I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Today's read: 13 minutes.
Quick hits.
- President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row; the men will now serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Biden did not commute the sentences of three other men on death row who each carried out mass killings. (The commutations)
- Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) allegedly paid multiple women for sex, including a minor, and purchased and used illegal drugs (in some instances from his Congressional office), according to a final draft of the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into Gaetz’s conduct. (The report)
- The United States Central Command said two U.S. Navy pilots were shot down over the Red Sea in an apparent friendly fire incident. The pilots ejected from their aircraft and were rescued. (The incident) Separately, at least five people were killed and 200 injured when a car drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany. (The attack) Separately, Houthi forces in Yemen claimed responsibility for a missile strike on Tel Aviv, Israel, that injured more than a dozen people. (The attack)
- A woman was lit on fire and killed aboard the New York City subway on Sunday. Police announced they had arrested a suspect, reportedly identified as a Guatemalan migrant. (The killing)
- The personal consumption expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, increased 0.1% from October to November and 2.4% annually, a smaller increase than expected. (The numbers)
Today's topic.
The government funding bill. On Saturday, President Joe Biden signed a stopgap funding bill into law, averting a prolonged government shutdown after last-minute negotiations in the House and Senate. The continuing resolution (CR) is a scaled-down version of a bill that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released on Tuesday but scrapped a day later. The new CR, called the “American Relief Act, 2025,” funds the government at current levels through mid-March while providing roughly $100 billion in natural disaster aid and $10 billion for economic assistance to farmers.
We covered the initial CR on Thursday.
What happened: The extension of government funding, disaster aid, and economic assistance for farmers were all part of the first version of the CR, as were a host of other provisions unrelated to the potential shutdown. Those additional measures prompted pushback from President-elect Trump, Musk and many House Republicans, who said they would not support the additional spending. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance also pushed for any funding bill to include a debt ceiling increase.
Johnson then introduced a second version of the CR that continued current government funding for three months but replaced a host of controversial provisions with a two-year debt limit suspension. That bill also failed, with 38 House Republicans joining all but two Democrats to vote it down. Finally, the House passed a third version of the CR on Friday — with the debt-limit provision excluded — that passed the Senate 85-11 and was signed by President Biden just after midnight, with a government shutdown technically in effect. The measure required a two-thirds majority to pass because it was taken up under suspension; all Democrats except one voted for the package, while 34 Republicans voted no.
Although Johnson was eventually able to shepherd a deal through, the episode led several House Republicans to publicly question whether they would support his re-election as speaker when the next Congress is sworn in. Trump has not commented on the final CR, but some of the president-elect’s allies are reportedly criticizing Johnson for his handling of the bill. Musk, meanwhile, expressed tepid support for the outcome, calling it a change from “a bill that weighed pounds into a bill that weighed ounces.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) framed the CR as “a bipartisan bill that funds the government, helps Americans affected by hurricanes and natural disasters, helps our farmers, and avoids harmful cuts,” adding in a separate statement, “this bill does not include everything Democrats fought for, [but] there are major victories in this bill for American families.”
Today, we’ll explore reactions to the funding bill from the left and right, followed by my take.
What the left is saying.
- The left is critical of Republicans’ handling of the spending bill, particularly Trump and Musk’s role.
- Some suggest that Musk may have gotten exactly what he wanted from the episode.
- Others say the ordeal is a sign of things to come in the next four years.
The Washington Post editorial board wrote “Trump and Musk show how not to conduct the nation’s business.”
The CR “managed to keep the government open, though lawmakers were forced to strip most of the Democrats’ desired provisions, and Mr. Trump’s, to get it across the finish line. No matter what one thinks about the negotiations’ particulars, everyone should agree that this is not the way to conduct the nation’s business,” the board said. “Mr. Trump should not have spurred a last-minute frenzy to keep the government running during the holidays when a reasonable bipartisan compromise had already been reached. The negotiators’ job was made harder by the fact that Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the president-elect’s confidant tasked with making the government more ‘efficient,’ seemed to be at cross-purposes in their demands.”
“The episode is all the more frustrating because both Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump had at least a kernel of a point worth making. Mr. Musk is right that federal spending needs trimming. The national debt is on an unsustainable course, and the government spends too much to see to its core responsibilities… Mr. Trump, meanwhile, is right that the federal debt limit should be reformed, if not abolished,” the board wrote. “But it takes two to deal — and time. Last-minute, ad hoc legislative theatrics will gain Mr. Trump — and the country — far less than a more reasonable approach would. Meanwhile, the nation will suffer amid confidence-sapping uncertainty and political confusion.”
In The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner said “Musk got the only thing that he wanted. Does Trump realize it?”
“In the end, legislators of both parties wanted to get home for Christmas, and both houses overwhelmingly passed a simple ‘continuing resolution’ keeping the government funded at roughly present levels through March, plus disaster relief and farm aid. Musk succeeded in stripping out the China provision,” Kuttner wrote. “The mainstream media focused on the tick-tock of whether the government would shut down, on Musk’s surprising influence, and the issue of the debt ceiling—but totally missed the China investment provision that was the real driver of the dispute.”
“Did Trump miss it? Let’s recall that Trump is a ferocious China hawk. Stopping U.S. investment in sensitive technologies that could help China has been a key element of the agenda for serious China experts in both parties. On that issue, Musk won and Trump was rolled,” Kuttner said. “Musk disingenuously praised Congress for drastically shrinking the total spending. This was total bullshit, since the budget numbers of the original deal and final one were almost identical. But shrinking spending wasn’t the goal: keeping the government out of his China business was.”
In New York Magazine, Ben Jacobs argued “the Republican Party is out of control.”
“At the dawn of unified rule in Washington, Republicans couldn’t even agree on whether to keep the lights on. What had been a relatively formulaic affair, a bipartisan deal struck by Speaker Mike Johnson to avert a government shutdown, turned instead into 48 hours of pure chaos,” Jacobs wrote. “While Democrats were dismayed to lose various provisions in the original deal, none of them was worth shutting down the government over. All fell into line on Friday night and supported the bill.
“In contrast, 34 Republicans, most from the party’s hard right, did not. There were idiosyncratic reasons for some to object, but there were 20 members returning in 2025 who had objected to both bills, voting no on both Thursday and Friday. It showed the outlines of just how big the rump of dissident Republicans could be in the next Congress to frustrate Johnson’s ambitions,” Jacobs said. “Even if Johnson manages to avoid defenestration on January 3, he still has to manage a paper thin majority that will range from Mike Lawler, who is expected to run for governor of New York as a moderate, to Marjorie Taylor Greene who recently floated Musk for Speaker.”
What the right is saying.
- The right is mixed on the outcome, with many praising Trump for pursuing a scaled-back CR.
- Some say the episode shows Trump has less power than he projects.
- Others say the spending fight was a welcome change from past iterations.
In Fox News, David Marcus said “Trump's handling of shutdown threat was a masterclass.”
“In the space of just a few days, Trump’s pressure on the Congress, including siccing his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attack dogs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on reckless spending, turned a 1,500 page monstrosity of a bill into a slim 120-page banger of basic necessities, including disaster relief and help for farmers,” Marcus wrote. “Within hours of the torrent of posts from the dynamic duo of DOGE, the American people began to wake up to what was in the bill and object. A trickle of GOP lawmakers flipped from yes to no on the bill, and with that, the stage was set for our soon-to-be commander in chief.
“With the target softened, Trump tore into the bill, going so far as to threaten lawmakers who voted for it with primary challenges. Trump even indicated that Johnson’s speakership could be in doubt if he did not get in line,” Marcus said. “It was fascinating how people all week tried to paint the budget mess as Republicans in disarray with House members defying Trump and looming trouble between Trump and Musk. Yet, when the dust settled, we had shed 1,400 pages of blundering B.S. with nary a peep from Biden.”
In National Review, Philip Klein wrote “Trump gets an early lesson on limits of his power over Congress.”
“Trump wanted Republicans to scrap or pass a long-term extension of the debt ceiling under President Biden’s watch so that it isn’t something he’ll have to deal with during the early months of his presidency. But it turns out that there are still a few dozen Republicans who don’t want to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts. And they aren’t simply going to change because Trump sends out a few social media posts,” Klein said. “Trump’s presence does not alter the math that bedeviled former speaker Kevin McCarthy and that is causing problems for Speaker Mike Johnson.
“The reality that Trump will be facing when he takes office is that there is a razor thin Republican majority in the House, and it will take less than a handful of Republicans to sink anything Trump wants to do as long as Democrats are united in opposition. In the upper chamber, Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell are clearly willing to oppose Trump on a number of issues, and when that happens, he won’t be able to lose a single additional vote. There’s a reason why the Matt Gaetz nomination had to be pulled.”
In The American Conservative, Jack Hunter suggested “a new kind of political movement is flexing its muscles in Washington.”
“Under Democrat presidents like Barack Obama or Joe Biden, passing this bill would have been business as usual unless a Republican majority could muster a stink, usually to no result. The same would have gone under a hypothetical Republican President Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush. Hell, Biden technically still is president, but the gravitational political pull right now is in the direction of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who is an unconventional leader, to say the least. And it was largely Team Trump that stopped this bill,” Hunter said. “This limited government, fiscally restrained spirit, so integral to traditional American conservatism, seems to be a guiding force on the eve of Trump’s second term.
“The moment is by no means perfect. Trump has already said that he wants to raise the debt ceiling, something Democrats have long clamored for. But it is a libertarian populism that now animates the impending DOGE and that helped kill the terrible Johnson spending bill. The establishments of both parties are accustomed to getting their way, particularly on spending. This time, they didn’t.”
My take.
Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.
- Ultimately, Trump and Musk didn’t accomplish much by derailing the original CR.
- The final bill doesn’t significantly alter spending and excludes potentially beneficial bipartisan policies.
- This episode presages larger challenges Republicans will face in Trump’s second term.
It's not hard to understand why Congress's approval rating is so low when this is how they act. To recap: A major spending fight, derailing months of bipartisan negotiations and nearly shutting the government down over the holidays, got us a bill costing nearly the exact same amount of money — just without some of the most popular and bipartisan provisions.
That is what just happened.
Yes, as observers like Elon Musk were quick to note (and celebrate), they just trimmed over a thousand pages of text, too. But looking at the massively decreased page count is deceptive, because the bill that passed contains almost all of the key provisions from the bill that failed last Thursday: disaster-aid funding, economic aid for farmers, and federal funding to repair the Scott Key Bridge in Maryland. Notably, the final CR also still contains a three-month extension of the use of telehealth in Medicare, a popular pandemic-era measure.
So what got left out? Most of the commentary from the left and right focused on the bill excluding a debt ceiling extension into January 30, 2027, which is what President Trump had asked for (he wanted to do it now under Biden so it wasn't a fight on his watch). However, three other dropped provisions were what really caught my eye.
For one, the new CR did not include long-sought reforms for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen between drug manufacturers and insurers. The reforms would have required PBMs to provide more information on rebates they negotiate and how much they pay for drugs, and to pass rebates onto health-plan sponsors (like insurers or employers). These requirements were aimed at limiting a practice called "spread pricing," in which PBMs charge payers like Medicaid more than they pay a pharmacy for a drug and then keep the profit. The reforms likely would have saved patients and the government money, but they're dead — for now.
Also absent in the new CR was legislation to restrict investments in China. That effort specifically targeted the artificial intelligence and technology sectors, but also would have mandated reviews of Chinese real estate purchases near sites of interest to national security in the U.S. It was a decidedly hawkish piece of legislation, but one that had a lot of bipartisan support given the increasingly adversarial relationship between the U.S. and China, particularly on trade and technology.
Third, the final CR excluded funding (supported by both parties) to continue protections for low-income Americans who have had their food-stamp benefits stolen through illegal skimming devices. Congress had been allowing states to replace those stolen benefits using federal funds, replenishing more than $150 million in benefits stolen from 300,000 low-income households over two years.
While I appreciate efforts to make our government leaner, our legislative process more straightforward and our Congress less dysfunctional, I don’t think that’s what Trump and Musk did here. Instead, they undermined bipartisan efforts to put more pressure on PBMs for transparency, take a more adversarial stance toward investment in China, refund benefits that were stolen from the needy, and give a raise to lawmakers.
I celebrated when Musk got involved in Twitter, but he's genuinely lost me over the last couple of years — and not because of his political views (many of which I agree with). He’s lost me because of his insistence that he is right about so many things where he is very obviously wrong, which shows an ignorance about how the government works and a total abandonment of curiosity to learn. He spent all week tweeting objectively false things about the initial bill, and then celebrated when the bill was shorter — apparently unaware that the new CR didn't actually save the government money or spend any less than the bill he tanked. Apparently, he just thought a shorter bill meant less spending.
What’s more, his praise was directed at the second CR that included legislation to lift the debt ceiling, which would have effectively given Congress a blank check for two years. If his Department Of Government Efficiency is going to be run with a similar misunderstanding of how budgets and spending work, then you can count me out.
Brian Riedl, one of my favorite conservative economists, put it like this: "The huge CR/omni was bad and deserved to go down, but the House GOP outsourcing itself to Elon Musk is still very bad, not least bc nearly everything he tweeted about the bill was false internet rumors."
I'm not entirely sure how long this whole Trump-Elon-Republicans marriage can last. This latest sequence makes for some very, very bad optics — at least from where I'm sitting. Consider this: Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and the bill he just helped kill had some direct connections to his private work. The restrictions on investment in China would have impacted his business dealings; Musk is also a massive Pentagon contractor through SpaceX, and he put up zero fight a couple weeks ago when the nearly $1 trillion defensive authorization bill passed, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted. Even the removal of the big pharmacy reforms raised my interest, as the network of billionaires Trump has brought into his administration must have been impacted (Politico noted that Mark Cuban was one of the few people to call out Musk on this specifically, asking him his views on the industry given the legislation he just killed).
I don't think it'll be long until those stories start to bother Trump and cause considerable headaches for Republicans. In an era of populist fervor and following an anti-establishment Trump candidacy, the optics could get even worse in a hurry.
What concerns me more, however, is that the problems could go well beyond optics. No American should be comfortable with the richest person in the world and the president working hand in glove, and we should focus as much on the things Musk is not talking about as we do on the issues he keeps directing all of our attention to.
All of this is also a preview of the messiness to come when Trump takes office. As I've said over and over, I support the fight many House Republicans are waging. Our government’s spending is out of control, and the way Congress passes spending measures is completely broken. I support Speaker Johnson's push for drafting, debating and passing individual appropriations bills, and I support people like Musk focusing on the massive government bloat and waste that we have come to accept.
Yet, remember this: On Wednesday, Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a continuing resolution without a debt limit extension. He put particular focus on Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who has long been against removing the debt limit. On Friday, 170 Republicans — including Roy — voted for a continuing resolution without a debt-limit extension. Roy then took the House floor and blasted Trump and Musk for not understanding that the new bill didn't actually spend less money, before admonishing his fellow Republicans as "profoundly unserious about reducing deficits."
This is the real problem for Republicans: not their thin majority over Democrats, but their massive intraparty disagreements on spending and the size of government, where Trump’s stance is light years away from many of the House Freedom Caucus budget hardliners. I expect that to be the defining battle of the first months of his presidency.
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Your questions, answered.
Q: Where (and why!) would you rank Trump on the all-time presidents ranking? Where would you rank Biden? Do you think Trump’s second term will move him up or down in your rankings?
— Chris from Verona, Washington
Tangle: I’m glad you asked this question so I can give you one of the biggest non-answers I’ve ever given in Tangle: I hate presidential rankings! I think they are incredibly silly and unhelpful.
First of all, how are we supposed to rank presidents at all? C-SPAN’s well known presidential survey ranks them based on 10 leadership characteristics that include traits like public persuasion, crisis leadership, and moral authority; overall, Abraham Lincoln ranks first and James Buchanan last on that list. Separately, the Presidential Greatness Project literally just surveys historians on the question of “greatness” ranked 0 to 100, and tallied Trump last and Abraham Lincoln first.
This all seems totally absurd to me. I’m not going to sit here and pretend there aren’t tangible ways to measure presidential success — Buchanan was a terrible president and should be toward the bottom. I’m sure most of us could agree to knock George W. Bush for 9/11, the failed war on terrorism, and the 2008 financial crisis. But does anyone really think we can separate “ranking” someone like Trump from personal bias about what is good or bad for the country?
Even if you agree on policy questions, it still seems like a futile exercise. For instance, Trump built a few hundred miles of border wall. He promised to build 2,000 miles of border wall. Should we move him up the rankings for getting a few hundred miles done? Should we move him down the rankings for not fulfilling his exact promise? Should we dock him for a bad idea, or bump him up for a good one? Also, how do we change his ranking now that we’ve seen the massive immigration surge under Biden?
I really don’t think we can rank presidents with much accuracy based on subjective notions like leadership skills, greatness, or moral authority. I especially don’t think we can do it while we are literally experiencing their presidencies, or even in the first few years after they leave office. So even if I were to play the game on Biden or Trump, I would wait a decade or two to see how their policies and terms really play out before cementing their legacies.
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Under the radar.
AT&T recently announced that it will eliminate its landline phone service in almost all U.S. states by 2029, citing antiquated copper wire infrastructure and maintenance costs as drivers of the decision. According to AT&T, the telecom company currently provides traditional landline service in 21 states, but just 5% of its residential customers and 5% of its commercial customers use the service. In place of landlines, AT&T plans to expand its existing fiber broadband network and build out a landline alternative for customers who don't want or need a broadband connection. “This is a multiyear process to ensure that every single customer has voice and 911 and access to an alternative before we are able to discontinue the copper-based landline service,” Executive Vice President Susan Johnson said. USA Today has the story.
Numbers.
- 1,547. The length, in pages, of the initial continuing resolution (CR) released last week.
- 116. The length, in pages, of the CR passed by Congress and signed by President Biden on Saturday.
- -6%. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s net favorability rating, according to a December 2024 Economist/YouGov poll.
- 47%. The percentage of Republicans with a favorable view of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
- 19%. The percentage of Democrats with a favorable view of Johnson.
- 87%. The percentage of registered voters who say it is inappropriate for government shutdowns to be used as leverage in policy disagreements, according to a 2023 Quinnipiac poll.
- 79%. The percentage of Republicans who say it is inappropriate for government shutdowns to be used as leverage in policy disagreements
- 96%. The percentage of Democrats who say it is inappropriate for government shutdowns to be used as leverage in policy disagreements.
The extras.
- One year ago today we had just published a short newsletter announcing our winter break.
- The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was the pre-Christmas Amazon workers strike.
- Nothing to do with politics: The meaning behind 14 archaic words in classic Christmas carols.
- Thursday’s survey: 2,049 readers responded to our survey asking what they want a funding bill to look like with 35% supporting a “skinny” continuing resolution. “There must be a better way to fund and run the federal government,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
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