Medved: What role will Elon Musk play in a possible government shutdown?

Conservative commentator Michael Medved said on KIRO Newsradio that we’ve seen the threat of a government shutdown before, but without the wildcard of billionaire Elon Musk.

“Musk put out these X messages, threatening Republicans who voted for the previous agreement with primary challenges,” Medved said on “The Gee and Ursula Show.”  “This got people’s attention, but the new bill, reduced to 150 pages from 1500, still failed.”

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Medved attempted to explain why Musk seemed to be advocating for a shutdown. “There’s an instinctive feeling that shutting down the government is good because there’s too much government anyway. But this doesn’t solve the problem; it just costs more in the long run.”

Minutes after Republicans’ latest plan to avert a shutdown and raise the debt ceiling failed in the House Thursday, congressional leaders regrouped to consider what to do next.

“There certainly were not a majority of Republicans, certainly not enough Republicans to pass the previous 1500-page compromise,” Medved said. “So Trump himself apparently worked on another compromise yesterday, and they voted on it last night, and it lost. And what’s bizarre about this is this is not from Musk.”

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Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republican leader, said they wouldn’t try to bring the bill back to the floor.

Meanwhile, Rep. Chip Roy, who spearheaded Republican opposition to the bill, was defiant outside the chamber.

“I’m ambitious to make sure that we actually cut spending. I’m ambitious to do what we said we would do,” he told reporters.

On the opposite side of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said: “It’s a good thing the bill failed in the House, now it’s time to go back to the bipartisan agreement we came to.”

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans “are not serious about helping working-class Americans,” adding, “They are simply doing the bidding of their wealthy donors and puppeteers. Unacceptable.”

“What people have to realize is all this money that’s not going to be paid to some 800,000 federal employees who are furloughed,” Medved said. “They’re going to get the money eventually, and it just costs more to pay it out this way than to allow the government, with all its inefficiencies, to continue to function.”

Contributing: The Associated Press

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, here and email him here.