President Musk?

Trump has managed to violate the Constitution by running for government office as a proven insurrectionist, so it makes sense that he would do it again by allowing a foreign-born citizen to serve as President.

Elon Musk, who bought Trump for over $200 million and violated the Thirteenth Amendment by owning someone, has stepped in and is calling the shots with Congress.  As soon as Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bipartisan stopgap bill to und the government, Musk, the richest man in the world and a major government contractor, denounced the bill as wasteful and demanded that the bill be scrapped.  Trump, acting as his chief of staff, agreed.  The bill camethisclose to going down completely and causing a government shutdown right in the middle of the holidays.  But Democrats stepped in and rescued the bill when it became apparent that letting the GOP twist in the wind wasn't worth the pain that would inflict the country as a result of a shutdown.

Musk is in a position to get whatever he wants in negotiations over the budget simply by telling Trump his demands and using his social-media platform to browbeat congressional Republicans.  He can also direct foreign policy by using his influence for his own personal gain not just with Trump but with other foreign leaders - why else would he have sat in on a telephone conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky?  

This is why the Founders put all of those restrictions in the Constitution - the emoluments clause, the prohibition on foreign-born citizens in the Presidency, the check and balance on the executive branch by giving power to the legislative branch - and it's also why the location of the national capital was based on the approximate center of population (as it existed in 1787) and was placed as far away from business interests as possible.  Technology and the westward centering of the population made Washington, D.C.'s location irrelevant, but Musk, through flattering Trump while flattering his own wallet, has managed to render the constitutional guardrails against his (Trump's) use of power ineffective as well.

Musk and Trump lost this round on the budget, but the outsize influence Musk exhibited means that more chaos is to come.     

It's Our Own Default

Some people claim that there's a woman - Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert - to blame.

But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen isn't playing any blame games.  She's coming right out and saying the not only will the United States reach the debt ceiling this week - Thursday - but she can only keep paying incurred government bills until June - not through September, as previously hoped.

Republicans hope to use this man-made crisis (or woman-made crisis, if you blame Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert for it) to get President Biden to cut domestic spending and zero out funding for hiring IRS employees to allow the debt ceiling to go up and the allow the rich to make out like bandits while the poor and a good chunk of the middle class fall by the wayside.  Or maybe fall into a bottomless pit, so that they keep falling for all eternity.

What can the Democrats do on their own?  Probably nothing.  It's either capitulate to the GOP, or let the economy crumble and start a depression.

People thought the Republicans would be less extreme toward all matters economic when they won only a narrow majority in the House, but a House majority is still a House majority, no matter how big it is.  

The best - no, only - hope is for the Democrats to get at least six Republicans to join them in issuing a discharge petition to have a debt ceiling vote over Kevin McCarthy's objections and try to get a majority to pass it.  As for the possibly of default, the Republicans do have an idea: they're working on a contingency plan to enact if the government does default, which I assume involves blaming the Democrats for everything.  By contrast, a discharge petition \could take awhile, given the nuances of House procedure.

And in case you haven't noticed, Americans can't be bothered with nuance, preferring instead to shoot first and ask questions rarely.

If ever.

The Businessman

Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in part because many people believed that a businessman who served as President could run the country like a business and get it back on track as only a CEO could.  Henry Ross Perot, who died last month at the age of 89, was the anti-Trump.  For one thing, Perot actually ran a successful business - two, in fact - that designed and operated data processing systems.  The earlier business, Electronic Data Systems (Perot Systems was his second), was bought by General Motors, earning Perot a seat n GM's board of directors, where he was too honest about the quality of GM's products.

Perot parlayed that honesty into his 1992 presidential campaign, in which he ran as an independent and told everyone the unpleasant truth about how the runaway spending and misadministered government programs initiated by both parties got us into a big mess and left the country ill-prepared.  In 1992, Perot's campaign rallies rivaled Nirvana concerts in terms of audience drawing power and coolness; he made fiscal responsibility combined with a social conscience fashionable, and millions responded to his message and to his wonky TV ads explaining what was wrong and what needed to be done.  (Here we are now, educate us!)  Perot's patriotism ran deep, as evidenced by his work in trying to find missing American servicemen in Vietnam and getting them home.        

Perot won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, the best showing fora third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and he took as many votes from Democrat Bill Clinton (who won) as he did from Republican George H.W. Bush.  Had he run at a different time in American history - like say, at a time of anxiety after two two-term Presidents, one of each party, a condition that benefited Trump - Perot might have won, even as an independent.  And under a Perot administration, we all might have been better off.  He knew what he was doing.  RIP.

No Railway or the Highway

A report from Tampa, Florida on The PBS NewsHour re-affirmed my lamentable conclusion about the utter stupidity of this country's federal transportation policy.

Tampa wants to build a light rail line to serve the central city and the surrounding suburbs in Hillsborough County, and it has the strong backing of the city's Democratic mayor. It would increase mobility and create more jobs Local Republican leaders, citing the tax increases and extra spending this would involve, oppose it, and they have similar reservations if not outright hostility toward a high-speed rail line to connect Tampa to Orlando. The Republican mayor of nearby St. Petersburg, to his credit, supports it so long as his city is also included in this line, which would mostly run down the median of Interstate 4.

One local Tea Party member insists that the federal government only has basic duties, such as the common defense and a national highway network. He didn't come out and say the government does not have the responsibility to build a railway network - which is of course public transportation, not like a highway, which is a public right of way for private vehicles - but that's pretty much what he intimated.

And I could have sworn he said the Constitution provides for the Interstate Highway System, although I don't recall the Founding Fathers suggesting a need for concrete roads for motorized vehicles. As for the idea of the Constitution mandating a national road system, Henry Clay repeatedly tried for a national road and canal network in the early nineteenth century, but his opponents kept thwarting him, insisting that transportation was a state issue that the federal government had no right to be involved in. President Andrew Jackson, for one, didn't think Clay's proposal constituted interstate commerce and so wasn't covered by the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress shall have the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

And oh yes, "Interstate" 4 only goes through Florida. As with any other mainline Interstate, its construction was funded federally with money shared by the states. Did this help interstate commerce? Or was this highway, which crosses the Florida peninsula between Tampa and Daytona Beach, just built to encourage development in central Florida?