Yes, Chuck Schumer.
All you hear is that Mike Johnson is the one with egg all over his face after House Republicans, bolstered by online advocacy from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and others, scuttled the continuing resolution that would have kept the government funded into mid-March.
That’s what the Propaganda Press is pushing, and too many Americans are still letting those liars set the narrative.
Because the 1500-page disgrace that the House Republicans killed on Wednesday was not Johnson’s idea. It was Schumer’s.
I’ll explain.
1. Johnson Might Not Be The Good Guy Here, But He’s Not The Bad Guy
Johnson’s job as speaker is to pass the must-pass things and keep the House — and the federal government — running. That’s actually a dirty job, and there’s a reason so relatively few of your favorite members of Congress have any interest in it. The speakership is a position serving the entire House, not just the majority party. So there are things a speaker has to do that he’d probably rather not do.
Ideally, Johnson would conjure the votes to keep things moving through the party from which he comes, meaning that this week he’d put a clean CR through that would be backed by a majority made up of Republicans.
But he has two problems there.
First, Johnson can’t get to 218 votes with just Republicans, because Republicans can’t agree on a CR for a host of reasons. One is, and this is where I would be if I were a member of Congress, that some of them don’t want to vote for any spending bills at all without a full-on scrubbing of the budget.
This isn’t going to happen while Joe Biden is still president and Schumer still runs the Senate. There isn’t enough stroke — at least not until January — to force the Democrats to knuckle under on any budget the hard-core conservatives like me would support.
So if you’re Johnson you bleed votes from a tiny majority because there’s a small group of people like me who want to take the absolutist (and correct) position and won’t vote for much of anything.
You can’t just shut the government down as the speaker. If it shuts down, so be it, but your job is to try to keep it funded.
And — this is the point the sleazeball Propaganda Press refuses to mention — it isn’t just passing a CR through the House that Johnson has a problem with. He also has to send something across the marble that the Senate will pass. Functionally, that means he’s sitting down with Hakeem Jeffries, the barking dog who serves as the Democrats’ House Minority Leader, but Jeffries is Schumer’s stalking horse and he’s fronting for Schumer’s demands.
Which is what that failed CR was. It represented the best deal Johnson thought he could get from the Senate Democrats. Sure, you and I think he could have gotten better, but on the other hand, when in your whole life have you seen the modern Democrat Party deal in good faith on matters of legislation?
I don’t blame Johnson for how bad the CR was. I don’t give him a lot of credit for being a particularly hard negotiator on this document but don’t delude yourself into thinking this was Johnson’s big idea. This was the bill Chuck Schumer and the Senate Dems demanded.
It’s Chuck Schumer’s CR. Nobody else seems willing to identify it as such, which is mind-blowing. All the hundreds of pages of trash spending and self-serving protections for the ruling elite in there, and you think the guy Donald Trump had on the stage with him on Election Night was the architect of it?
No.
You don’t have to love Mike Johnson. But let’s not pretend and bullshit each other that this was his brainchild.
2. Oh, But Bullshit Is Still The Stock In Trade Of The Democrats And Their Propaganda Press Pals
I could have grabbed any number of video clips illustrating how awful the coverage of this week’s drama on Capitol Hill has been, but the clowns at CBS News get to win this lottery. This is almost eight minutes worth, and it’s a perfect illustration of funhouse mirror bias from the legacy corporate media.
Did you hear Chuck Schumer’s name once in that little infomercial? No, you did not. You heard whining from Jeffries about how the Republicans “reneged” on a deal, which was a patent lie — they larded up a continuing resolution with 1,500 pages of pork a day before it was to be voted on and somehow it’s the Republicans who are acting in bad faith?
So it’s the prospect of a shutdown until Trump takes over as president. And this is something Republicans, who won the election in November and can’t get voted out of power until November of 2026, should somehow be afraid of.
Oh, no — there will be furloughs of government bureaucrats, 90 percent of whom are partisan Democrats! That’ll sure infuriate the GOP’s base voters, won’t it?
Not to mention this new demonization of Elon Musk, as though somehow he’s in charge of the country because he spent the day Wednesday griping about stupid government spending. No, what happened was that Musk raised awareness of how awful Schumer’s CR was, a whole bunch of others chimed in, the phones started ringing on Capitol Hill and this thing rightly went down in flames of its own making.
No serious country should pass a three-month spending bill with 1,500 pages of new spending items in it.
3. Lessons Hopefully Learned
I’m defending Johnson here only in the sense that we’re allowing Schumer to skate when he’s the Satan of Spending on Capitol Hill and he ought to have that around his neck. I’m not going to argue with you if you’re yelling at your computer screen that Johnson is at fault too.
If we take all this at face value, Mike Johnson should never allow himself to end up in this position again. Next month there will be no reason why it should ever happen again. Next month it’ll be John Thune in charge of the Senate and Trump in the White House, and 1500-page porkubus CR’s to fund the government for three months should be banished to the toilets where they belong.
It’s good that Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, and the House Republicans blew up that CR, even if it makes Johnson look bad.
That CR was a disgrace. Congressional pay raises, money for more senseless killing in Ukraine, mountains of pork? Special pleadings for Liz Freaking Cheney and Bennie Thompson?
No.
This thing should have been 20 pages. Instead, it was 1,547. It’s essentially a smash-and-grab operation by a party that the public turned out of office, with Johnson having to be the sucker bearing the blame for it. And, again, if this is to be taken at face value, there isn’t much injustice in his fate. At the very minimum, Mike Johnson should have been dragged loudly kicking and screaming to the table for a CR like this. Instead, it seemed almost like he was phoning things in.
It’s almost Christmas, and so we’re all feeling good. I get it. But we need a little more bloodlust than we saw this week.
What Johnson should absolutely do now is strip that thing down and push a 20-page CR with nothing but bare-bones spending in it to cover the period between now and March. He should be able to pass that through the House with just Republican votes, as if you’re a conservative of the Chip Roy/Thomas Massie/Marjorie Taylor Greene stripe you just pulled off a massive win and your smart move now is to pocket it, and go get drunk at the Christmas party.
And if Chuck the Schmuck and the Senate Democrats won’t pass the clean CR, then let’s have a government shutdown. It’ll be their fault, and the whole country is going to know it, regardless of what the freaks and clowns at CBS News want to report.
4. On The Other Hand, Maybe This Shouldn’t Be Taken At Face Value
Many of our regular readers know that I’m an old friend of Johnson’s and we do talk somewhat frequently. I have not talked to him about the CR, so I want to make it clear that what follows is purely theoretical. It’s speculation and not inside information of any kind.
But have you stopped to consider that if Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Johnson, and others in the new president’s inner circle had set out to orchestrate a change in how budget politics in Washington works, they couldn’t really have scripted this much better than it’s playing out?
What do we know? We know that Mike Johnson has been a political confidant of Trump’s for going on eight years now. We also know that it would be a sizable understatement to say that they talk frequently. More like constantly. Johnson was on that stage with Trump on Election Night last month, after all.
And think about how thorough the drubbing that Musk and Ramaswamy gave that 1,547-page CR. They were shredding that thing in real-time all day on Wednesday. When Jeffries took to X to screech about how the GOP had double-crossed the Democrats by rejecting the CR, Musk was all over him immediately pointing out that the American people had spoken and that the American people aren’t stupid.
And when the CR failed, the Democrats’ spin was that Elon Musk is the real president and Trump is now his puppet. This is a narrative that works awfully well for Trump because now it isn’t Trump’s fault if the federal government gets a massive haircut courtesy of the Department of Governmental Efficiency. The Propaganda Press is trying to set Musk up as some James Bond villain who’s going to be gutting the administrative and welfare state, and this actually works amazingly well for every Republican politician out there. The ones whose constituents would love to throw half the federal register in the trash and two-thirds of the employees in the unemployment line can line up with Elon and Vivek and toast them with champagne.
And the ones whose constituents are more mixed can run for the hills knowing that Elon can absorb all the hate and outrage of the Left and then some because Elon Musk is no politician. Frankly, if DOGE is successful in chopping the government down enough to balance the budget, he’s fairly likely to disengage and work on sending rockets to Mars.
Meanwhile, Trump trashed that CR like there was no tomorrow. But he hasn’t wavered on his backing of Johnson. I know there’s a Breitbart piece saying that he has, but “we’ll see,” which is what Trump said after exhorting Johnson to act “decisively and tough” going forward, is not what it sounds like when Trump breaks with somebody.
So what if, and this is purely theoretical, that CR was a snare set for Schumer and Jeffries? Trump called the CR a “Democrat trap,” but could this have been a trap for Democrats?
You may not think Mike Johnson is capable of that. But do you not think Trump, Vance, Elon, and Vivek are? Because I do.
Johnson can go along with this and be made the sucker because he knows he has Trump’s backing so he isn’t going anywhere. Sure, everybody’s furious at him right at this moment, but it’ll pass without permanent damage if Trump still says he’s his man in the House.
And what’s the upside? Well, the American people got to see the Democrats in their full glory. In flagrante delicto. Give them a free run to write a three-month CR, and before you know it they want pay raises for themselves, they’ll demand to be let out of Obamacare, and they’re going to give themselves a pass from prosecution when you know damn well that the Jan. 6 commission crooks don’t deserve that. They’ll lard up with hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending that nobody thinks is needed, and on and on.
We knew they were this greedy already, sure, but now they’re on their way to the wilderness and they’ve just sped themselves into the thickets.
So when DOGE gets going, and they howl and screech about the cuts, the comeback will be this CR that they demanded.
Again, this is theoretical. But it’s worth keeping in mind as there’s a little government shutdown or the Dems begin caterwauling about a clean CR that leaves all of their little pet projects in the recycle bin.
Chuck Schumer all stitched up is a vision you can carry with you into Christmas, n’est-ce pas? I’m just saying, it’s not a crazy thought.
5. Merry Christmas To All!
I’ve got one more column after this one that’ll drop early next week, and it’ll be on a subject I’ve got close second-hand knowledge of that you might not know about, so this is my opportunity to wish all the readers a very merry Christmas, and also to say thanks to each of you for reading the words in this space.
You guys are the best, and I hope it’s a great holiday for each and every one of you.
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