It is starting, even before January 20.

House and Senate leadership negotiated and came up with a Continuing Resolution to keep the government funded through some time in March. Votes were to be taken today and President Biden (remember him?) was to sign it tomorrow, before large parts of the government were to be defunded and shut down on Saturday.

(Digression: remember when there was a bill negotiated last year by Congress to reform immigration law and it was ready to be passed until then candidate Trump said to the Republicans: “don’t vote for it” and they all said “Yessa”. And remember when Trump told the Congress not to pass a national debt increase bill?)

Yesterday, as the House and Senate readied to approve the Continuing Resolution and took deep breaths of relief, the Tri-presidents Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy (the TPs) said to the Republicans: “Don’t vote for it”, and apparently  they won’t.

So, as of now, the government will partially shut down in two days unless something happens to turn it around. Normally, knowing how Congress acts, you would say: “Well, of course they will come up with something before the Saturday deadline.” But this time, and for the next four years – maybe they won’t.

One of the things that the Tri-presidents want to accomplish, of course, is to cut government spending. So how will they start to go about that? We know that one thing they won’t want to do is increase the national debt, right? Then why are the TPs  By insisting that the debt ceiling be raised now, so far by an unspecified amount. Now, why do they need to increase the debt ceiling now? Answer is simple: they don’t. They want to do it only so they can say – when they will have to increase it later on account of the tax savings extensions they plan on passing to benefit the very wealthy – that “we don’t have to increase the debt ceiling, because Biden already did it.” Pretty dumb, you say? Yup.

But those who voted for Trump don’t yet know how dumb it is. Or don’t care, because they are in a daze, kowtowing to the Great Leaders as after Trump said that he will arrange for rightwing primary opposition for anyone in Congress who does not do what he demands they do.

So the government just might shut down this weekend.

And not only that, as Norm Orenstein said last night on Laurence O’Brien’s show (and I sort of paraphrase): “Mike Johnson is no moderate. He is a Christian nationalist and a very right wing politician. But he isn’t right wing enough for the Republicans in Congress,” and many are saying that they won’t vote for him for Speaker. Will we have another paralytic Speaker battle? Perhaps.

In the meantime, I heard that there are those who want to request, or may have already requested, the FBI to instigate a criminal investigation against Liz Cheney for the work she did on the committee that investigated the impeachment of Donald Trump. Also on Laurence O’Brien’s show last night, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked how they think this is even possible since sitting members of Congress have immunity just to make sure something like this doesn’t happen? And, he asked, what kind of prosecutor says: “Let’s go get Liz Cheney. Let’s investigate her and figure out what crime we can charge her with?” And, that is just what is happening. And add to it the attack on the First Amendment that Trump has brought bybsuing thecDes Moines Register for publishing a poll showing he was behind in the Iowa presidential race.

All this before the TPs even take office. Purposeful chaos is on its way.

We have been advised before that it will be a bumpy road and should just buckle our seat belts. But guess what? I think they took our seat belts away.