It’s that time of year again. No, I’m not talking about the wonders of the Christmas season. I’m talking about the US Congress coming together to shove a giant omnibus bill down the throats of hurting Americans.
Yeah, inflation is still crazy high, and eggs cost $6 a dozen now, but what we really need is to spend millions of dollars in taxpayer money on LGBT “pride centers” while shoveling even more money into the black hole that is the Department of Defense. You’d hope that we’d at least get extra spending for border security in such a monstrosity of a bill, but nope, there’s a provision that expressly disallows that.
Because of course there is.
And don’t expect Republican leadership to stand in the way of the gravy train. Heck, they are all for it. Mitch McConnell even praised the omnibus as a major win for the right, suggesting the GOP got all its priorities. A sane person would ask what the trade-off was and whether it was worth it. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of those around.
Well, except for senators like Rand Paul. He took to the podium today with all 4,000+ pages of the omnibus and said what his spineless Republican colleagues won’t.
I brought with me the omni, 4,155 pages. When was it produced? In the dead of the night, 1:30 in the morning it was released. Now, people argue that it’s conservatives’ fault, that you don’t have the Christmas spirit, somehow you’re holding up goverment. Well, whose job is it to produce this? The people in charge of spending. The people in charge of both of the parties. When did they know that this would be necessary?
Well, it’s in the law, September 30th. You’ve got nine months, almost ten months to produce a plan, to have a spending plan. They weren’t ready on September 30th so they voted themselves 90 more days. They weren’t ready last week either so they voted themselves another week. And now we have it at 1:30 in the morning, this morning.
Paul continues from there, tearing down the bi-partisan argument that this bill must be passed immediately as a quasi-emergency measure. Republicans and Democrats knew for over nine months that this plan needed to be put together. Instead of doing it responsibly, which would have been to produce several smaller spending bills grouped by similar appropriations, they dropped a 4,000+ page bill in the middle of the night with a demand that it be passed within days. No debate. No amendments. Just eat the turd sandwich.
All the while, people like McConnell and Schumer insist that it would be dangerous not to pass their garbage omnibus package. As Paul notes, though, what’s more dangerous? Adding another trillion dollars to the national debt or the military doing without an extra few million in spending? The United States is far more susceptible to financial collapse at this point than foreign invasion, especially given our biggest enemies live across thousands of miles of ocean.
That’s not to say military spending is bad. It is to say that constantly leaning on military spending as a “win,” excusing all manner of insane domestic spending that was traded for it, got old a long time ago. It’s the same song and dance every single year from Republican leadership. They don’t even attempt to care about what is being done to the country’s economic outlook, whether we are talking about the national debt or the middle-class crushing inflation caused by their continued blowing out of the budget.
Paul stands among a small group that has remained consistent on that point. No one else is clean in the national Republican Party. It’s just a shame that he doesn’t have a real shot at the White House because he might be the best option of them all. Republican voters prefer the sizzle to actually tasting the steak, though.
