The United States House and Senate moved Thursday to block the president’s unauthorized war in Iran, discharge a war powers resolution, and strip funding for a $1.8 billion golden ballroom slush fund tucked inside a reconciliation bill. The revolt was broad, public, and, according to lawmakers, completely unconnected to the president’s approval rating among rural white voters falling from plus 27 to net negative 6 in fourteen months.
Senate Republicans, who had previously described the ballroom as essential infrastructure, now described it as ‘a decorative civic engagement surplus that we just noticed.’ House leadership quietly killed a floor vote on the Iran war powers resolution after realizing Democrats and some Republicans were prepared to pass it. The procedural maneuver was so abrupt that Representative Jim McGovern asked the chair to explain what happened. The chair moved on.
‘We woke up, consulted the Federalist Papers, and realized the founders had anticipated unilateral military action in the Middle East might be problematic,’ said a senior leadership aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the sudden discovery of principle remains politically sensitive. The aide added that the revolt’s timing, coinciding with the lowest approval numbers of any president in polling history, was ‘a scheduling artifact.’
Lumpy-Dumb-Dumb has not personally addressed the revolt. His only public communication in the last twenty-four hours was a retweet of a New York Post article about a shark sighting, which an unnamed aide called ‘a subtle and powerful foreign policy metaphor.’ The silence has been described by the White House as a pivot to a ‘strategic listening posture,’ which mainly involves leaving the Oval Office television tuned to Fox News at low volume while aides whisper about trade deficits.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio added his own quiet contradiction, noting en route to a NATO meeting that Russia and China are providing weapons and intelligence to Cuba. This contradicted the president’s recent praise of his relationships with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and undercut the administration’s simultaneous demand that Cuba justify an aircraft carrier deployment. ‘Of course our friends are arming our adversaries. That’s what friends do,’ Rubio seemed to not say, while saying it.
The revolt extended to public health, where the former CDC director made a round of media appearances warning that the president’s mishandling of an Ebola outbreak in Africa risked a pandemic. No one asked the president about this, because no one could find him. The $1.8 billion ballroom fund was reclassified in the reconciliation bill as ‘patriotic quail habitat research’ and given a footnote so dense it required a separate footnote to explain it.
