously motivated to find their way to “yes” on Kennedy’s nomination. Trump suggested over the weekend that he could support primary challenges to those who oppose his nominees; and as I reported last week, his fervent acolytes in right-wing media are doing a lot more than suggesting.
So it’s easier for everybody involved for Kennedy to sit down with senators and paper over his clear record while they nod along. Everyone wins. Including measles.
Quick Hits
THE FANFIC CAUCUS: Rand Paul is here to remind us things could always get stupider: “The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress,” the senator observed this morning. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk . . . not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka ‘uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds.”
He wasn’t the only one writing congressional-procedure fan-fiction. “Someone suggested the following plan to me,” former Rep. Matt Gaetz shared yesterday. Gaetz mused that he could show up to Congress on January 3, participate in the speaker election (“I was elected to the 119th Congress, after all”), take his oath of office, file a motion “to expose every ‘me too’ settlement paid using public funds,” and then resign in time to start his first broadcast on One America New Network. Quite the plan, if Gaetz hadn’t already resigned from the next Congress in advance!
SPEAKING OF GAETZ: Here’s news we honestly didn’t see coming: CNN reported yesterday that the House Ethics Committee secretly voted earlier this month to release its ethics report into Gaetz after all: “The report is now expected to be made public after the House’s final day of votes this year as lawmakers leave Washington for the holidays.”
It’s a remarkable and welcome about-face, given the committee initially seemed poised to sit on its own report after Gaetz resigned from Congress last month. Still, one can’t help but be a little cynical about the timing. The committee seemed more reluctant to take action that could shine light on Gaetz’s alleged misbehavior when Donald Trump wanted to make him attorney general. It then decided to go ahead and release the thing once Trump had moved on and Gaetz was on his way out of government. Shouldn’t that have been the other way around?
EVERYTHING IS GOING WELL: The now-dead continuing resolution that would have kept the government funded became a target of MAGA ire for a lot of fuzzy reasons, but maybe the silliest was that it would have given lawmakers their first pay raise since 2009. When a producer for Tucker Carlson accused Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) of “spearheading” that effort, Crenshaw blew up at him: “Yeah or maybe you’re a f—ing lying piece of s— . . . whatever gets you pathetic bottom feeders your click bait.”
This, of course, drew other MAGA influencers like moths to a flame: “Dan Crenshaw is the America-last, Ukraine-first war pig who doesn’t need a raise because of all the money he makes when he miraculously became a stock expert since joining Congress,” wrote the thought leader who goes by “Catturd.”
This all might sound pretty harsh, but don’t worry—this is actually just the process by which great legislation is made.
Cheap Shots
This anti-elite populism is really getting out of hand:
Former Rep. Kinzinger calling Musk the President Elect and Trump the VP is PERFECT. We need to mock these self-serving gangsters. It also serves to cause Trump to question having Musk on his team, which is a bonus!
Elon bought Trump. Full Stop.
No Republicans -- House or Senate -- have spines. They disintegrated years ago and are now dust.
The only question is whether the Republicans will take it with or without lube.