#matt wuerker

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 31, 2024

On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.

He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.

Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.  

Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.

An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”

This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living

will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one. 

Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. 

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.” 

Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations. 

As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. 

At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” “Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.

A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” 

Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.

In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).

Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare. 

Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler. 

At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” 

The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone. 

In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally. 

This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.

Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.” 

The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

The lines at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse.

The Trump hush money trial has become a public grovelling pit for Republicans wishing to be Trump's running mate. These people have lost any remaining dignity they might have still had.

VP wannabees: Be careful what you ask for.

[mia-golgotha]

Matt Wuerker

[scottguy]

[aunti-christ-ine]

[allallestodo]

LiNK

[imkeepinit]

Editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winning POLITICO cartoonist Matt Wuerker from May, 2010.

Do We Subsidize the Wealthy? 100 Years of Federal Taxes

[el-ffej]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

[cynicalclassicist]

Like an evil cat.

[azspot]

Matt Wuerker

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 20, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 21, 2024

This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.

Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.

This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.

As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.

The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.

The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”

As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.

For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.

At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.

On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.

Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.

What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”

Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.

Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.

"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.

But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”

Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.

Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.

As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”

The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”

Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”

Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.

The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.

The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.

The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

The attendees of the Constitutional Convention were clearly against absolute rulers. There is nothing about immunity for presidents or other officials. The only time any form of the word immunity is mentioned is in Article IV Section 2 where it is used in relation to extradition.

The Trump-Bush "originalists" on the US Supreme Court have gone from following the original language of the Constitution to coming up with their own very original ideas on how to decide cases.

Here is the reality that we're living with today:

As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him. ��� Adam Serwer at The Atlantic (archived)

Trump needs to be defeated at the polls in November. And the only way to defeat him is to vote for Joe Biden. "Protest votes" for impotent third-party candidates who have no chance of winning are as useful as used toilet paper.

Don't rely on the current Supreme Court, some hypothetical sequence of convoluted actions, or some unlikely deus ex machina thunderbolt to rescue us. Nobody will save us from us but us.

We need to get out of our comfort zones and push the envelope around people we know. That doesn't mean getting into time wasting arguments with MAGA cultists; it does mean challenging Trump-curious comments from low information voters. Seeds of doubt planted now can germinate later this year.

People who feel nostalgic about the Trump years should be reminded that those included 2020 which saw the US with the worst COVID-19 response of any industrialized country. There's also Trump's attempted January 6th coup, his surrender to the Taliban, and the enormous tax breaks for the filthy rich.

I Will Vote

[editorialtoons]

Matt Wuerker/POLITICO

[scottguy]

[aunti-christ-ine]

The second amendment definitely needs to be amended to clarify its vague unclear wording.

[allallestodo]

LiNK