A Rare Sign of Life in Congress

Happy sunset from Colorado, Peter Zeihan here. And today we’re going to talk about Congress because apparently something interesting is finally happening there. For those of you been following me for quite some time, you know that I’ve been broadly disappointed with Congress for over a decade. Basically, the senators and especially the House have outsourced all their responsibilities to the executive branch and just turned into, a general scream shop, not even a talk shop. 

We haven’t really had meaningful legislation that hasn’t originated in the white House in quite some time. And a lot of that has been, let’s just call it subpar. Anyway, these trends really came to a head in this new administration. Trump two, where the Republican Party, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists as the institution that it used to be. 

It used to be a place where young leaders would be trained up, where people could not just be indoctrinated but actually taught to lead. And there was a policy arm within the institution to generate the sort of people who could then serve as advisers and even cabinet secretaries over the long run. When Trump ran for reelection this most recent time, he took over the party and basically got rid of all of that. 

So there’s no new generation waiting in the wings or is no longer a set of policy experts that he can draw upon. It is just now an institution that exists to service his personal needs, whatever those happen to be. And so the Republican Party, for all intents and purposes, is now gone. Now, that doesn’t mean that you get immediate turnover in Congress. 

And one of the things that we saw in the early months of the Trump administration, Trump two, again, is that Donald Trump would personally do a lot of arm twisting to convince senators to vote for his cabinet appointments for people who were really just deplorably unqualified. The big four, of course, are Pete Hegseth in defense, who continues to show over and over and over again that he doesn’t understand how an organization works much less a military. 

We have the DNI, director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who, if she’s not working for the Russians directly, certainly shares their worldview on all things American and continues to accidentally out spies. I think we’re up to nine now. We have let’s see. Kash Patel at the FBI, who is very charitably a, conspiracy theorist with absolutely no law enforcement, experience. 

And then we have, RFK Jr at Health and Human Services who is just a complete nutjob and has recently gotten Donald Trump to declare that he feels that Tylenol causes autism. Along with all kinds of other vaccine nonsense. Anyway, the point is that Trump leaned on the Republican senators in the Senate to confirm these people, even though they were wildly unqualified, and under normal circumstances, they would have never been nominated, much less confirmed. 

And there were a number of centrist senators who are really big on things like rule of law, who told the president, look like, you know, we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. You’re the president. You just won. You have a cabinet that you want. We’re going to help you build it. But you’ve got to promise us that these people aren’t actually nuts, and they’re going to put some time in to learn their portfolios so that it’s not an utter disaster. 

Well, here we are a few months later, and it’s been pretty disastrous. Now, that’s kind of piece one of what’s going on. Piece two is something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, US statistics are generally considered to be by far the best in the world. And almost all of the major countries out there try to model their statistics collection on what the United States does. 

But the only group that disagrees with that is the really hardcore MAGA, led by Donald Trump, of course, who feels that, BLS and US government statisticians in general have been lying about the statistics for years in order to make him look bad and make Biden look good. No evidence has ever been presented on this topic because there probably isn’t any, everyone else in the world still thinks US statistics are the best on the planet and throughout the business community. 

That is not exactly a controversial point of view. Anyway, Donald Trump fired the director of BLS a few months ago and decided that he wanted to put somebody who was much more pliable in that position. 

The person he selected is a gentleman by the name of E.J. and Tony. Now E.J. and Tony does have a PhD. He does have a background in economics, but nothing that has to do with data, nothing that has to do with labor statistics. And E.J. and Tony has been basically for several years now, hitting the airwaves as a kind of a social media star denigrating the blues and economists in general. 

And he’s made it very clear. I mean, you don’t have to really read between the lines on this one, that if he does get confirmed, he will go through and basically rip up the entire system and just start making up statistics to make Donald Trump look good. So, 

if you’re not a hardcore MAGA and you’re not in the white House and you’re not part of the Heritage Foundation, which is where E.J. and Tony is, has been chief economist. 

This is not a guy that you want. No one else has come out to endorse him. Heritage Foundation. Well, that’s a sad story. It used to be a really solid conservative think tank 15 years ago, but it’s basically denigrated into MAGA world right now. And now it’s all about conspiracy theories. Anyway,  diAntony is disliked. 

Like basically everybody in the community, community mean people who can do math. And he’s basically described as a social commentator who happens to have a PhD, not someone who’s a statistician or an economist. Well, the interesting thing that happened October 1st is the Trump administration withdrew his nomination. Now, the really curious thing is why they did that. 

The reports out of Congress is that there are a number of Republican senators who rolled over for people like RFK Junior and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, who refused to even meet with them. Tony. Apparently, got to the point where enough is enough, and Congress is actually, at least at some level, starting to consider actually doing its job as an independent branch of government. 

Now, I don’t want to oversell this because this is one event, albeit a very, very big one against a constellation of giving in, the, the personalities, in question are kind of up in the air, but probably the big three are Murkowski of Alaska and Collins of Maine and Grassley of Iowa, all three of which are very big on rule of law issues. 

But if it was just those three. He could have still been confirmed because the Republicans have a majority and Vice President JD Vance could always go in and flip the switch to break a tie. So it has to be more and it probably has to be more than 1 or 2 more in order for us to be in a situation suggesting there’s at least a half a dozen Republican senators who have said, no more. 

And that, for me, makes this a very good day.