Prescott Bush As Finpol

This year, we've been in and out of Ferdinand Lundberg's world of finpolity as outlined in his 1968 book The Rich and the Super-Rich, and which I summarized in this post. It turns out that, although Prescott Bush's wealth can be traced to his wife's father, George Herbert Walker. who was presidenr of the Harriman family investment bank, W A Harriman & Co, and Prescott himself became a managing partner of its successor, Brown Brothers Harriman, and was closely associated with Edward Harriman's sons, W Averell and E Roland, Prescott himself is never mentioned as a finpol in The Rich and the Super-Rich.

This was almost certainly by design. According to Britannica,

At least some portion of the Greenwich Bushes’ financial stability came by way of the largesse of the Walkers, who were ostentatious in their demonstrations of wealth, whereas Bush counseled his offspring to play down their wealth and instead advocated public service as a sort of noblesse oblige.

By the early 1900s, following the example of the Rockefellers, the object of the finpolity was to keep a low profile and generally stay out of the news, not least to avoid assassins and kidnappers, but also just to stay clear of damaging publicity. I suspect that most of the families Lundberg identified in his various books would have preferred not to be mentioned and envied the Bushes -- by 1968, for instance, George Bush pere was simply an obscure Texas congressman. However, neither Prescott nor his son George completely avoided accusations of shadowy connections. According to Wikipedia,

In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that [George H W] Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this claim.

In the 1930s, Prescott's name surfaced in connection with the so-called Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, "a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator".

In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany, although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error. According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."

Nazis? According to Britannica, this involved Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's company:

BBH’s association with the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, which continued even after the start of World War II, would taint its reputation. Similarly infamous was the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a BBH asset managed by Bush that transferred funds, bonds, gold, coal, oil, and steel to Nazi Germany during its military buildup. In 1942 the U.S. government, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized UBC and other German-affiliated BBH assets, but Bush was never found guilty of a crime, and the affair would neither prevent Averell Harriman from becoming the Democratic governor of New York nor have lasting political ramifications for Bush or his progeny.

It's possible to make too much of this. Germany was a major part of the European economy, and all US companies had involvement there after Hitler came to power, much like they have stakes in China now. But I noted yesterday a passage in a New Yorker piece that also referred to Prescott's involvement in funding a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor. It's also difficult to tell when Prescott's connection with Averell Harriman began. He and Harriman were from the same social background, and both were at Yale in the 1910s, where both were also members of the Skull and Bones secret society. By the early 1920s, Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was president of the Harriman bank.

By the time of World War II, when Prescott was also at BBH, Harriman was heavily involved in Allied diplomacy and strategic planning as Roosevelt's emissary.

Harriman served as ambassador to the Soviet Union until January 1946. When he returned to the United States, he worked hard to get George Kennan's Long Telegram into wide distribution.[13] Kennan's analysis, which generally accorded with Harriman's, became the cornerstone of Truman's Cold War strategy of containment.

From April to October 1946, he was ambassador to Britain, but he was soon appointed to become United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948, he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan. In Paris, he became friendly with the CIA agent Irving Brown, who organised anti-communist unions and organisations. Harriman was then sent to Tehran in July 1951 to mediate between Iran and Britain in the wake of the Iranian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

By this time, Harriman wasn't just involved in intelligence, he was driving intelligence at the policy level. By the early 1950s, both Harriman and Prescott Bush began to seek elective office. Harriman was elected Governor of New York as a Democrat in 1954 but was defeated for re-election by Nelson Rockefeller in 1958, one of many juxtapositions of finpol families in electoral competition. Prescott ran for the US Senate as a Republican in 1952 and won; he was re-elected in 1958 but declined to run again in 1964.

Business Insider quotes Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy (2008) in summing up Prescott Bush's political influence on George H W and Dubya:

His passion for politics, of course, trickled down to future generations of Bushes. Weisberg writes that, while George H.W. Bush never worked on any of his father's campaigns, he watched closely. He inherited his father's sense of duty.

"Prescott Bush established three essential myths that Bush men lived by," Weisberg writes. "The first is: I made it on my own. The second is: I'm not really rich. The third is: I'm running to serve my country."

But, in the spirit of Prescott Bush, this nevertheless leaves a great deal unsaid. How much was Prescott involvred in Averell Harriman's intelligence activities? How far was Prescott able to place his son George in CIA related activites? In particular, by the time George was named CIA Director in 1976, he'd had fairly minimal public involvement in intelligence -- he was a member of the US House from 1967-71; UN Ambassador from 1971-73; Chair of the Republican National Committee 1973-74; and Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China 1974-75, prestigious jobs, but not necessarily a worker bee at the policy level.

What else had he been doing suddenly to become the chief spymaster?

A Detour Into Prescott Bush

Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy, the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post:

The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha.

The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of deep-state programs that deploys mentally reprogrammed or chemically enhanced agents who operate extralegally to assassinate problem people, who tend to be idealistic humanitarians with inconvenient views. Jason Bourne, the central figure, is one such agent, who loses his memory when he's nearly killed in an operation, and in the course of regaining it, he discovers his role in the program and sets out to expose it.

This view of a world dominated by clandestine agencies operating outside the bounds of law strikes me as a remarkable paradigm for our recent history, as Democrat Leader Charles Schumer commented on the eve of Trump's first inauguration, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I began to pursue this idea again yesterday as I ruminated on the remarkable obtuseness of Walter Russell Mead when he characterized George W Bush as a "Jacksonian", a movement that championed greater rights for the common man and was opposed to any signs of aristocracy in the nation.

There's also the troublesome problem of both Dubya's and his father's close association with neoconservative foreign policy. Mead himself calls Bush pere a "Hamiltonian", which supposedly favors international commerce and institutions, as opposed to Dubya's Jacksonianism, but the foreign policies of both Presidents Bush strike me as completely congruent, based on prominent foreign military interventions in undeclared wars, variously in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Panama.

Trying to draw a distinction between a "Hamiltonian" and "Jacksonian" in trying to explain this is simply misleading. Jason Bourne understands recent history better than Walter Russell Mead; it's based on a clandestine-service deep state with interventionist instincts that appears to have evolved between World War I and the Cold War, with milestones including the development of the FBI in the 1920s under J Edgar Hoover, the rise of the OSS during World War II under "Wild Bill" Donovan, which morphed into the CIA (over Truman's strong objection) during the Cold War, most notably under Allen Dulles.

One factor in this history has been he Bush dynasty. Again, this points to Walter Russell Mead's obtuseness in calling Dubya a "Jacksonian"; the Bushes, as much as the Kennedys, are the closest thing we have to an aristocracy. Mead, himself a Yale alumnus like the Bushes, seems completely unconscious of this.

There are also tantalizing references tro intelligence work throughout the Bush family's 20th-century history. Bush pere was CIA Director in 1976-77. His father, Prescott Bush, according to Wikipedia,

served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers.

According to The New Yorker,

In the mid-forties, when Prescott helped fund a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the spy organization staffed and run by his Ivy League associates, the worlds of intelligence and national security opened to the Bush family.

From the perspective of the post-Dubya years, it's worth revisiting the Bush family history and trying to parse out why the Bush family and their loyalists like the Cheneys have aligned themselves so clearly against Trump, and in fact why Trump seems to have grasped instinctively the need to purge the Bush influence from the Republican Party. I'll detour into this.

A Generation Ago, They Called Dubya "Jacksonian"

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002:

When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president.

Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests.

I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on,

Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a century ago.

Wait just a moment. Milbank misses an important point, Dubya's 2000 opponent:

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was born on March 31, 1948, in Washington, D.C., as the second of two children born to Albert Gore Sr., a U.S. Representative who later served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator from Tennessee. . . . During the school year he lived with his family in The Fairfax Hotel in the Embassy Row section in Washington D.C. . . . Gore attended St. Albans School, an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1965, a prestigious feeder school for the Ivy League. . . . He graduated 25th in a class of 51, applied to one college, Harvard University, and was accepted.

It's pretty clear that Al Jr was admitted to Harvard in a "basket" reserved for children of celebrities, prominent politicians, and other powerful figures. It didn't hurt that he came from St Albans, but of course, that's how he got into St Albans, too. Dubya, Yale Bonesman, was that because his dad was a Yale Bonesman before him, but then Bush pere's dad, Prescott Bush, was a Bonesman, too. Prescott's uncle and grandfather were Yalies as well.

In fact, Dubya's 2004 opponent, John Kerry, was also a member of Skull and Bones at Yale. In retrospect, what a strange interlude that was -- with few exceptions, beginning in 1988, a succession of privileged, elite-school alumni competed with each other for the presidency from both parties, all of them increasingly detached from the plebeian American experience.

We might say this culminated in Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, only nominally people of color, neither a descendant of US African slaves, whose childhoods were privileged, much of that time living outside the US. Harris in particular dressed as a full-fledged member of the US white upper class while affecting African-American street argot, and very few in the media had the temerity to speak about this. Milbank noted a similar juxtaposition in his 2002 essay:

Jackson was a frontiersman who spoke of the "idiots" in Washington. The cowboy-boot wearing Bush often ridicules Washington in speeches.

A legacy Yale Bonesman who wears cowboy boots whose grandfather was a Wall Street banker closely associated with the Democrat Harrimans. Not all that different from Kamala Harris, if you ask me. Milbank goes on to explore Dubya's "Jacksonian" instincts:

The Council on Foreign Relations' Walter Russell Mead, in a book last year titled "Special Providence," discerned four strains of American foreign policy: the Hamiltonian approach, which favors international commerce and institutions; the Jeffersonian approach, which frowns on costly international entanglements; the Jacksonian approach, an unapologetic flexing of military might; and the Wilsonian approach, an internationalism based on moral values.

The first President Bush had heavy Hamiltonian instincts. Bill Clinton mixed the Hamiltonian with the Wilsonian. Mead's book came out before it was possible to categorize the current president and his response to the Sept. 11 attacks. A recent conversation with Mead, though, allowed for some updating: Bush, he says, is increasingly pure Jacksonian.

The Jacksonian label "summarizes everything Europeans don't like about a strain of American foreign policy," Mead said. "It's a feeling that the preservation of our people, our national community, is the highest law."

Jacksonians have little use for international law. When Jackson was fighting Indians, he crossed into foreign territory, arrested and hanged British subjects. As president, he sent the Navy to Sumatra to burn a settlement that had insulted the American flag.

But if Mead thought Dubya was a pure Jacksonian, what is Trump? On Trump's first Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, Mead wrote,

For the first time in 70 years, the American people have elected a president who disparages the policies, ideas, and institutions at the heart of postwar U.S. foreign policy.

Wait. What about Dubya? But Mead goes on to re-explain his four basic foreign poicy strains:

When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms.

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law.

. . . Jeffersonians, including today's so-called realists, argue that reducing the United States' global profile would reduce the costs and risks of foreign policy. They seek to define U.S. interests narrowly and advance them in the safest and most economical ways. . . . Both Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seemed to think that they could surf the rising tide of Jeffersonian thinking during the Republican presidential primary. But Donald Trump sensed something that his political rivals failed to grasp: that the truly surging force in American politics wasn't Jeffersonian minimalism. It was Jacksonian populist nationalism.

I'm not at all sure that Mead understood Trump especially well then, and still less now. What about Trump's Christmas messages on Truth Social?

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump kicked off the lengthy posts by wishing a merry Christmas to all, “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal.”

. . . Trump then mocked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he referred to as “governor," and suggested once again that the United States could annex Canada as its 51st state.

He wrote that "if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World."

Trump continued his post by addressing “the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”

Jacksonian? If you ask me, right now, Trump is more like Teddy Roosevelt mixed with Frank Zappa. But let's look at the originator of this "Jacksonian" theory, Walter Russell Mead himself:

He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, and a book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly foreign policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

. . . Mead was educated at the Groton School, a private boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts. He then graduated from Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.

In other words, he's a member of the traditional US upper class telling us how to think about the traditional US upper class, which at the moment is in turmoil. He wouldn't know a Jacksonian if it bit him on the butt, and I suspect his understanding of Trump at this point is minimal. Trump is beyond Jacksonian, something outside the box.

History According To Lindy Li

Lindy Li is a puzzle. She's been highly visible in the press since the election, characterized as a Prominent Democratic National Committee powerhouse fundraiser who has turned on the party following Harris's November loss, spilling what purport to be insider secrets. I'm not sure about this at all.

Matt Margolis echoes the received line at PJ Media:

Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline.

The reference to "what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala" carries a link to another Margolis story at PJ Media:

In a candid interview with NewsNation’s Natasha Zouves earlier this week, Li shed light on key figures in the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and what they really think about Kamala Harris.

. . . When asked directly, “Do you agree that Obama and Pelosi did not want Harris?” Li didn’t mince words. “I know they didn’t,” she replied. “I have a lot of friends in Obama World, and actually, I'm friends with Speaker Pelosi, and I spoke with her before. . ."

But Li pkept on playing coy, until the interviewer began to lose patience:

Pressed on who Pelosi and Obama were backing, Li painted a nuanced picture. “I don’t think Pelosi was hoping for anyone in particular, or not that I know of. I do know that Obama was carefully vetting Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. I know there were other names on his list.” She also noted, “I’m not saying that Kamala Harris was necessarily at the top of [Obama’s] list, but he was definitely considering other candidates. I don’t think she was ruled out.”

So, er, what did Obama and Pelosi actually think about Harris? Li winds up telling us absolutely nothing, except maybe they were thinking about other candidates, who presumably didn't make the cut. Then there's this odd quasi-tidbit:

Li added, “And Obama and Pelosi were both hoping for a primary instead of a coronation, so to speak.”

This is nothing new; Pelosi had already said this herself:

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the New York Times in comments published Friday [November 8].

“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

But this is disingenuous in the extreme. The Democrat National Committee exerted maximum effort to forestall any primary campaign against Biden starting in late 2023, first denying ballot access to Bobby Kennedy Jr, then doing the same to Dean Phillips. This could not have been done without the tacit approval of both Obama and Pelosi, but mainly Pelosi.

Why would the DNC be opposed to a serious 2024 primary season? Because neither Biden nor Harris did well in primaries in 2020; Harris in particular suspended her campaign even before the Iowa caucuses. If Biden were to drop out as a candidate at any point in 2024 that might have allowed for any sort of primary contest, Harris would have been quickly eliminated. By letting Biden stay in the race so long, it had the effect of making Harris the heir apparent without any sort of primary uncertainty.

This can only have been the intended outcome. Pelosi's hopeful words about an "open primary" are nothing but crocodile tears, and it's a little peculiar that Lindy Li, teasing what she claims to be insider information about what Obama and Pelosi really thought, simply repeats Pelosi's already-published remarks.

But this brings me to another question -- exactly who is Lindy Li, and how did she achieve the powerhouse Democrat insider status she claims to have? According to Wikipedia, she was born December 14, 1990 (age 34) in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. She must be some sort of prodigy, huh, having clawed her way to power and influence starting as a humble immigrant? I'm not so sure. She

immigrated with her family to the United States when she was five years old. She spent much of her childhood in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Li attended the Agnes Irwin School, a private college-preparatory day school for girls, graduating in 2008. Her father is a real estate executive.

According to Data USA, Malvern, Pennsylvania's median household income was $115,743 in 2022. This is higher than the median household income in Pennsylvania ($73,170) and Chester County ($118,574). According to the same source, median household income in Beverly Hills, CA is $116,771. Annual tuition at the Agnes Irwin School for 9th - 12th Grade is $46,250.

Living in an affluent community and attending an exclusive private school are key class markers, even more so than an Ivy degree. However, Li also went to Princeton. As I've often noted here, the Ivy admissions process is highly secretive, but we do know that the offspring of major donors are in fact given preference, as are the alumni of exclusive "feeder schools" like Agnes Irwin.

We know little of Li's family background other than that her father is a "real estate executive". Real estate where? It sounds as though the family may have brought some part of their wealth with them from China, but at the moment, we know very little. For that matter, whose money was involved in Li's fundraising efforts? She seems to have spent only a token amount of time in her own business career -- how did she get all those contacts? Just whose money was this?

Bottom line: I don't believe a word of this whole Lindy Li saga. Somebody else is pulling those strings.

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.

Kabuki!

I went to bed last night assuming the alt aggregators would provide a full update of the events surrounding the potential government shutdown, but of course they didn't. Only one or two mentioned that the Senate passed the new House Plan C version and sent it on to Biden for signature, which appears to be a formality, the main issue being getting Joe in shape to do much of anything. But where did things stand when I went to bed?

As of noon yesterday, Leader Schumer was claiming he wasn't on board with anything:

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addressed the looming government shutdown on Friday and urged House Republicans to return to the initial deal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

“If Republicans do not work with Democrats in a bipartisan way, very soon, the government will shut down at midnight. It’s time to go back to the original agreement we had just a few days ago. It’s time for that,” Schumer said, referring to the continuing resolution negotiated and agreed on by both the leaders of the House and Senate. President-elect Donald Trump followed Elon Musk’s lead earlier in the week in criticizing the deal, which eventually led to Johnson rescinding the proposal.

Eventually the Houise passed a slimmed-down version of the original that left out much of the pork spending, but

Its passage presented only a partial win for Trump as it excluded a provision he sought to suspend the debt limit, which would have permitted him to avoid a contentious fight in the legislature during his term.

. . . The Friday vote saw the House approve a 118-page version of the bill, without the debt limit increase that Trump demanded. It needed two-thirds support to clear the lower chamber and the final tally was 366 in favor and 34 opposed. Democrats crossed the aisle to put the bill over the two-thirds threshold and overcame Republican opposition.

. . . The upper chamber ultimately voted early Saturday morning to approve the bill by an 85-11 margin.

Wait -- I thought Schumer was going to stand on principle and demand the House pass the original CR! Not a bit of it, the whole thing passed by comnfortable supermajorities, Democrats on board. Doesn't this suggest the fix was in much earlier, and the events of the past few days were largely kabuki? Sundance at Conservative Treehouse outlined the main issue yesterday before the Plan C bill passed:

Unbeknownst to most, the debt ceiling was suspended in Jun of 2023. As a result, Joe Biden and congress could spend on Ukraine without worry about the debt ceiling being a hurdle. The UniParty suspended the debt ceiling with a purpose.

Starting Jan 1st, 2025, the debt ceiling issue is scheduled to return. National debt will be whatever it was when the debt ceiling was suspended plus whatever spending Biden and the UniParty did since June of 2023. A new debt ceiling is estimated to be hit by June of 2025 or earlier.

President Trump told Speaker Mike Johnson -using the CR as a vehicle- to push the restart of the debt ceiling back for 2 years. This would allow for continuance of the tax cuts that President Trump wants to make; plus, economic drivers like no tax on tips, no tax on social security, no tax on overtime, a 15% tax bracket for companies who build, invest and manufacture in the USA. Expanding the economy is the goal.

As I write this, there's been no public reaction from Trump or Musk. The Democrat view appears to be that it was "better than a shutdown":

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) responded to a question on if he thinks the government funding bill is an overall win by stating that it’s better than a shutdown and the funding bill that was voted down on Thursday, and “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.”

The implication there would be that the public relations impact of a shutdown would go overwhelmingly against the Democrats, who in the end voted more enthusiastically for the Plan C deal in the House than the Republicans. By the same token, Schumer's demand earlier in the day to return to the original CR was empty noise. According to the BBC:

Republicans, in a closed-door meeting earlier on Friday, reportedly agreed to raise the debt limit without Democratic help sometime next year, before the US Treasury hits the current cap. In doing so, however, they also agreed to accompany that move with trillions in spending cuts – from a pot of "mandatory" spending that includes government-run health insurance, veterans benefits, government pensions and food aid to the poor.

Who won? For now, the subtext appears to be that the Democrats were afraid of being blamed for a shutdown and got what they felt was the best deal they could. Schumer's brief threat to hold out for the original CR was empty. And the "six weeks of arduous negotiations" turned out to be a useless excercise when Trump wouldn't go along.

So far, the lack of tweets from Musk or truths from Trump suggests they aren't all that dissatisfied with the outcome -- if they were. we'd definitely hear about it.

Constitutional Crisis

It seems like I've been ruminating over the past year about an ongoing unspoken constitutional crisis, for instance, here, the day after the June 27 debate debacle, where I compared the apparent coverup of Biden's decline to the final months of FDR's presidency:

Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris.

So right now, it looks as if congressional leadership got together and cobbled up a business-as-usual continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. They assumed that the congressional uniparty could be stampeded into passing it at the last minute to avvoid said shutdown, Biden as lame duck president would sign it, and the boodle would proceed uninterrupted.

The problem is that a complete outsider with no elected position, Elon Musk, who has apparently been camped out at Mar-a-Lago with the president-elect's ear, has thrown those comfortable assumpitons into confusion:

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.

The complaint? That Uncle Sam was spending like a drunken sailor and needed to tighten the purse strings quickly.

But then Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance dumped gasoline on the fire. In a lengthy post on X, they criticized Johnson’s continuing resolution deal as “a betrayal of our country,” and demanded that Johnson raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it entirely.

Right now, neither Musk, Trump, nor Vance has any constitutional authority. Nevertheess, they can clearly act to prevent congress from passing a continuing resolution.

As these events unfolded, the two people with actual constitutional authority to negotiate a resolution to the problem, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, abruptly changed their holiday plans and decided to remain in Washington, although by all indications, neither has the mental capacity to make any serious progress:

Vice President Kamala Harris abruptly canceled her plans to travel to Los Angeles on Thursday evening, according to an announcement from her office.

. . . However, around midday, her office stated that she would "not travel to Los Angeles, CA, and will remain in Washington, D.C."

The news comes after reports that President Joe Biden had also arrived back at the White House after cancelling his upcoming holiday in Delaware.

Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment outside of normal working hours.

. . . It also remains unclear whether her decision to return to Washington D.C. was tied to the looming threat of a partial government shutdown as Congress struggles to reach an agreement on a funding bill.

But as long as Joe remains president, Kamala's role in any solution to the standoff would be purely advisory or as some sort of intermediary. Under such circumstances, given her record of incompetence, any such involvement on her part would be ineffective. (UPDATE: She's there purely as a potential tie-breaking vote in the Senate.) But this also comes in the context of belated recogniton that Joe has essentially been checked out for his entire term:

Two bombshell reports out this week, in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, depict a president thoroughly out to lunch for his entire term: Top cabinet members unable reach him. Staff regularly taking his place at official events. Biden refusing to hold morning meetings but clocking out at 4pm — even though he naps every day and, in July, announced that he'd no longer hold events after 8pm.

How many hours has Joe Biden actually spent working? How was the 25th amendment not invoked? Was the danger of a President Kamala Harris — who the liberal media also tried to sell as viable — truly that unthinkable?

So, why the need to have Kamala on hand in Washington now? Has Dr Jill decided it's time for Joe to duck out of this last crisis and dump it on Kamala to work out some kind of Hail-Mary deal? I wouldn't rule it out. But nobody's been using the words "constitutional crisis" all year, when we've clearly been in one.