The Porkupus Lives On—So Now It’s Up To Elon To Save The Day

If you want to understand how the world champion of spend, borrow and print—that is, Donald Trump—took control of the supposed party of Fiscal Rectitude, just take another gander at the picture below. The so-called conservative party just reelected Little Mikie Johnson as Speaker of the U.S. House– even after he tried to fob this abomination upon the nation.

Surely the Donald’s post on Truth Social just hours before the vote is proof, if any is needed, that the GOP has become a cynical, opportunistic Washington-based fund-raising machine that has lost all touch with its historic principles of small government and fiscal prudence. After all, if the 1,547 pages of pork and special interest favors authored by Speaker Johnson is a “big win” for the GOP what other conclusion is possible?

“A win for Mike today will be a big win for the Republican Party.”

Draft of Speaker Johnson’s Porkupus CR

The real truth is that in times of yore—as when your editor served in the US House—no Republican Speaker would have dared to table this monstrosity. And if he had, he would have been drummed out of the Speaker’s Lobby by acclaim of the GOP caucus.

There is no mystery as to why, either. The occasion for the above was simply that the Congress had not gotten around to enacting the 12 regular annual appropriations bill on a timely basis. So all that was needed was a one paragraph bill authorizing every department, agency and program to spend at prior year run rates until the regular appropriation bill for FY 2025 was approved.

Accordingly, the other 1,546 pages were entirely gratuitous. In fact, they were all about feeding the Swamp Creatures and oiling the squeaky wheels of Big Government. Mikie’s Porkupus CR amounted to a rank exercise in business as usual during the last several decades on the banks of the Potomac.

Today, of course, there was but one sturdy voice for sanity—-the deeply principled, knowledgeable and thoughtful Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. His lonely “hell no” to Johnson’s reelection is a reminder that it is not just the RINO’s who have broken faith with everyday American voters, but that the overwhelming share of the GOP rank and file on the banks of the Potomac have succumbed to the UniParty disease itself.