Yep. I think Musk is going to find out sooner than later that he doesn’t actually control what he bought.
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So…cryptocurrency? That makes sense.
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I don’t see that anyone else has posted this; Heather Cox Richardson on The Bulwark
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I really hope so.
The irony is for decades now there’s been that Republican-led conspiracy theory about (((George Soros))) secretly controlling Democrats and the so-called deep state from behind the scenes.
Meanwhile you have Musk (both secretly and overtly) spending a fortune to get Trump elected along with forcing Congress to bend to his will through Twitter. But, who gives a shit because, “Americans want a disruptor” and he’s “successful business man”, right?
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Hmm. I will finish later, but one thing she said I disagree with. She said the left (she didn’t say far left, but I think she meant far left) wants to dismantle Democracy. She also said the (far) right also wants to dismantle Democracy, just for different reasons. I am sure there are some on the far left who want to dismantle Democracy, but not anyone of any relevance. Who is on the far left of American politics who actually is in elected office? AOC, Bernie, the rest of the Squad, Elizabeth Warren? None of those people want to dismantle Democracy. I’m further to the left than most of those people and I don’t want to dismantle Democracy. I want to dismantle Capitalism, but not Democracy, and I think that’s true of most on the far left. I really like HCR, but every now and then, she really dips a toe into “both sides” territory, and I don’t like it.
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I did kind of puzzle a bit on that one; unless she means far, far left, as in anarchists, but realistically, I think Leftists want a democracy that works for the people. I watched a video by Politics Girl today, where she says pretty much that; dismantling the existing system is unrealistic and not desirable, because there is a decent framework already in place. Baby, bathwater, and all that.
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December 19, 2024 (Thursday)
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.
By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
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December 20, 2024 (Friday)
This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.
Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.
This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.
As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.
The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.
The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”
As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.
For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.
On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.
What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.
Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.
“All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Trump wrote.
But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”
Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.
Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.
As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there’s a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”
The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”
Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”
Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.
The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.
The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.
The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.
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Of course. Priorities. 
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So instead they blame House Democrats for things like this recent budget crisis, despite them being the minority party. “Why didn’t any Democrats get on board!” — yeah, right. Like any Republicans would do the same if the roles were reversed? Go cry about bipartisanship when you’re actually acting in a bipartisan fashion.
Trump really doesn’t understand how government works, does he?
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Maybe, but he does display a pretty masterful understanding of how disinformation works. I really doubt he thinks it’s a Biden problem, or even cares much just whose problem it is. The important thing for him to say is that any political problem is Biden or the Democrats’ fault; most of his cult will believe it.
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That, and he wants it “solved” before he goes into office so he doesn’t have to worry about it. The last thing he wants to do is any actual work. But he’s fine shitting the bed for whomever comes after him.
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That humongous sledgehammer of a fact (among many, many others) just ain’t massive enough to bash through and into the skulls of the GOP’s base. They need to feel pain and know that Trump was the cause.
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Call me a liberalistic anarchist, but I think we need more democracy to dismantle hierarchies.
As long as the state exists, it should represent more people, less unequally, with more checks and balances, and less unequal treatment. And more and more so.
I think we’ll always need some body to represent the whole public. At the very least, to deal with pandemics and other global threats. And to check that community and other institutions aren’t failing parts of the public.
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December 21, 2024 (Saturday)
Shortly after midnight last night, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government through March 14, 2025. The previous continuing resolution ran out at midnight, but as Bloomberg’s congressional budget reporter Steven Dennis explained, “midnight is NOT a hard deadline for a government shutdown. A shutdown occurs only when [the Office of Management and Budget] issues a shutdown order, which they traditionally will NOT issue if a bill is moving toward completion.”
President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, praising the agreement for keeping the government open, providing urgently needed disaster relief, and providing the money to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship hit it in March 2024, causing it to collapse.
“This agreement represents a compromise, which means neither side got everything it wanted. But it rejects the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought, and it ensures the government can continue to operate at full capacity,” Biden said in a statement. “That’s good news for the American people, especially as families gather to celebrate this holiday season.”
Passing continuing resolutions to fund the government is usually unremarkable, but this fight showed some lines that will stretch into the future.
First of all, it showed the unprecedented influence of billionaire private individual Elon Musk over the Republicans who in 2025 will control the United States government. Musk has a strong financial interest in the outcome of discussions, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he had included Musk as well as President-elect Trump in the negotiation of the original bipartisan funding bill.
Then Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it.
Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites.
Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.
Taking away paychecks is always wrenching, but to do it right before the winter holidays would devastate families. It would hurt the economy, too, since for many retailers the holiday season is when their sales are highest. Musk—who doesn’t answer to any constituents—seemed untroubled at the idea of hurting ordinary Americans. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.
In the end, Congress passed a bill much like the one Musk scuttled, but one of the provisions that Congress stripped out of the old bill was extraordinarily important to Musk. As David Dayen explained in The Prospect, the original agreement had an “outbound investment” provision that restricted the ability of Americans to invest in technology factories in China. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) had collaborated on the measure, hoping to keep cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, as well as the jobs they would create, in America rather than let companies move them to China.
As Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained, Musk is building big factories in China and wants to build an AI data center there, even though it could endanger U.S. security. McGovern charged that Musk’s complaints about the spending in the bill were cover for his determination to tank the provision that would limit his ability to move technology and business to China. And, he noted, it worked. The outbound investment provision was stripped out of the bill before it passed.
In The Prospect, Robert Kuttner explained this huge win for Musk, as well as other provisions that were stripped from the bill before it passed. After years of fighting, Tami Luhby of CNN explained, Congress agreed to reform the system in which pharmacy benefit managers act as middlemen between pharmaceutical companies and insurers, employers, and government officials. The original bill increased transparency and provided that pharmacy benefit managers would be compensated with flat fees rather than compensation tied to the price of drugs. The measures related to pharmacy benefit managers were stripped out of the measure that passed.
That lost reform shows another line that will stretch into the future: Trump’s team is working for big business. As Kuttner puts it, Trump, who is allegedly a populist leader, tanked a bipartisan spending bill in order to shield the Chinese investments of the richest man in the world and to protect the profits of second-largest pharmacy benefit manager UnitedHealth Group, the corporation for which murdered executive Brian Thompson worked.
Other measures stripped from the original bill were five different bills to combat childhood cancer. The idea that sick children were among the first victims of the funding showdown sparked widespread outrage. While the Senate did not return the entire $190 million worth of funding to the continuing resolution, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) pushed the chamber to pass the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0, devoting $63 million to extend the original measure that was passed in 2014 in honor of a Virginia girl who advocated for cancer funding until her death in 2013 at the age of ten. Representative Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) had shepherded the measure through the House in November, when it received only four no votes, all from Republicans.
The Senate also passed a measure repealing two laws that have curtailed Social Security benefits for teachers, firefighters, local police officers, and other public sector workers. The Social Security Fairness Act repeals the 1983 Windfall Elimination Provision, which cuts Social Security benefits for workers who receive government pensions, and the 1977 Government Pension Offset, which reduces Social Security benefits for spouses and survivors of people who themselves receive a government pension.
The House passed the Social Security Fairness Act in November by a vote of 327 to 75, with 72 Republicans and three Democrats voting no. In the Senate the vote was 76 to 20, with 27 Republicans voting yes and 20 voting no. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed offsetting the cost of the measure by raising the age of eligibility for Social Security to 70 over 12 years. That proposal got just 3 votes. Even those Republicans who would like to cut Social Security told Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis that such cuts would have to be bipartisan “because the programs are too popular for Republicans to cut on their own.”
Both the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0 and the Social Security Fairness Act had strong bipartisan support. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) first introduced a measure in 2005 to address the “horrendous inequity” in Social Security benefits under the previous system. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), famous as a champion of workers, pointed out that the new law will benefit bus drivers and cafeteria workers in the public schools, as well as the teachers.
And that bipartisanship on issues about which lawmakers feel strong public pressure is another line that could stretch into the future.
Finally, the struggle over the continuing resolution shows, once again, that Trump is weaker than his team claims. While Musk got the Chinese investment restrictions stripped out of the final bill, Congress passed the measure without Trump’s demand for freedom from the debt ceiling in it. This failure comes after Senate Republicans rejected Trump’s choice for Senate majority leader and after his first nominee for attorney general, former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), had so little support he was forced to withdraw from consideration.
Trump has been angling to get Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Florida senatorship that will be vacated if Senator Marco Rubio becomes secretary of state, despite her lack of any previous experience in elected office. But that plan, too, seems to have gone awry.
Today, Lara Trump announced: “After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the United States Senate.”
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Fingers crossed that this continues to be true. However, I feel like it’s important to note that TRUMP ISN’T EVEN IN OFFICE YET! He, and Musk, were able to get changes made to the continuing resolution without any actual authority to do anything. After January 20, he will have actual authority to do things.
Well that’s good. Maybe she’ll go back to recorded really shitty music.
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Couldn’t agree more.
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December 22, 2024 (Sunday)
On December 23, 1783, General George Washington stood in front of the Confederation Congress, meeting in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, to resign his wartime commission. Negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War on September 3, 1783, and once the British troops had withdrawn from New York City, Washington believed his job was done.
“The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country,” he told the members of Congress.
“Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.”
“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”
In 1817, given the choice of subjects to paint for the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol, being rebuilt after the British had burned it during the War of 1812, fine artist John Trumbull picked the moment of Washington’s resignation. As they discussed the project, he told President James Madison: “I have thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commission as he did, when the army, perhaps, would have been unanimously with him, and few of the people disposed to resist his retaining the power which he had used with such happy success, and such irreproachable moderation.”
Madison agreed, and the painting of a man voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator hangs today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
[Image: John Trumbull, General George Washington Resigning his Commission, 1824, public domain through Wikimedia Commons.]
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