The handwriting has been going up on the wall for the past few days now. Mike Johnson himself is playing into this, bragging about the “text string” he has going “with Elon and Vivek” both of them not being elected officials, merely Trump cronies and media personalities. And in this reality TV age of politics, that is completely enough. All you need to be is photogenic and have the right line of bull and even if you have zero else to offer, you can be successful politically. [See: Boebert, Lauren] Without Boebert’s appearance and just the mouth, she would have sunk like a rock long ago.
Anyhow, on the present madness being contemplated. Right-wing media has had it in for Johnson the past few days over the CR bill. Now Rand Paul is chiming in. Senator Paul, according to his old nemesis, John McCain, “works for Vladimir Putin.” Paul got mega pissed when McCain said that to his face, on the floor of the Senate, and threw his mic on the ground and stalked off. File that under, “Truth Hurts, Don’t It?”
Have they all gone completely mad? A possible criminal, and or purin asset in our House of Representatives?! Wth is going on. Musk, I believe is much more threatening than trump alone. Putin must be ecstatic rn.
— Claire S🖤🩷🖤 (@SaintLaurant) December 19, 2024
Now here’s a legal quandary this raises and I don’t know the answer. They might start teaching this kind of stuff in law schools now, since manipulation of the law and the Constitution is the byward of the day. The legal issue is, Elon Musk would then be in the line of succession to the presidency behind J.D. Vance. Musk is not a natural born citizen. Could he be a sitting dictator president? I’m assuming that Musk would get skipped over and the line of succession would go down to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. But I don’t know that for a fact. Again, and always, potential constitutional crises are roiling in the distance like the conga line of hurricanes that we see on this planet where climate change is warping normal weather patterns. Trump is to politics what global warming is to weather.
This is just one more storm signal to watch. But the tide has very much turned against Mike Johnson in recent days. He’s going to find out soon, I fear, what a total pawn he is. He believed he was elevated by God to the Speaker role, no, in fact he was merely a convenient pawn of Donald Trump, who plays on Satan’s team. Nothing mystical about Johnson’s situation. He just got used.
I wonder if Elon Musk would pay the military and government workers out of his own pocket, if the government shuts down? Or, would he just let them eat cake? We might find out soon. This is surreal, but then this is what we’ve been saying since Trump announced he was back in the game.
Again, MAGA has made the mistake of believing that Musk and Ramaswamy are wizards who will do magical things. No. They are self serving people who will line their own pockets and who cares what the damage is to the rest of us?
And there’s another situation to look at here and this has been said for some time: there are people on Team Trump who don’t believe he’ll make it physically (or mentally) through the next four years and they are cobbling together a system that works around him. That’s actually prudent. But what it translates as, is that we don’t really know who’s running the government and in what capacity because what’s happening in this transition alone is enough to make Machiavelli blush.
Excellent column!!
“The legal issue is, Elon Musk would then be in the line of succession to the presidency behind J.D. Vance. Musk is not a natural born citizen. Could he be a sitting dictator president? I’m assuming that Musk would get skipped over and the line of succession would go down to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. But I don’t know that for a fact.”
Well, rest assured that Musk would NOT be in the line of succession. Currently, the Presidential line of succession has TWO members who are ineligible due to their being born outside the US to non-citizens (admittedly, both members are very low-ranking: The Secretary of Energy and Secretary of Homeland Security). But, even going back to the Nixon and Ford Administrations when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State (he was fourth in line behind the VP, Speaker of the House and President pro tem of the Senate) was ineligible due to having been born in Germany and, more recently, Madeline Albright–Secretary of State under Bill Clinton–was ineligible due to having been born in Czechoslovakia.
As for Speakers of the House, to the best of my knowledge, none has ever been born outside the US and elected to Congress (historically, there have only been a small handful of non-members of Congress receiving votes for the Speakership and pretty much all have come in the past 20 years as “protest votes”) and, I’m not aware of anyone holding the post of President pro tem who wasn’t born in the US and therefore a “naturalized citizen” (Daniel Inouye probably came closest as he was born when Hawai’i was a territory rather than a state and there could’ve possibly been some constitutional issues there).
BUT, the biggest impediment for Musk ever thinking he has some kind of “workaround” to the Presidency is the 12th Amendment (one of the ones that rarely is criticized by the far-right). The final sentence of that amendment reads, “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” And with the addition of the text of Section 1 of the 25th Amendment (“In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.”) and text from Section 3 of the 20th Amendment (“. . . if the President-elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President-elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President-elect nor a Vice President-elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.) plus the Presidential Line of Succession Act of 1947 (which passed with majorities in both Houses of Congress). Taking all of those pieces and putting them together basically says, “Elon Musk can never be President of the United States under any circumstances.” His ONLY hope would be a Constitutional Amendment’s passage to overturn the “natural-born citizen” requirement (I’m still hoping for someone to challenge Marco Rubio’s ability to become President as he was born to NON-citizens; his parents emigrated from Cuba but he was born before either of them had become naturalized citizens so he does not qualify as a “natural-born citizen” if the Trump Administration actually pushes to end “birthright citizenship”).
2 great articles. Comprehensive and succinct. The devil is in th edetail and waaaay beyond MAGA comprehension, not to mention their saintly President’s reading level.