☕️ NORMATIVE ☙ Saturday, December 21, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Budget battle ends in a whimper, but who won?; disappearing Cabbages; Trump angers progressives by deep-state draining; another pro-jab anchor fades away; progress in the Defense Authorization; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Time for the Weekend Edition roundup. In today’s stack: Congress miraculously passes clean budget extension bill after two days of drama; conservatives complain about Key Bridge; Biden becomes invisible; Trump shatters more norms angering norm-shattering democrats; famous pro-jab Fox Anchor resigns or retires or moves on or something, for reasons you could unfortunately guess; and an encouraging change sneaks into the massive Defense Authorization bill.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the third time was the charm. The New York Times reported the story under the headline, “Congress Approves Spending Extension, Ending Shutdown Crisis.” Say what you will about the bill, but after outraged Democrats protest-voted against a clean CR on Thursday, yesterday Trump and Speaker Johnson passed a pared-down, 120-page continuing resolution with massive bipartisan support (366-34 in the House, and 85-11 in the Senate). The Republicans used “two simple tricks” to pass a bill.

Over the last 72 hours, the budget battle shrank from a 1,600-page porkulous to a trim, 120-page, “mostly clean” continuing resolution in two quick maneuvers, thereby avoiding the dreaded “government shutdown” non-shutdown. The GOP’s maneuvers included one strategic move plus one major concession.

Some will find this controversial, but by every ordinary metric, it was a smashing success for Speaker Johnson whose job, after all, is to pass good bills with as much support as possible. Democrats, who are claiming victory on social media this morning, actually lost. They got whipsawed into voting for basically the same bill they’d literally just rejected because Republicans “broke our deal.”

The GOP’s brilliant strategy emerged after “round two,” which saw 30 debt-hawk Republicans joining all Democrats in a mass protest vote against a clean resolution that mainly funded the government, raised the debt limit, and provided disaster and “farm relief.”

After that bill went down in flames, working with debt hawks, Speaker Johnson then began to prepare separate bills for everything in the CR, so that Representatives and Senators would be forced to vote separately on each and every piece, one-by-one.

Passing the individual parts of a continuing resolution would have been perfectly lawful and probably more rational, but it would have shattered so-called “legislative norms.” Meaning, they’ve always done it the other way. The benefit to passing it all at once is nobody has to take credit for individual slices of legislative bacon. Had Johnson followed through, Republicans would have successfully kept the government running, and mulish Democrats, not Republicans, would have voted to shut it down.

So it is unsurprising that, after receiving back-channel assurances from Democrats, Speaker Johnson proposed a still smaller bill, a third college try, which sailed through both chambers with nary a peep. In fact, I think every Democrat voted in favor. The largest group voting against were the GOP debt hawks.

The other piece was the big concession. One of the few things removed between Bill 2 and Bill 3 was a provision that Trump wanted that would have lifted the federal debt limit. Because of that omission, corporate media ran headlines this morning like NBC’s: “Congress avoids a shutdown but leaves 'a big mess' for Trump and Republicans in 2025.” The sub-headline added, “Trump tried to push Congress to take the debt ceiling off his plate but failed.”

The Times’s article explained that, to get Trump on board, unnamed “House leaders” worked a deal to do exactly what Trump wanted to avoid, which was to put off extending the debt limit until Trump’s first few months in office. There will be a smaller Republican majority, and it sure looks like putting off till tomorrow what could have been done today. Here’s how the Times described the deal:

Both President Trump and Elon Musk have so far been silent on yesterday’s successful vote, except Musk re-tweeted two posts calling the deal a “massive win.”

⛴️ The passed bill included much-needed disaster relief, canceled Congressional pay raises, wrung out the woke word replacements, and purged the new pandemic policies. It did not even touch the debt limit. Still, that was insufficient to placate some conservatives, who would probably complain if they were hung with a new rope. E.g.:

I’ll just touch on the bridge funding, since that one seems to be a repeating theme among conservatives unhappy with the budget bill. Generally speaking, they angrily demand to know why the federal government should pay to replace the broken bridge, not only but especially since there’s insurance and a shipping company to sue.

Nobody is saying it, but the answer seems obvious, and regular readers will surely recall.

C&C was all over this story at the time it happened. The short version is that the Francis Scott Key bridge was likely a Proxy War military casualty. It’s destruction was probably payback for helping Ukraine harry Russia’s Crimean Bridge. Zelensky is literally obsessed with that bridge. It haunts his dreams. Just when he’s falling asleep, he’ll suddenly remember the bridge and thrash around on his pillow like a gaffed salmon.

Remember all the mystery fires plaguing power stations and chicken farms during 2022-2023? That’s your Proxy War.

Thus, the dramatic and fabulously expensive collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge wasn’t Maryland’s fault. It was Joe Biden’s fault. And the legal side would have gotten ugly. I’d bet Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio that the bridge’s insurance policy almost certainly had an “acts of war or terrorism” exclusion. Neither is the shipper liable for Acts of G—d, which include acts of war or terrorism.

It is only fair the federal government should replace that bridge. It also wants to. The government preserves “strategic ambiguity” by avoiding a court showdown and discovery, with the insurer trying to prove the ‘accident’ was not negligent sailing but a deliberate attack.

🔥 Amidst all this budget drama, Where’s Waldo? I mean, where’s President Cabbage been? I’m guessing Biden must have been having a few ‘bad days,’ since The Hill ran a story yesterday headlined, “Biden ‘AWOL’ amid shutdown fight: ‘He’s completely disappeared’.

There’s so little Biden left you can hardly see him anymore.

The gist was the bill had to be passed and signed before then end of the day yesterday, January 20th. But as the long day wore on, and the Senate moved through its vote, Biden staffers informed Senate leaders that the old man was going to bed before sundown. He’ll sign it tomorrow, they promised. In other words, Joe Biden shut down the federal government, albeit briefly, because he was too tired to stay up.

Too tired from what? And, can you tell any difference this morning with the government in ‘shut down’?

Like Groundhog Punxatawney Phil, Joe will have to emerge from his groundhog hole to sign the budget bill today (or his automatic pen could do it). Or else the National Parks will close or something.

🔥🔥🔥

In another richly ironic story about Trump shattering “legislative norms,” the New York Times reported “Trump Moves to Replace Officials Whom New Presidents Traditionally Leave Alone.” The sub-headline explained, “Congress devised some positions to stay on during changes in administrations. But Donald Trump has declared his intent to replace at least three.” Oh, I think it is going to be many more than three.

It all began with Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel to replace the horrifying mistake Chris Wray. (Wray resigned this month, effective January 1st.) This month the President-Elect also appointed folks for commissioner of the I.R.S. (former auctioneer, debt hawk, and former Rep. Billy Long), and for the director of Voice of America (former journalist Kari Lake).

The Times is freaking out because most presidential transition teams lack the time and bandwidth to reach down into the deeper levels of the deep state, like these three positions. The Times focused on how Biden famously kept Wray on as FBI head despite his appointment by Trump. The Times admits Trump’s appointments are perfectly legal, but dang it, something about it is just plain wrong, and the Times waved its hands about “norms” and “traditions”:

Hilariously, the Times was forced to list four or five times Biden did the same thing, replacing lower-level agency heads, but had an excuse for why every one was different when Biden did it. The complaint that Trump is “breaking norms” is pretty rich, especially after Democrats shattered the biggest norm of all by prosecuting a president for petty state crimes.

This kind of detailed hiring is literally how we drain the swamp. Trump is actually doing it this time, and the three appointments that upset the Times so badly are the evidence.

This terrific development, by the way, is the fruit of the diligent efforts of the Heritage Foundation in its “Project 2025,” which so terrified Democrats and which corporate media defamed every chance it had. Publishing its now-infamous position paper was only a small part of the project. The main goal was to recruit loyal, reliable people to fill hundreds of federal agency positions two and three layers deep in the federal government — a massive undertaking.

Heritage’s “Project 2025” position paper was written to get everyone on the same page.

Imagine how much time and effort it takes to recruit, vet, interview, and negotiate with the kinds of people we want in these deeper federal agency positions. It could take months to find the right person for just one position, never mind hundreds of them. We can thank the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s ability to make these kinds of appointments quickly.

🔥🔥🔥

A generation of anchormen, it seems, is fading away. The latest was Fox News anchor, jab-pusher, and Never-Trumper Neil Cavuto, who announced yesterday he is leaving Fox. He stressed several times that he is not leaving reporting. But he did not say where he’s off to next. Presumably podcasting, like Chris Wallace. The Hill reported the story headlined, “Cavuto ‘not leaving journalism’: ‘I’m just leaving here.’”

CLIP: Neil Cavuto announces departure from Fox after 28 years (2:58).

The details are murky, but Cavuto’s departure seems to relate to ongoing health problems. He has health issues like his recurring, severe covid infections, which continued to dog the popular anchor despite his “full” serving of shots plus an undisclosed number of boosters. In February 2022, the fully vaccinated Cavuto spent what sounds like a very difficult time in intensive care and almost died from his post-jab covid infection, which left him recovering from severe pneumonia.

After he recovered, Cavuto cited the jabs as what must have saved him, saying he was sure it would have been worse without the shots.

Stockholm syndrome. It has to be.

Anyway, we always liked Neil, notwithstanding his crazy jab beliefs and his NeverTrumping. We pray his health improves and that his inevitable podcast is a success.

🔥🔥🔥

The New York Times reported an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Senate Clears Defense Bill Denying Transgender Care to Minors.” It was a start.

Democrats were outraged that this week’s $895 billion Defense Authorization bill included a tiny tweak of the military’s health care plan. The change deleted coverage for any “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” of children under 18. Speaker Mike Johnson had insisted the language be added before allowing the bill to the House floor for a vote.

The Times, which exaggerated the change saying it “denies transgender health coverage to children,” did not explain why Democrats or anybody else would want the military to pay for treatments that sterilize children. Halfwit Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wi.) told the Times, “It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families.”

What? Unless this kind of care is banned in their state, service members retain “the freedom” to make that decision. They just have to pay for it themselves. But if they live in a sane state like Florida, where we don’t sterilize our children, the coverage wouldn’t help anyway.

We are not yet anywhere close to de-transing our military, but this is a step in the right direction. Maybe a few kids will be rescued since their parents are too cheap to pay out of pocket for sterilization. It seems to me a better law would require the parents to get the same treatment as the kids. I can dream, can’t I?

Have a wonderful weekend! Go get your last-minute shopping done and enjoy the cool, Christmasy weather, and then meet back here Monday morning for a new roundup, as we close in on the end of one of the most remarkable years in modern history.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com