Who will run the show in the U.S.?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/12/2024 (269 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is, at the very least, an interesting dynamic.

A billionaire helps another rich man get elected to the presidency of the United States of America, and, as his reward, gets the preliminary nod to be appointed to jointly run a kind of non-official, non-government advisory board to cut up to US$2 trillion from the U.S. federal budget. (In case you haven’t caught on yet, we’re talking about Elon Musk).

Last week, Musk took aim at a bipartisan bill in the U.S. House of Congress, a massive continuing resolution that would keep the U.S. government from heading into a shutdown.

Like most omnibus bills, the continuing resolution contains that assistance, and a whole bunch more: pay increases for Congress, aid to U.S. farmers, disaster relief money, money for children’s cancer research, and the list goes on.

Legislators on both sides of the aisle have ambushed omnibus bills for years, stuffing their own pet projects into one massive bill — in this case, 1,570 pages worth of appropriations, new and old.

But Musk decided the whole bill should be stopped. He spent the whole of Wednesday in a lather, tweeting and retweeting condemnations of the bill, and whipping up some X users to call their congressional representatives to make Republicans pull their support for the bill. And eventually, Donald Trump himself got onside, pushing Republicans to do the exact same thing.

Musk declared a popular victory when it became clear the bill would be blocked. “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed! VOX POPULI VOX DEI” Musk wrote on X/Twitter. The last four words are Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of the Gods.”

It’s an interesting choice. Alcuin of York, a scholar born in 735, hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that, “those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of the Gods, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” A simple check through the daily postings on Musk’s X/Twitter would confirm the accuracy of Alcuin’s analysis. But we digress.

Musk, of course, is a U.S. businessman who likes to be recognized as a forward-looking entrepreneur. That characterization is, of course, up for debate, like most things are: some argue that many of his successes involve buying out original creators. Be that as it may, he has managed to amass a huge fortune, and has found a way to basically sit at the right hand of the president-elect of the United States.

He’s gotten that close to the highest elected office in the United States without ever having to face the true wishes of the people whose voices he claims to venerate — perhaps by actually running in an election and getting the peoples’ votes.

A different, Republican-sponsored replacement bill to halt a shutdown failed on Thursday. Yet another attempt at a bill passed the House of Representatives hours before deadline on Friday evening. The Senate then passed it just after midnight on Saturday morning, and it was signed into law by President Joe Biden later that day, averting a government shutdown.

But to return to that interesting dynamic: what exactly is Musk’s continuing role going to be in the Trump administration? Is that role going to be that Musk complains, and Trump reacts? Oh wait: another Alcuin quote might shed some light here: “Man thinks, God directs.” Who directed Trump to think about stopping the bill, one might rightly question? Trump later claimed it was his own idea … but … We know who got elected. Who’s making the decisions?

» Winnipeg Free Press