Republicans may feel that they’re on the up and up, armed with Donald Trump in the White House and a trifecta at the federal level, but former insiders of the conservative party argue that the GOP’s inability to stand up to its executive leader is becoming an unsolvable problem.
Speaking with MSNBC on Sunday, former Florida Representative David Jolly claimed that Republicans have no targetable solutions for some of Congress’s chief jobs due to the legislative branch’s constant deference to Trump’s will.
“I don’t think Republicans in Congress know what they’re doing right now,” Jolly said. “They have a government funding cliff and a debt ceiling coming up in four weeks, and they don’t even know how to solve that.
“I think, Alex, that we’re in a constitutional crisis. I really believe that, people are tepid in saying that—but I would say not just because of Trump and [Elon] Musk, though they’re facilitating it,” Jolly continued. “The constitutional crisis is because the Republican Congress has collapsed.
“It is listless and meaningless, it is not providing the check that the Constitution suggests it should in this environment,” he said, arguing that the only existing check that remains on the “lawlessness and corruption” of Trump and Musk’s power is in the courts, which “takes time.”
“But the immediate ability to rush to the fire is the Congress, and they’ve just laid down and said ‘Hey, Donald Trump is running this place, and Elon Musk is as well, and we’re giving up any authority,’” Jolly said.
Jolly also had harsh words for the MAGA leader’s open-armed reception of the world’s richest man, whose spending-fixated department tapped into federal databases with info on hundreds of millions of Americans, including sensitive details such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.
“How do you think Elon Musk’s cover-boy treatment was received in the White House?” asked MSNBC’s Alex Witt, referring to the billionaire’s front-page spread on Time magazine’s February issue.
“Elon Musk is either a co-president or a first spouse right now, given the power that he’s wielding and the lack of accountability,” Jolly said.
Whether Musk even has the proper clearances to access such sensitive data has been an ongoing topic of discussion. Last week, Trump designated Musk a “special government employee,” which, per the Justice Department, is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.” But hours after the appointment, even top officials in the administration weren’t confident that Musk had cleared a background check to do the job.
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