HARDWICK – So what did the Lutherans do to Elon Musk to raise his ire? Did he write a class paper in his youth about the positives of Apartheid and his teacher, a Lutheran (lots of them in South Africa), gave him a failing grade? Was he abused by a Lutheran minister when he was a young boy?
For who knows what reason, he has it in for Lutheran Family Services. According to him, Lutheran organizations, affiliates and just about any place that has any connection to anything Lutheran gets better than $628 million a year from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Of that, almost $500,000 goes to Lutheran Family Services in South Dakota, which, reportedly, uses the money to run nursing homes. He thinks that is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
According to Musk, all these expenditures are actually money laundering of public dollars for religion. He claims on his X account that this has to end.
“The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
Musk is a private citizen with no authority to shut or open anything public. DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is not a government agency. It is a creation of Musk.
Now Musk has had a handful of DOGE engineers commandeering the payment system of the United States Treasury, with no legal authority to do so.
Musk now has access to and control of practically all payments made by the U.S. Treasury, to all government departments and agencies, including Congress, the Supreme Court and the entire judicial system, states, municipalities, organizations, individuals. Think: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans . . . all of us.
Well, a court will rule all that illegal. And how will that ruling get enforced? The U.S. Department of Justice, the F.B.I., all governmental law enforcement, is under the control of the White House.
What gets enforced and doesn’t, who gets paid and who doesn’t is up to the whim of Musk, with suggestions from Trump.
Perhaps the only way out, other than massive civil disobedience, is for the Democrats in the House of Representatives to approach eight or 10 moderate Republicans, if any exist, and agree to support one of them to be the Speaker of the House. Vote out the current speaker and vote in the new one, who becomes third in line for the presidency. In the Senate, find three or four Republicans, who will stand up for America, if any will, to vote out the Majority Leader and vote in one of them. Then impeach Trump, impeach Vance and let the new Speaker of the House become president, and have that person fire all of Trump’s appointees, order Musk and his minions arrested for treason, and return to the rule of law.
Otherwise . . .
Connelly was editor and co-publisher of The Hardwick Gazette from 1986 to 2017.