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Republican Budget, Once Again, Gives Democrats Everything
Despite campaign promises to return to “regular order” (i.e., submit each Federal Department’s budget as a separate {fiscally responsible} bill), the Republican majority has once again crammed everything into a single, bloated omnibus spending bill. And like every other “Bipartisan Budget Deal,” it represents an utter capitulation to Democrats on spending greased by extra pork for the Republican Donor Class. Here are the key features of its 2,200+ pages.
- Record levels of spending across all departments. Conservatives are supposed to be happy because it increases military spending. Are you happy enough that the military gets another $60 billion that you don’t care about the other spending and bloat?
- Chuck Schumer’s NY Transit pork project gets funded, albeit indirectly, Donald Trump’s border wall does not. There is a piddling $1.6 Billion for Border Security, which is mostly limited to repairs to existing fencing and ineffective pedestrian obstacles. Only 33 miles of the border will get new fencing.
- Also, the H2-B Visa American-Worker-substitution-program is vastly expanded (page 1,760 of the bill).
- No budget cuts to the EPA. Big increases at the Department of Energy for “Clean Energy Research.”
- Sanctuary Cities are fully-funded.
- Planned Parenthood is fully funded.
- No cuts to Obamacare. A $70 billion Bipartisan Obamacare bailout will be voted on separately.
The national debt has expanded another trillion dollars since Trump was elected. About the only hope we have left is that government growth is eventually canceled out by complete fiscal bankruptcy. So far, though, debt does not seem to matter. Leviathan feeds and grows.
This bill sucks as much as any spending bill has ever sucked. Republicans only get away with this because so few people pay attention. While Democrats fight every single day for evermore spending, the Republican party derides fiscal conservatives as “whacko-birds,” concedes everything, and then claims they had no choice but to “compromise.” And their compromises are invariable 95% sell-out to Democrats, 5% lip-service to conservative constituencies.
Is there any point to the Republican Party beyond slowing the erosion of gun rights?
Published in Politics
That’s a horrifyingly accurate description of every annual budget. You could have stopped writing right there.
We’ve got to change how we do our budgets…
Disgraceful. And, quite frankly, a substantive reason to question the Administration, in addition to the usual suspects on the Hill. I’ll be curious to see if anyone can spin this in a positive light.
I thought Mick Mulvaney was supposed to be a budget hawk. Is he distracted by his CFPB work, or has he been told by the President to stand down on this spending monstrosity?
If the latter, or something close to it, I can only pray that PDJT has made a conscious and canny determination that passage of this measure will, with stratospheric probability levels, lead to the GOP at least holding the Senate in November — thereby putting the Democrats’ impeachment fantasy decidedly further out of reach.
To get some idea of where we are on the Collapse-o-meter, we have below a graph of OECD countries Total Government Debt as a percentage of GDP. (1995-2016). USA in Red. Japan (Blue) is the poster child for debt, but theirs is mostly internally financed. Also highlighted for comparison purposes, the UK (Purple)
If you are curious, the three grey lines between the US and Japan …. those fiscal titans, Greece, Italy and Portugal.
Not happy about this at all. Trump should veto, but being under attack by so many Republicans his hands might be tied.
Maybe when the GOP gets blown out in November congress should look in the mirror instead of at Trump.
Republicans in Congress should all be challenged to take an oath that when they get voted out of office this fall, they will refuse to take a job in government or in any job in which they would be interacting with government.
I’ve mentioned this before, but a commentator I read around 2011 said the Tea Party wave in 2010 was in a way hurtful. The GOP needed some time in the wilderness after their 2006 losses. The party needed to internalize that voters were upset that they had control of government and didn’t implement fiscal responsibility. As Moses needed the generation with ties to Egypt to die off before Israel could enter the Promise Land, the GOP needed some time for the 2000-2006 congressional leadership to retire. Instead Obama was elected, grabbed the steering wheel, jerked it all the way to the left, and mashed the accelerator. The public got scared and said even though you really screwed up last time, we need the GOP in control of Congress. Too much of the old leadership was still around and they went back to their old ways.
One characteristic of liars is that they lie. So why do Republican primary voters for the most part keep reelecting the same lying representatives? I can only think of two possibilities: ignorance or stupidity (“against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”).
You compare this to gun rights, and that is a good comparison.
The impact of this budgeting system, such as it is, does not directly threaten the average person in a way they can see and understand so it’s not a top issue in primaries. (Gee, you think that’s one reason we get these omnibus spending bills?) Laws impacting your gun rights directly threaten, in ways easily understood, the individual Republican gun owner. So they are vocal, active and tend to vote their beliefs: It is a key issue impacting who the voter supports. But even there the omnibus budget bill idea may give success against the voter (somebody on Ricochet predicted that the bill which combines Fix NICS with concealed carry reciprocity would be modified in committee and we would be left with Democrats’ fix NICS.)
Thank goodness Trump is so engaged and focused on the budget, surely his master negogtiator skills will solve this.
But remember it was either this or Hillary Clinton. What was Trump’s line? “I love debt.”
I’m glad to see another person come around to support President Trump.
Yeah as awful as this bill is, we could have Hillary and a much worse version. Thank you for the reminder.
And the Republicans will blame Trump when they lose this year. They promise a lot to their constituents, but even when given the reins of power they just haven’t the will to push back.
Consider the swamp undrained.
This is how you get more Trump.
Not Trump, per se, but the repeated betrayal of conservatives by the beltway GOP is probably the main reason why an outsider such as Trump had a shot at the nomination. The TEA Party should have been a wake-up call, but it was derided and marginalized by the powers-that-were.
Trump isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom. THIS is the problem.
When the GOP finally fragments (as seems more likely by the day), Trump will receive most of the blame. That blame will be misplaced.
Why should conservatives continue to work to support a party that proves time and again that, when the rubber meets the road, they’re little more than Democrat-lite with a smattering of conservative rhetoric on top?
Outsiders were doing very well in the Primaries. Remember how all the talk was about “lanes”. Trump, Carly and Ben Carson were doing very well in the Outsiders lane. The guy who finished 2nd was Cruz. He was not an Outsider but campaigned to win the votes of the people supporting the Outsiders.
Yes Republicans should realize that this stuff is how they loose control. Whether that loss of control is losing elections or getting some outsider running as a Republican. They need to do things they promise. Repeal the ACA, bring spending back to regular order and maybe find some ways to control spending.
I understand, but can’t go along. I’m not inclined to give Trump a pass on this. He’s in the mix and there were “negotiations.” He signs it, he owns it too.
Amen! The worst part is that the Go-Along-To-Get-Along Establishment GOP has sullied the ‘Conservative’ brand by draping themselves in phoney conservativism during campaign season. People hear it so much, they think the GATGA’ers are what conservatives are all about.
I’m not defending Trump, nor saying he should get a pass. I’m suggesting that, absent the repeated betrayal of conservatism by the beltway GOP / Republican Establishment / whatever you want to call them, it’s unlikely Trump would even have been nominated. Fewer people would have seen his bluster as a welcome push-back against the status quo and more would have seen it as just the bullying rhetoric of an egotist. If the “establishment” had been seen as being dependable in furtherance of conservative goals, an “establishment” candidate would likely have won the nomination.
In which case, whatever blame Trump is due also flows back to this sort of capitulation.
Only 51 Republican Senators and a half-dozen or so of those are not conservative. I’m not sure what people expect from this process. The only way it changes is if we get over 60 in the Senate in November and all of them are able to be herded into the conservative pen when votes are cast. You don’t need 60 votes to continue the status quo. You need 60 to stop it. I don’t like it either but crying about it and calling the entire lot of the republican party names is counter productive.
He wouldn’t be blameless. However, I analogize it to some no name managing to box out the other team in the paint, creating a lane, and your guand flubbing the layup. Or generating a turnover with an ill conceived pass instead of driving and scoring.
I’d complain to my representatives but as a conservative living in western Washington, it is a waste of breath and or digital strokes. My Senators are Patty Murray (D-Dimbulb) and her mini-me Maria Cantwell (D-Tech$), and my lone GOP representative is Dave Reichert who has announced his intention to retire so he has no incentive not to just go along, which is what I think he did the last tine there was a last-minute spending bill. Sigh.
I agree.
He promised better deals. This isn’t one.
This isn’t continuing the status quo. It’s capitulation to the Democrat agenda, just maybe not as fast as they’d like. As usual.
It’s not the entire republican party. It’s the “leadership”, the power brokers.
That seems fair. I would counter to an extent, that Trump should not matter at least not at that point. Trump has no input into the workings of Congress. There is not an Ominbus bill because Trump demanded this. Republicans in Congress promised a return to Regular Order and they lied. Republicans in Congress promised to be more responsible with Public Funds and to reduce deficits, they lied.
Congress should put forward what they want to do. Then work with the President to get his signature. These guys have run for years on taxes, spending and more recently repealing the ACA. They promised they would do stuff if they had the House, the Senate and the White House. They have it, but they have no idea what to do with it , likely because they were never serious.
So sure Trump deserves some of the blame if he was negotiating the current deal and signs it. Congress could have made the President much less relevant to this discussion.
My thoughts, too.
You have a point about the problems with changing the Status Quo. My read of this is that this bill does change the Status Quo. However rather than moving in a more fiscally conservative direction it spends more money.
Control of the House and the Senate, by whatever margins, is sufficient to live up to one big Republican Promise. The return to regular order. Separate spending bills that go through committee. We were promised an end to this last second omnibus stuff. This is solely the fault of Republicans in Congress. This has nothing to do with Trump or the Democrats. Republicans run the Congress they could have run the budget properly but chose this path.
But…Trump was elected to do things differently. If he signs this, then he’s party to it. As it should be.
They don’t even try, do they?
Why, why, why, why, why is it so [redacted] difficult for Congress to do their jobs the way they are supposed to?