Cartagena The whole shutdown the government thing in the United States is a serious problem, but for the public it’s becoming another case of crying wolf too many times. As people dial down for the holidays and are wrapping their presents, or just taking a breather, they weren’t changing the channels from Hallmark movies to CNN to see what happened to the government. The regularity of these threats has become the equivalent of a Congressional parlor game, so good news again that the immediate crisis was averted for millions of federal employees and the public, but the can has just been kicked down the road again.
What’s more interesting this time at the apex of Trump’s post-election influence, where there is no accountability or guardrails, is that Trump and his buddy, Elon Musk, were just taught a lesson in how power works, and Trump just got reminded, once again, that there are high walls that his rhetoric faces when they have to confront reality. The 100-day honeymoon just got called off when it came to “I do.”
Granted that the Senate may be subservient in the checks-and-balances equation, but that is still to be determined. The old Republican lion Mitch McConnell could not have sent a clearer message recently to Trump and Robert Kennedy that touching something like the polio vaccine meant a slot of Fox News as a commentator might be the best he could hope for next year. We’ll just have to wait and see where the limits are there.
The House of Representatives is a whole different ballgame, as the MAGA-men were just reminded. A five-vote majority offers no cushion at all. If the Republican lead goes down to three votes, once some of the appointments are approved, and they leave Congress, no manner of huffing and puffing could blow the House down to his will. Furthermore, it’s unlikely to get better in two years. An incumbent administration rarely picks up seats, and, as a lame duck, Trump’s bloating will have little impact. Don’t get me wrong, they will still pass a lot of bad and evil stuff, but there are still limits.
Trump has a set of problems, if you remember his first term and his campaign promises. He wants to claim he will cut government, but he also has to deliver the goods to his base, and that means spending money. Thirty-eight Republicans voted with the Democrats to oppose the shutdown bill that Trump and Musk wanted. Admittedly, many of them are fiscal hawks who bucked at the feature in the bill that removed the debt ceiling a bit. But, as a Times’ graphic showed, most of them are pretty immune to Trump’s threats, either having been re-elected with margins between 10 and 30% or being on their way home. Remember, this was no landslide or mandate, and Trump’s coattails hardly covered his butt.
These votes were a good reminder that the President has power, but limits have to be remembered, or he will be reminded. We will see other reminders. The Supreme Court is terrible, but it’s not a rubber stamp. Trump’s record was not all wins and no losses. “His overall win rate [was] 17 percent, while past administrations generally won around 70 percent of cases, according to multiple studies.” No matter what they say, the Court also watches the polls, and they know the confidence in their decisions is abysmal, so going in their direction is not a gimme. Also keep in mind that many of its bad decisions strengthen review by Congress, rather than just empowering the executive branch. Furthermore, as Trump knows full well, and Musk is about to find out, the bureaucracy and the legal requirements around administrative and agency operations are big roadblocks to their hopes of being a bulldozer.
Trump and Musk need to enjoy these days while they can. There’s every sign that they aren’t going to last long, even if the rest of us will still be paying high prices for their act over the next four years.