So, Who Won The Standoff?

There's been a real effort to spin the outcome of the continuing resolution dispute as a loss for Trump and the Republicans. But as I noted yesterday, there's a big dog that diodn't bark, and it still hasn't: had Trump felt he lost, we would have seen bombastic posts against Speaker Johnson and other RINO Republicans, either from Trump himself or Elon Musk. Insead, we now have Trump simply moving on and threatening to retake the Panama Canal.

Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal calls it The Week the GOP’s High Hopes Collided With Reality:

House Speaker Mike Johnson had spent weeks negotiating with Democrats, carefully cobbling together the compromises it would take to secure a majority vote in the narrowly divided chamber. It was a delicate construction, a house of cards, that had already begun to teeter when Elon Musk emerged Wednesday to stomp all over it. By Friday, the government was spiraling toward a shutdown after a series of failed and aborted votes as Republican members bickered and excoriated each other on social media, on the House floor and in acrimonious closed-door meetings.

But this was the Democrat talking point in the wake of the continuing resolution's collapse. I quoted Jamie Raskin yesterday:

given where we were, this was probably the best possible solution. But, of course, it was not what we had agreed to, originally. There were six weeks of arduous negotiation and then bipartisan agreement to a deal that got blown up by a tweet.

I'm still scratching my head at this take: if the original deal that took six arduous weeks to work out was so great, how could it be blown up by a tweet? Why couldn't the concursus bonorum that drafted it just stay the course and put Trump-Musk in their places? The obvious reason was the threat of a shutdown. But wouldn't a shutdown have worked to the benefit of the swamp? Apparently not. If they'd thought Trump would look irresponsible by making the GS-12s late on their boat payments, why didn't they just call his bluff?

Interestingly, the Democrats didn't want anything like this. The worry they had was that Biden would upset the apple cart, not Trump:

One unnamed Democrat strategist told [The Hill} that Democrats do not even want Biden to get involved.

“The bigger story is that no one is asking him to be involved. Democrats in Washington just want the Bidens and their people to get the hell out of town so we can move on from them,” the strategist said.

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) agreed that Democrats would not want to listen to Biden at this point anyway.

“President Biden has been in lame duck status for most of this year. Even if he had something to say, it doesn’t seem there would be anyone listening,” Curbelo said. “His only strategy is to let President Trump, Elon Musk, and the Speaker own the chaos, since it was their decision to torpedo that bipartisan agreement [Speaker Mike] Johnson had built.”

But where was the chaos? The story line, as best anyone can figure it out, was that Musk, followed by Trump, tweeted that the original deal wouldn't fly, notwithstanding it took six weeks to negotiate. Within the space of two days, driven by abject fear of a shutdown, they came up with another deal that would fly -- and remember that on noon Friday, Leader Schumer was still demanding they return to the original. But if the choice was between a new Republican deal and a shutdown, they chose not to do a shutdown, even though they're still claiming the blame would have fallen on Trump.

This version simply doesn't fit. A much better explanation is from David Marcus at Fox News: Lawmakers get in line and chop 1,400 pages of pork, thanks to Trump and his DOGE tag teamL

Prior to the intervention by Trump, it looked for all the world like House Speaker Mike Johnson would stuff the Democrats’ stockings with pork and goodies to ensure that a shutdown did not mar next month’s inauguration.

. . . But a funny thing happened on the way to the bill’s passage. At Trump’s behest, Musk and Ramaswamy began posting on X all the deep flaws of the legislation, and there were some doozies.

. . . With the target softened, Trump tore into the bill, going so far as to threaten lawmakers who voted for it with primary challenges. Trump even indicated that Johnson’s speakership could be in doubt if he did not get in line.

And that was it. Ding dong the bill was dead, and the American people dodged, or should we say, "Doged," a bullet. By Friday night, the cleaner and leaner bill passed the House and a shutdown was averted.

The success of this strategy is reflected in the Democrat response -- the best they could do was trot out a crazy old lady to rail against President Musk:

The purple-haired lady is unhappy:

“President Musk said don't do it! Don't do it! Shut the government down! Imagine! What does he know about what people go through when the government shuts down?!”pic.twitter.com/CKzcVHWiAh

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 20, 2024

That simply didn't work, it just brought a new laughingstock to the fore, the octogenarian Rosa DeLauro with degrees from Columbia and the London School of Economics. Marcus continues,

Trump was new to Washington and its mendacious machinations in 2017, but not anymore. Today, like a seasoned veteran, he is not only poised to lead the nation, let’s face it, he is already doing it.

Make no mistake, this fight was a risk. A shutdown could have blunted the sweeping sense of optimism across America after the election. But with risk comes reward and today, having slayed the dragon of out-of-control spending, that optimism is only set to grow.

Trump has been resolving the constitutional crisis -- that is, the growing recognition that Biden hasn't been in charge, quite possibly since his inauguration -- by acting as though he's already president. That includes telling Justin Trudeau he'd be better off if he were governor of the 51st state, and now threatening to retake the Panama Canal. I don't think even Teddy Roosevelt would go quite that far -- and Trump isn't even president yet.

Recall that at ths point in 2016, they were threatening to invoke the Logan Act against him. Things have changed.