Republicans in Congress will try to pass a stopgap spending bill this week to avert a partial government shutdown and keep the government running through September, though they’ll need Democrats’ help to do it.
The 99-page stopgap spending bill, which House Republicans released over the weekend, is required since lawmakers haven’t made any progress conferencing the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
The continuing resolution, the third since October, would fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2025 — marking the first time since fiscal 2013 that Congress has leaned on stopgap spending bills for the entire year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
The algorithm won’t matter.
Look at it this way. Magical new campaign finance laws are in place. What kind of a chance do you think you would have in an election where your opponent has, one way or another, secured the endorsement of a multi-billionaire like Elon Musk, several influential celebrities, or whatever who are willing to independently (or “independently”) endorse your opponent? Would you think your chances are good if all you have available to you is your government-issued war chest? The Elon Musks, Taylor Swifts, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons of the world are going to reach millions upon millions of people regardless of Youtube’s algorithm. So of course everybody is going to want to secure those endorsements if they want to even have a chance.
And under these new laws, it’s presumed that voters will no longer be contributing to campaigns. So why on God’s green earth would a candidate even bother listening to voters at all any more? Several decades of political history have already shown that politicians value the desires of their wealthy donors far, far more than the voters. And that’s with voters contributing to their campaigns. What do you think will happen when they have to choose between the wealthy celebrities who would be essentially funding their campaign through the back door and the voters who collectively contribute $0? Your concerns will no longer matter. They know that even if they lose the vote of the 20% of people who are informed and pay attention to politics, they’d be able to rely on celebrity endorsements to deliver votes from the 80% of uninformed voters who couldn’t care less about politics 99.9% of the time. Your vote would be worthless to them, easily replaced by probably 3-4 votes from some uninformed rubes who just voted for whoever their celebrity of choice told them to.
Like I said, you would literally be making the problem worse. The wealthy donor class would have even more influence than they do now. Social media influencers would see their political influence increase, leading to the rise of even more social media politicians like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. What comparatively little influence the average voter has would evaporate.
I am all for campaign reform. But I’m not for short-sighted solutions that look good on paper but make the problem worse in practice. And not only are the solutions being discussed be blatant violations of the freedom of speech, expression, the press, and the right to petition our government, which is something that I am dead set against, but they would also be easily exploitable by Trump or someone like him, who’s already starting off the ball game on third base. Like you, I don’t know what the solution to any of this is either. But I do know that this isn’t it.
