Tubby Hits the Wall

It's not ALL bad news

I won’t be long about this. God knows many if not most of you have been following the situation well enough. But it inspires a thought or two that I think is worth sharing.

Brief backfill: On Monday the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued — and Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket obtained and reported on — a memo called “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.” The memo features gibberish denouncing “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering” and, more importantly, orders to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities” — in other words, a freeze on all duly-appropriated federal payments.

Word got around. On Tuesday various states noticed their expected federal funds — including Medicaid and Head Start payments — had been blocked, showing (obviously bogus) “system maintenance” messages when they tried to access the systems.

They raised hell. Even some Congressional Democrats threatened to act on upcoming votes based on the freeze. 23 state attorneys general, among other interested parties, swiftly filed suits to stop the freeze.

Trump’s goons bullshat that it was all a big mistake, at least as far as the big-name programs were concerned, and that after all it was just temporary. But they couldn’t say when it would end, and an administration attorney told a federal judge that “the government doesn’t know the full scope of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause,” and the judge partially stayed the freeze pending further adjudication.

Meanwhile there has been a lot of chatter about the apparent fact that, since Congress has the sole power to “pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,” Trump’s scheme is unconstitutional, in much the same way that his blather about “ending birthright citizenship” is unconstitutional.

Well.

As to the chatter, I can’t say how far its influence reaches. It may not reach very far at all. Those of us who pay attention to the news at all are in a bubble, because most people barely pay attention or pay no attention at all, or have their heads filled with gush from Fox News and such like. Also the Prestige Press coverage of these events is, as usual, hilariously timid (“Trump’s funding freeze creates widespread confusion,” lol no one’s confused buddy). Our tweets or skeets or whatever may not count.

But a few things happened that clearly did count. There were the quick lawsuit filings. State officials allowed themselves to be quoted. The kind of high-profile Democrats you had to hope would speak up – like J.B. Pritzker and Ron Wyden – did so. And the road was blocked.

You know who noticed this? Rightwing propagandists. Heretofore they’ve all been chest-beating 24/7 on behalf of Glorious Leader Trump. Now they’re running headlines like “Trump’s spending pause? Biden did it first” (Washington Times). The dipshit at RedState (“Democrats Lose Their Minds Over Trump's Funding Freeze, Then Flat-Out Lie About Its Impact”) was particularly good:

While it cannot yet be proven, the most likely reason for this system-wide outage was that some industrious bureaucrat resister decided to shut down the [Medicaid] website to prove the point that this freeze was dangerous and a threat to democracy.

Wheels within wheels! Scanning the red trades, I do notice most of them soft-pedal the story and focus instead on Karoline Leavitt’s inaugural press conference — so blond and white (“a breath of fresh air,” sighs Byron York), not like that, you know.

They know they can’t spin this one.

Meantime Tubby is on to another scam: Paying off federal workers to leave the government’s employ. That’s a particularly dumb play — everyone knows Trump always stiffs his employees! — and its emergence at this point suggests discombobulation, as if they hadn’t expect people to start booing and were hustling a juggler onstage to distract them.

Or maybe not. Like I said when Tubby II was booked, we oughtn’t fantasize ourselves to be political consultants, attuned to the tides and tempests of public opinion and plotting a course for a “resistance.”

But we can rely on our eyes and ears and our common sense. And what they tell me is that, while things are still bad, very bad, they are not hopeless; that even this partially successful pushback on this outrage is obviously not what the administration was counting on as part of some sort of 3D chess maneuver; and that (as I said elsewhere in my post-election essays) it is never out of the question that these people, being basically psychotic and stupid, may fuck up, and good people may take advantage of the opening. Take some comfort in that!