Can a political system work that requires great consensus, but in which the richest person in the world can launch a pack of trolls to pressure deputies live? The US is going to try to answer this question this Friday. The country is on the verge of suffering a government shutdown, because the previous budgets expire tonight, and the two parties are negotiating against the clock a minimum agreement to extend them for three more months. The problem is that the current polarization, and the surprising rise of Elon Musk, are making it increasingly difficult to reach the bipartisan agreements that the American system demands.
In the last few days, Democrats and Republicans agreed to an extensionwith some additional items, such as money for a children’s hospital for children with cancer or a 3% increase in the salary of congressmen after 16 years of freezing. but when Muskwhich has earned the nickname ‘shadow president‘ in the media, he announced that he was against it, he managed to immediately mobilize a hundred Republican deputies to vote against it, overturning the agreement and plunging Washington into chaos.
The process was as follows: the parliamentary leaders of both parties reached an agreement. When Musk ordered to reject it, the Republicans withdrew the negotiated version and presented a unilateral version, eliminating all the items negotiated by the Democrats and adding more Republican requests instead. Democrats voted against it, along with 38 Republicans. The law was rejected, and it opened a gigantic doubt: how to get out of the mess without unleashing Musk’s wrath. The solution proposed by the president of Congress, Mike Johnson, seems to be to kick things off: extend the current budgets for three more months and return to the table in March. If there is no new last-minute rebellion, it could be approved this weekend, before Monday arrives and the Government shutdown begins to ‘do harm’
Of course, this decision does not solve the real problems facing both sides. On the one hand, the tiny majority of Republicans in the future Congress and Senate makes it mandatory for them to count on Democrats to approve future budgets. All the cuts that Musk designs must first go through the opposition’s filter, something that seems quite complicated. And to that we must add one of the country’s perennial crises: the debt ceiling. Next year, the US Treasury will once again reach the debt limit it is allowed to issue, and must ask Congress for permission to expand it and avoid a suspension of payments. Another issue where bipartisan agreement will be necessary, and Democrats will demand conditions.
Agreements in times of polarization
The big problem is that The US political system is built on bipartisan majoritiesrequired by the constitution to do practically everything, something that completely clashes with the extreme polarization that the country currently suffers. And the demand for absolute purity is especially burdensome for Republican deputies, who are almost prohibited from making the slightest concession to Democrats under threat of being declared traitors to the country through their related media.
Added to all these problems is the fact that The Republican Party has long been not a parliamentary group, but two: the ‘moderate’, open to negotiating and making concessions, and the ‘radical’, willing to vote no to all laws proposed by their own party if all their demands are not met. The second group has not stopped growing since Donald Trump’s first victory, which makes the internal management of the party increasingly difficult: How can the president of Congress convince the Democrats to approve a text if the majority of Republican representatives threaten to throw him out if he offers the slightest concession to the Democrats?
As if that were not enough, Musk has been threatening politicians left and right for several days. He has threatened ‘his’ Republican deputies that he will campaign to throw them out in two years and replace them with other ‘Muskista’ Republicans if they do not comply with his demands. And he has threatened all Democrats to use his enormous fortune to finance Republican candidates in the next elections.
But the official president-elect, Donald Trump, also faces an unexpected challenge: prevent Musk from stealing the spotlight. The tycoon, accustomed to dominating the political scene and the media in the last decade, has found himself with a person richer than him, who controls a platform much larger than his, and who is capable of projecting his voice even louder. than Trump. The question is to what extent will he allow this ‘cohabitation’ between him and his self-proclaimed ‘first colleague’.
Markets assumed that Trump’s victory, and his majority in both Houses, would mean tax cuts and a series of partisan Republican laws. But a month before coming to power, the signs point to The cage of crickets that the Republican Party has become seems incapable of even passing laws that theoretically everyone agrees on.. If this appetizer is a sign of things to come, the chaos of Trump’s second term may be even greater than his first.
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