An agreement was struck. Washington was ready to leave for the holidays having come together on a plan to fund the government and avert a shutdown — albeit with some grumbling on the Maga right.
Then Elon Musk jumped in. By Thursday morning, that deal had collapsed.
After days-long crusade by the Twitter and Tesla CEO, House Republicans began coming out in droves in opposition to the bill — in no small part due to a wave of phone calls from Republican voters furious over Musk’s tweets, which described the deal as “criminal”. Musk, in countless posts, raged against the legislation and overtly threatened to “end the careers” of any Republican who voted for it multiple times.
Trump came out against it too, after Musk declared that no government funding bill should be passed at all until his inauguration in January.
The deal, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, had been “detonated by House Republicans” because the GOP caucus “has been ordered to shut down the government”.
“This reckless Republican-driven shutdown can be avoided if House Republicans will simply do what is right for the American people and stick with the bipartisan agreement that they themselves negotiated,” the Democratic leader told journalists at his party’s press conference Thursday morning.
And he says he does not know whether Speaker Mike Johnson is still calling the shots in terms of supplying Republican votes for the legislation. Responding to a reporter who asked, “who is in charge?”, and questioned Musk’s role, Jeffries responded: “That’s a great question. I don’t have the answers right now.”
His fellow Democrats spent the day dunking on their Republican colleagues for changing course on Musk’s whims. The Twitter CEO, Democrats argued, was the real president-elect.
“We have an outside influence who believes, I think, that he is president. And that is President Musk,” declared Rosa DeLauro, a senior Democrat and key ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Pramila Jayapal, outgoing head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote on Twitter: “It’s clear who’s in charge, and it’s not President-elect Donald Trump.”
“Shadow President Elon Musk spent all day railing against Republicans’ CR, succeeded in killing the bill, and then Trump decided to follow his lead.”
Dan Goldman, speaking on CNN, added: “It’s one thing when you have Donald Trump governing by tweet…but now you have Elon Musk, an unelected oligarch, governing by tweet.”
One White House official who spoke to The Independent described the situation as evoking a sense of deja vu going back to late 2018, when then-President Trump reneged on a deal cut between then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to avert a holiday shutdown because it did not include funding for a wall along the US-Mexico border.
But the official, a Washington veteran who has served in senior roles working for multiple House Democrats, expressed incredulity that the current situation was being prompted by two people who currently have no official role in government.
