The house has, I guess against all odds, passed a stopgap funding bill which will now head to the Senate. And there's some really interesting things about it. First of all, it passed 366 to 34 very, very easily. One Democrat voted present. The only no votes were Republicans. [00:00:19] So all but one of the Democrats were on board. And look, with a bill this big, obviously there's going to be a lot that we don't know about it, but I'm left asking some questions. I'm going to read you a few quotes from some of the big stakeholders in this big fight, and it's only going to probably confuse you more. [00:00:35] So the bill extends federal funds to mid-March, so we won't have a shutdown for several months. It sends more than 100 billion in relief to farmers and natural disaster victims. So it did the two major additional components of disaster relief and helping [00:00:50] to offset some of the lingering effects of Donald Trump's trade war with China. It reauthorizes the sweeping agriculture policy and antipoverty law called the farm bill. So what does it not do? Well, plenty, I'm sure, but specifically, it doesn't suspend or eliminate the debt ceiling. [00:01:06] Okay. So it has the major additional spending and it doesn't suspend the debt ceiling. Which is why I'm kind of confused when Donald Trump and Elon Musk are apparently really, really happy with it. Musk says that Johnson did a good job here, given the circumstances. [00:01:23] He went on to say they took a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Now, granted, he has proven himself recently to not be a great guy with math, but it doesn't seem like they cut it significantly. Donald Trump apparently is on board, too. [00:01:39] Johnson said he knew exactly what we were doing and why, and this is a good outcome for the country when the only thing about the prior bills that Trump seemed to have a problem with was that they did not suspend the debt ceiling, perhaps until 2029, and this doesn't. [00:01:55] So they don't seem to have gotten any of the concessions they want. The Democrats are all on board, and yet Musk and Trump are sort of declaring victory. That makes no sense at all. I have a potential explanation, but, David, do you have more details? [00:02:11] Yeah. If you look at the first bill that came over two nights ago, right. Plan A, right. And that was the 1500 page bill that had all kinds of different programs. Well, yes. While some of those programs, including the aid bill, the $100 billion and also the disaster aid, while that's still there, [00:02:26] some of the other priorities and some of the other language that was in the original bill got stripped out. And so if you look at, for example, plan B, which was the this essentially stripped down version of plan A, but had Donald Trump's essentially [00:02:41] getting rid of the debt ceiling. Now imagine plan B, but without the debt ceiling. That's sort of my understanding of where this came down. And I think the important point here is that the Democrats did not get some of the agreed upon provisions that they had expected, that they had negotiated. [00:02:58] However, Republicans did not get and Donald Trump did not get the lifting of the debt ceiling. And keep in mind, I mean, Trump said just two days ago. There will be a government shutdown if we don't get rid of the debt ceiling or we don't suspend it. Well, too bad Donald Trump lost on that. [00:03:13] Democrats lost on some of their priorities that they had wanted. Everybody seemed to be in agreement on the $100 billion farm bill and the disaster aid. And there seems to be, of course, this agreement that we should keep the government funding through March. So this essentially is a punt, right? [00:03:28] You keep the government open for three more months. You get the two big items that everybody wanted and what Donald Trump wanted, raising the debt ceiling and some of what Democrats wanted. You don't get. But, David, that still doesn't explain why the Democrats voted for it, because, I mean, oh, we're not getting rid of the debt ceiling like Trump wanted. [00:03:45] But the Democrats also wanted to get rid of the debt ceiling. So that's not really a compromise for them. They don't get anything out of that they actually agreed with. He has to know because keep in mind, I mean, in order, Donald Trump cannot pass his tax cuts without raising the debt ceiling, right. Because the Congressional Budget Office is going to say that the tax cuts [00:04:03] are going to cost the economy because of lost revenue to the government revenue that you're not going to get, you know, $500 billion. $1 trillion, whatever it is. Well, Donald Trump's not going to be able to pass his tax cuts without raising the debt ceiling. So now he's got a problem, right? What the Democrats have essentially did is they said, look, [00:04:19] we're punting because we're going to be able to extract some concessions from Donald Trump if he really if he really wants to raise the debt ceiling in March in order to pass this tax cuts. Here are all the different items that we Democrats are going to demand from him. And instead of having to do this sort of ad hoc with Speaker Johnson [00:04:36] at the end of President Biden's term, the Democrats can be loaded to bear at the beginning of the Trump administration with their laundry list of things, saying, okay, you want to raise the debt ceiling? Here are all the different things we demand that are part of the next budget. So yeah, I mean, in some ways it doesn't make a lot of sense right now [00:04:53] for Democrats to go along with this. But if you look at the big picture of where Democrats hope to be in the spring, I think it does make some strategic sense. - All right. - So that does begin to explain it. But yeah I have more thoughts on it. Go ahead. Sure. I would have to see like a full list of all the things that were cut. It just seems it seems like some of the little things that, like Vivek Ramaswamy [00:05:12] was talking about on Twitter, were so minuscule in comparison to the stuff that's still in this, that to declare that something that weighed pounds is now ounces seems like protesting a bit too much there, which I guess is a good thing. And in terms of Trump, like he's going to be sworn in on the 20th, they're going [00:05:30] to begin fights over this like three weeks into his term, which seems like the worst possible scenario for him. And also, like, I don't really buy that he cared about any of the individual components of all of this. I think that he cares about big things like massively cutting the taxes of the wealthiest people in the country, so this seems like a major loss for him. [00:05:49] I don't really buy that he cared about the funding aspect of this 1%. As much about getting is getting rid of the debt ceiling, particularly because he doesn't care at all about the deficit. He doesn't care at all about the national debt, and he was always going to blow that out of the water. So that would have given him free reign to do that, not only with the tax cuts, [00:06:07] but God only knows what other bills. So now he doesn't have that. I don't know, this just seems like like, you know, if you go back a week ago, before we thought that Elon Musk was going to dedicate every waking second of his life to destroying this deal, I think most people assumed that some sort of deal would be reached. [00:06:23] So now it has been Trump has laid out what his line was and they didn't go along with it. Remember, as we're going to talk about potentially like 38 Republicans defected on the previous bill after Musk and Trump had said very clearly what they wanted. [00:06:41] I don't know, I could be wrong. I feel like this entire process now, with hindsight, makes them look kind of weak, like they didn't really seemingly get what they wanted out of this. Maybe a little bit of pork. I guess they can say symbolically they did some efficiency stuff. [00:06:56] Okay, so here's my theory as to why, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are declaring victory, even though they don't seem to have gotten any victory at all. A because this is a classic Trump thing. He says that he wants something. He huffs and puffs. Right. [00:07:12] But but if he doesn't get it and he thinks he's not going to get it, and he thinks he's going to lose that battle, he just goes right past it. I've seen him do it so many times. Right. Which leads to part two. If he huffs and puffs and it doesn't work when they get a new deal, it [00:07:30] doesn't matter if it's nearly identical. If there's just a comma in a different place, he goes, I declare victory. It's not the Trump bill. Okay. And so this is fantastic because he's thinking nobody's going to read the bill anyway. Right. It's not like my followers are going to read the bill [00:07:45] and be like, oh no, wait a minute. This is 98% similar to the other bill. And if mainstream media reports that they're not going to believe him anyway, I'll tell them it was a huge victory and they'll just believe me. And I think that's what happened here. And why did they do that? Because they created a hot mess. And I think that they realized this isn't a good look for us, that we [00:08:04] start right out of the gate and just blow everything up and don't really have a good plan for putting it back together. Like they just couldn't couldn't figure out how to get enough votes to pass the version they wanted, let alone the fact that I don't think they knew what version they wanted. [00:08:20] Like they knew originally what they wanted about the debt ceiling. But just like I told you yesterday, sometimes you have some. Oh, yeah, look at this terrible mass shooting. Oh, these guys are all bought by the NRA. But I'm not. I'm going to do something about it. They get tomorrow, the next day he goes gets bought by the NRA, comes out, goes. [00:08:36] We don't need to do anything about it. Right. So in this case on the debt ceiling, he might have gotten a talking to like, hey remember we usually use this against the Democrats and then get all the goodies that we want. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. Forget it. We're keeping the debt ceiling. Right. And and oh, we don't we don't know what we want other than the debt ceiling. [00:08:55] Okay. Declare victory. I am the champion. I am the winner. Right. And that will largely work with his base. But that bill is the same as far as we can see for now. I mean, it happened right now, but. Yeah, we're going to have a little bit some of the other things that were cut. - Sorry. - One other thing. That's a little bit of reporting that's also coming out now that remember Donald Trump kept saying at least for the last 24 hours, oh, this [00:09:12] is going to be under Joe Biden's watch. Americans are going to blame President Biden and the Democrats if there's a government shutdown. Well, there's some reporting that perhaps Speaker Johnson and other Republicans had some polling that that had been done over the last 24 hours that they presented to Donald Trump and said, no, they're going to the public is going to blame you. [00:09:30] If the government gets shut down, they're going to blame you and Elon Musk, because people already know that there was this agreement that you guys blew up. So yes, I think it's part of Donald Trump just declaring victory because that's what he always does, but also because he was convinced that even before he's president, the public's going to be blaming you for people essentially not getting, [00:09:47] you know, their government services or whatever, all the sort of government stuff that that they expect. So I think that's one other that's one other thing to keep in mind. Also, there's another part about this with the debt ceiling and which I think is somewhat advantageous to the Democrats. If you look at the two things Donald Trump wants to start in 2025, [00:10:05] as soon as he takes office, obviously he wants the tax cuts for the rich. He can't do that without raising the debt ceiling. He also wants to start rounding up migrants. Well, even if you try to deport a fraction of the of 11 million undocumented migrants in this country. Just a fraction. You're still talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. [00:10:23] It's going to cost law enforcement. Where is that money supposed to come from? It's not just some slush fund. They can take it. You have to raise the debt ceiling, appropriate, appropriate new money to law enforcement or the military in order to carry this out. So I think the Democrats are looking at ways of blocking Donald Trump's two major [00:10:41] policy proposals, starting in January, by essentially handcuffing him with the debt ceiling that he's going to have to deal with and give Democrats the farm in order for the Democrats to relent. Yeah. And I think we should probably take our second break. But before we do, in terms of like it being a bad look going into this, [00:11:00] like having all the chaos and everything, first of all, everyone should get ready for that. That's going to be the look that we'll have for four years, because it's going to be utter chaos and failure and disaster. But also like, you know, as I said, the only thing he actually cares about, I mean, I agree with David, there's going to be the attempt at the mass deportations [00:11:16] is a transfer of trillions of dollars to the wealthiest people in the country. They're going to have that fight like three weeks into his presidency. They're going to once again threaten to shut everything down unless they can transfer trillions of dollars to the richest people in the world. [00:11:31] And by the way, one thing that that was cut and of course the Democrats don't mind agreeing to this, in my opinion, was enforcement at the IRS so that the rich can cheat on their taxes more. That was right out of the gate while Biden is still in office. [00:11:48] And that's bipartisan agreement. Let the rich cheat. I almost appreciate like the honesty coming out of Trump and the right that you know you'll have. Fetterman took a little bit for the mask to come off or whatever. Trump like he's not even sworn in yet and he's like yeah. No. All the stuff I was talking about in the election, none of that's true. [00:12:05] I am literally just here for the rich. This is a massive wealth transfer. You guys are screwed. If you enjoyed this video, that's because of our members. They make us independent. 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