Good luck with that. There is no "plan" and Republicans are incapable of governing, which we were reminded of once again during this latest fiasco with Musk and Trump stepping all over Johnson's negotiations. Here are the Trump sycophants on last Friday's Fox & Friends, opining over the chaos caused by Trump and Musk without admitting that that's exactly what they are, chaos agents with no interest whatsoever in actually governing.
JONES: You know, I, I find myself conflicted,, with this debate. I have been one that has advocated for regular order. I feel like we should have the 12 appropriation bills, but you're negotiating with half of the government.
I mean you only have the House and so it gets to the point... you have no leverage, you don't have that much leverage to say that you want regular order when you don't have full control.
I think it's much different when you have the presidency and you have the Senate, and you promise that to the voters. So I mean, you got to eventually say yes to something.
KILMEADE: I'm gonna give you a sports analogy that I think it's gonna benefit the country.
JONES: OK, let's hear it.
KILMEADE: You might know football, but you're not in the huddle. Elon Musk is not in the huddle. Vivek Ramaswamy, is not in the huddle. So as they're calling the play and they're dealing with all different kinds and in opposition, it might be easier to sit on the outside and go this is so clear what play to call, but you do not know what it's like actually doing the deal with so little power and leverage.
So you could say, yeah, right, that shouldn't be in, yeah, that shouldn't be in, but you know what should be in, that's in this, this and this. So they came back and they restructured at the last minute.
The the only criticism would be, could you have not done this earlier? Couldn't you have not done this in October, or right after the election?
DOOCY: Because just before we had Speaker Johnson on two days ago, Elon Musk at 4:15 in the morning said you can't pass this bill, and that was the beginning of the end, right? He was not in the huddle.
The question is who was he huddling with? According to the Speaker, he was huddling with him. Obviously Elon Musk and Donald Trump can kill a bill.
They said kill that bill, because they want they wanted The new one that had the lifting of the debt ceiling because, Donald Trump doesn't want that. So going forward, there are a couple of different options.
They say today, Plan B from yesterday, they could actually vote on that again today. It probably would fail again. Also, Speaker Johnson could meet with Jeffries. OK, what's it going to take to get some buy-in from the Democrats on this?
They could drop the debt ceiling requirement that Donald Trump has put out there, and that's the reason they lost 38 Republicans yesterday or just have a one or two week CR. Just kick the can until the end of the year, the first of January, after everybody goes and drinks a lot of eggnog.
Which was followed by Ainsley Earhardt basically admitting they're not going to get their caucus to agree on anything next year, and Lawrence Jones opining that he really hopes that they have "some sort of plan."
EARHARDT: There are about 30, my sources are telling me 30... 30 individuals that will never support CU. There are 30 individuals that will never support getting rid of the debt ceiling, so it's going to be very difficult to pass if you put those in.
The original, I love that picture that Elon posted where you've got the big stack, it was 1500 pages. Now it's 116 pages. But if you, Ralph Norman was on Fox & Friends First earlier and he said, not enough time to read it, A, and then threw in the debt limit at the last minute.
He had a problem with that. He said we can't have a limited, there's the picture, that's the first bill and then now that's the revised one on the right.
He said we can't have a limited shutdown, which means it wouldn't affect our military. It wouldn't affect TSA workers, because a lot of people are traveling today and then...
KILMEADE: They just don't get paid.
EARHARDT: And Chip Roy said, still spends, it still spends too much money. He said it's $110 billion unpaid for, and he has a problem with that. Too much pork.
JONES: Well look, I mean, well, let's shut it down then, but I just hope that when they do have full power, that there is some sort of plan. I'm all for a fight. I'm all for giving the voters what you promised them.
But, if they have full control and we are still at this same point, I mean, we were talking about the Elon Musk thing, but, there were the moderates and the conservatives that were opposed to that bill that was originally, the first CR.
So, after Elon got involved, there were more people that came to the table. Now we have just the conservative wing of the party that is upset about the spending while Democrats are in control of half of the government.
The "plan" should be that you reach some sort of bipartisan agreement on the agenda you would like to get passed and work with Democrats, but Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy apparently believe they can just order politicians around like they're a CEO and the politicians are their employees.
We'll see how much lipstick Fox continues to try to put on that pig as the chaos ensues in January.
h/t Media Matters