Sixth District Republican Congressman Ben Cline met on Thursday with Elon Musk, no doubt a personal thrill for the career back-bencher.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by the incoming president, Donald Trump, to head up an unsanctioned budget-busting committee that they named after a meme coin, are making the rounds on Capitol Hill to drum up interest in whatever it is they’re going to do, which likely isn’t much.
To that point, Musk isn’t really going to cut much government fat, when government fat is how he became a paper billionaire.
Cline, elected to a fourth term in November, is a member of a group called the Republican Study Committee – note: he’s a member, not a leader; he ran for the open chairman position on the RSC, but lost.
Cline posted on social media on Thursday that he gave Musk a copy of the RSC’s Balanced Budget Task Force report, “which outlines commonsense policies aimed at restoring fiscal responsibility, reducing wasteful spending, and eliminating bureaucratic red tape.”
Our colleague, Gene Zitver, the editor of the ClineWatch blog, noted that the report that Cline mentioned in the social-media post “would raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits and undermine Medicare, as well as slash Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”
Because Republicans like Ben Cline would rather slash Social Security, Medicaid, CHIP and ACA than make billionaires like Musk and millionaires like Ramaswamy pay their fair share.
It’s what the White folks voted for.