Congressional Democrats should stop sanewashing Musk and Trump

07 February

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump walks by Elon Musk during the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are shredding the U.S. Constitution, scrapping the rule of law, creating misery and chaos not just in the U.S. but worldwide, and transmogrifying a constitutional democratic republic into a punitive authoritarian kleptocracy.

And Nevada Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford is sticking with the “DOGE caucus” anyway.

The DOGE caucus was formed in December by Musk-struck Republican members of Congress who hoped their magnificent Musk would honor some of them by adopting their pet knee-jerk anti-government ideas.

As if the monomaniacal Musk would care about their ideas.

Horsford and several other Democrats joined the caucus too, wanting to believe, or refusing to disbelieve, they could work with Trump and Musk and their Republican congressional colleagues to promote a shared national interest.

Yes, very high minded.

Since then, Musk, enabled by his sidekick Trump, assisted by a team of barely post-adolescent techno tots, and with no recognition of the DOGE caucus’s existence, made a beeline for the aforementioned shredding, scrapping and transmogrifying.

But Horsford told Politico earlier this week that he’s among Democrats who are staying in the DOGE caucus.

“The caucus is about focusing on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse,” Horsford said, in a statement which over-generously characterizes his Republican colleagues’ goals but has nothing to do with what DOGE is doing.

“I joined in good faith and to make sure that we have a voice at the table to protect my constituents,” Horsord continued.

“The illegal activity we’ll handle through the litigation process,” he added.

The litigation process appears to finally be slowing Musk, a little, but whether it is capable of ultimately stopping the world’s richest man’s abusive molestation of a nation remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, there is no evidence that Musk has the slightest interest in what any member of Congress, or anyone else on the planet for that matter, thinks or says.

There is no DOGE caucus table worth sitting at.

‘Working across the aisle,’ normalizing the crisis

Also this week, Nevada Democratic U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen announced a bill she’s co-sponsoring to let churches and other non-profit child care providers get U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) loans made it out of a Senate committee.

The day before Rosen’s release, and following a report that Musk and DOGE had secured “access to all SBA systems,” a dozen Democrats on the House Small Business Committee wrote to the acting SBA’s administrator because they worry “Musk’s followers intend to block critical SBA services from reaching our nation’s small employers.”

“Beyond the operational impact, this breach endangers the private information of small business owners, SBA resource partners, and employees,” the members of the House added.

Rosen didn’t mention any of that in her release. But she was sure to work in a phrase that is a staple of statements issued from her office —“working across the aisle to pass my bipartisan bill.”

“I was ready to confirmSean Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation,” Nevada Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said in a press release Jan. 28, “but I cannot vote for him after the chaos President Trump has unleashed with his order to pause critical federal funding to Nevada.”

The chaos Cortez Masto was referencing was that caused by the infamous memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget that ordered a freeze on federal grants, loans and other forms of federal financial assistance.

Notwithstanding a pair of rulings from two separate judges putting a temporary halt on the funding freeze, the White House insists that Trump’s underlying executive orders to cut the federal funding “remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

Trump still intends to, as Cortez Masto put it on Jan. 28, shut off “critical federal funding to Nevada.”

Cortez Masto, along with Rosen, did end up voting against Duffy’s confirmation as Transportation Secretary on Jan. 28.

But two days later they both were among several Democratic senators who voted to confirm Doug Burgum as Interior secretary. And then they voted to confirm Douglass Collins, Trump’s nominee to head Veterans Affairs.

Cortez Masto and Rosen have voted against some Trump nominees during that period, most notably Pam Bondi for Attorney General, and Russ Vought as director of the OMB.

The question is not why Nevada’s senators voted for Burgum or Collins, but why they are publicly normalizing the Trump administration by voting to confirm any of his nominees at all.

Meanwhile, Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee is eager to tell anyone who will listen that the most important thing about her is that she is “the most bipartisan member of Congress.” After Trump’s election, Lee urged her Democratic House colleagues to embrace “a more nuanced”, i.e, less partisan, approach. Rare is the Lee press release that does not contain the word “bipartisan.” She touted her support for at least two such bills this week alone.

And Rep. Dina Titus, along with Lee, Horsford, Cortez Masto, and Rosen, was among the minority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate voting with all the Republicans in both those bodies for the Trump-marketed bill to allow undocumented immigrants to be arrested and detained for non-violent minor crimes.

Civil rights advocates and attorneys condemn the law for denying due process, and Nevada groups have slammed the state’s Democrats in Congress for caving to anti-immigration fervor whipped up by Trump.

NV Democrats should implement a freeze of their own

After the election, congressional Democrats in Nevada and around the country said they were ready to work with Trump when they can and try to find common ground. Because that’s a thing the defeated party always says after an election. That’s the norm.

That norm is based on the assumption that the United States government is fundamentally going to continue operating as it was designed to, where Congress passes laws, the courts interpret them, and the executive branch implements them. People who dislike the outcome often vow to try to change it via means afforded them in that same governmental structure. But in the meantime, everyone honors the result, because of the rule of law.

Musk and Trump, each convinced of their own extra special godliness, don’t feel bound by the rule of law and refuse to honor it. Rather than trying to fix what they feel is wrong about the U.S. government by scoring victories within the historically and lawfully established system, they’ve opted to trash that system altogether, consequences be damned. In the process they’re deliberately undermining whatever social, cultural, political, legal, rational, and moral cohesion has more or less characterized the nation since the end of the Civil War.

People in the U.S. who don’t support Trump (a majority, by the way), including elected Democrats, are struggling to figure out how the death of law and representative government in the U.S. might be prevented.

Judges have temporarily restrained Trump’s birthright citizenship order and his funding freeze order. Legal filings have temporarily limited DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system and paused Musk’s grisly “fork in the road” effort to muscle federal employees into early retirement. There is some promise in, as Horsford put it, “the litigation process.”

But when the highest court in the land has repeatedly shown deference to Trump and even sanctioned his lawlessness, we can’t count on the courts to save us.

Maybe Trump’s jealousy of Musk will finally prompt him to oust Musk from the government (assuming Trump has the guts to do that).

Or maybe a handful — that’s all it would take — of Republicans in the House and Senate will put their nation ahead of Musk and Trump. While that scenario seems unthinkable at this point, the unthinkable is not impossible, as evidenced by what Musk and Trump are doing now.

But one thing that assuredly will not save us is congressional Democrats — still shell-shocked, evidently — “working across the aisle” and vying for a seat “at the table.”

The only reason Nevada’s Democrats should be reaching across the aisle right now is to grab any Republican who they think can be reasoned with and see if they can shake some damned sense — or courage — or patriotism — into them. (Maybe they could start with Nevada’s only Republican in Congress, Rep. Mark Amodei?)

The chance of that succeeding being distant and remote at best, Nevada’s congressional Democrats and their colleagues should implement a freeze of their own: effective immediately, they should stop pretending there is something normal about what is going on.

Because their pretense in turn suggests to the public that something normal is going on.

Musk and Trump will never be subject to the rule of law if elected Democrats continue to insist on allowing the public to think what Musk and Trump are doing is somehow normal, or legal, or sane.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

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