The last parliamentary drama made in Washington, broadcast live from the large set of the Capitol, threatened this Friday to close the tap of the US Government’s financing at midnight, paralyze the work of some federal agencies and leave some 875,000 officials without pay four days before Christmas. Finally, a vote in extremis in the House of Representatives avoided what could have been the last major legislative crisis of the Joe Biden Administration and the first of Donald Trump’s second presidency, even before he was born. Although it is hard to believe when you see the news and the influence he already exerts on the political life of the country, there are still 31 days until the president-elect takes office on January 20.
In this new season of the series of political entanglements, the leading role continued to be the 219 Republican congressmen of the Lower House, to whom the tandem formed by Trump himself and his new best friend, Elon Musk, the latest star to join the showled these days once again to chaos and misgovernment. It is not the first: those 219 politicians are the same ones who two years ago needed 15 rounds of voting, a record, to elect the leader of their meager majority, the speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was fired just 10 months later after a revolt by the party’s toughest wing. The same ones, too, who were burning candidates, in another demonstration of the ego fight that life in the Capitol has become, until they ended up with the current president of the House: Mike Johnson.
The impression that the ultra-conservative Johnson had finally calmed down his temper and controlled his people remained a mirage this week, when the vote on a law agreed upon by members of both parties to guarantee the financing of the Administration for three months and In addition, suspend the application of the debt ceiling until January 2027. If this suspension had not been agreed upon, which will allow the country not to default on its payments, Trump would not have been able to carry out many of his promises. star, such as tax cuts and the mass deportation of irregular migrants.
The script twist came from Musk, the richest man on the planet and, since he partnered with Trump during the campaign that returned the former president to the White House, also one of the most influential. A series of tweets on Trump then changed his mind and expressed his agreement with Musk, which led to the question of how far the Tesla owner’s influence over the new president really extends.
On Thursday afternoon, Johnson announced a new pact of his own, ready to be voted on, a plan B that introduced changes such as the elimination of the first salary increase for congressmen since 2009. Despite the fact that it had Trump’s approval ( defined it as “a very good agreement for the American people”), it did not survive its examination in the chamber: in the evening all but two Democrats in the House opposed it, as well as 38 Republicans. On that list of those who opposed the president-elect, a man accustomed lately to absolute control of the party, are some of the most unruly actors in the cast, supporting actors who have stolen the shot several times in these two years.
Vance to the rescue
Perhaps no image better exemplifies the frenetic Friday that was experienced in Washington than that of the vice president-elect, JD Vance, arriving after 7:00 in the morning to lend a hand to Johnson, whose head the Trumpist ideologue Steve Bannon is already asking for, in the task of bringing order to the Republican conference. In statements to reporters, Vance said, visibly irritated, that if the dreaded shutdown (a term that in the city’s political jargon defines the paralysis of financing) the Democrats will have to be blamed for voting en bloc against plan B. Trump, for his part, wrote on Truth, his social network: “If there is going to be a government shutdown, let it be now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20, under ‘TRUMP’ [las mayúsculas son suyas]. It is a problem that Biden has to solve, but if Republicans can help, they will.”
And Musk? He spent the morning sending messages on He also denied that he is “the shadow president” and boasted about what he plans to achieve with the revolution of cuts in the Administration that he is preparing and of which this entire scandal sounded like a simulation. Along with Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire, although much more modest, Musk heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which promises savings of two trillion dollars that seem difficult to achieve.
As for Biden, the still president remained on the sidelines and remained faithful to his style of recent weeks, a style that has been compared to the trend towards quiet quitting that sociologists invented a couple of years ago to refer to the silent renunciation of those young generations who no longer see as much sense in seeing themselves as slaves to work as the previous ones.
Or perhaps it is because Biden, who made his debut as a senator in 1972, is a veteran of the Washington circus, who knows perfectly well that the drama of the government shutdown is recurring in the city, which is usually fixed, as it was again the case, at the last minute and that if he does not do it it is not the end of the world: President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) had to face one per year. Latest shutdown Important was in December 2018, when Trump, who had control of Congress, requested funding to build the wall on the border with Mexico and the House of Representatives gave him a fight that ended in a resounding slap. It lasted 34 days and was the longest in history.
The consequences of not reaching an agreement are many, although not always easy to understand outside the United States. Often, not even inside. The budget engineering of this country is an arcane indecipherable even for the congressmen themselves, but here are some examples: there are essential government agencies, such as the FBI, the Border Patrol or the Coast Guard, that would remain open; air traffic controllers and mail carriers would continue their jobs; National parks and monuments would close and many civilian employees of agencies like the Department of Defense would be sent home. The criminal proceedings would be interrupted, but not the civil ones.
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. https://t.co/KnSwLEjvjd
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024
Johnson passed this Friday’s test, but he should not get too confident. At the beginning of January, when Congress returns from the Christmas recess, the Republicans in the Lower House will have to elect their leader again, and, given what has been seen, his renewal as speaker it is not guaranteed. “The Speaker of the House of Representatives did a good job in this case, given the circumstances,” Musk said in X after the vote and in a somewhat condescending tone. “It went from being a bill that weighed kilos [en inglés, escribió pounds, libras] despite tens of grams [ounzes, onzas]. The ball should now be in the Democrats’ court.”
In the November elections, his Republican rivals obtained the majority in Congress, although the victory did not correspond to the unequivocal victory obtained by Trump in the presidential vote. The margin they have – 220 representatives, compared to those of the 215 Democrats – is much shorter than the appetite for chaos that their members have shown in recent times.
