John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog offers tepid praise for Friday night’s congressional spending deal.
It could have been much, much worse. The “continuing resolution” that Speaker Mike Johnson initially came up with, I take it as a result of negotiation with Senate Democrats and others, was a 1,500-page monstrosity that didn’t just continue existing spending until the next Congress can meet. Rather, it added many billions in new spending along with a plethora of other offensive provisions.
That Frankenstein bill likely would have gone through, but for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramasawamy, who, even though their DOGE does not yet exist, exposed what was in the bill and mobilized conservative opposition against it. It went down in flames.
Next, Johnson tried a “clean” CR, but that didn’t pass because Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, wanted more political goodies in the bill.
Now a spending bill has passed the House, and it is a lot closer to a “clean” CR than to the original monstrosity. …
… We won’t have a “government shutdown”? Too bad. Last time we had a “government shutdown,” voters were on to it. They saw that government continued unabated, for better and worse, and understood that government shutdown hysteria is just Democratic Party propaganda. I don’t think “government shutdown” is anything for Republicans to fear.
That said, this bill is vastly better than the one Johnson and his team initially negotiated:
The 118-page bill — less than one-tenth the length of the original edition’s 1,547 pages — will fund the government at current levels until March 14, 2025.
That is probably the most salient metric. Elon approved:
Musk also backed the final bargain, tweeting: “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances. It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Ball should now be in the Dem court.”
Let’s call it a win and go forward. This whole story is another instance of how Donald Trump and his team–here, Musk and Ramaswamy–are wielding extraordinary influence even though they are not in office.
