From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Chaos in Congress again is Elon Musk and Donald Trump blow up a bipartisan agreement to fund the American government through mid-March and avoid a Friday night government shutdown. What does this mean for House Speaker

Mike Johnson, who put together the deal and the ability of Republicans to govern when they run

the entire government next year? And should Republicans just cut out the middleman and maybe make

Elon Musk, Speaker of the house. That's our topic for

today on Potomac Watch, the opinion page podcast of the Wall Street Journal. I'm Paul as you go

with Kim Strassel and Alicia Finley. And, you know, no Congress seems to finish these days without

a spectacle, Kim. Oh my gosh. So why did Musk and Vivek

Ramoswamy, his partner in the Department of Government Efficiency under Trump? Why'd they blow this up?

What did they want? So here's what was in the agreement that was prior to this blowup heading to being

passed. This was a continuing resolution to keep the government funded

until March 14th, but as a price of getting that through the House and the Senate, where

Mike Johnson, the Speaker, would have to rely on Democrats to do it in the House because Republicans

won't vote for a CR. Too many Republicans wouldn't vote for a continuing

resolution. He had to add in a bunch of things Democrats wanted. So there's $100 billion in

disaster aid, something that some Republicans wanted to, $10 billion in economic aid to farmers.

There's a farm bill extension. There are changes to health care law.

There's a new requirement that you can sell E15 ethanol all year long. It was a Christmas tree in the end.

And I appreciate that Elon Musk, like many Americans who are worried about spending in debt,

looked at this and said, what the heck are we doing, given our debt load? And I get it. But the math of this is a lot more complicated than he is giving credit. Musk spent yesterday on Twitter lobbying hand grenades at this product and saying, you know what, just shut the government down.

We've got 33 days until the inauguration.

Nothing bad will go wrong.

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