For those feeling bad that Republicans didn’t win the Senate, you will now understand that Democrats already enjoyed supermajority control of the chamber, including command of the GOP leader himself. Every GOP Senate leader from McConnell on down has agreed to codify nearly every one of Biden’s spending priorities and affirm every single unconstitutional, harmful, and tyrannical policy for the entire remainder of the fiscal year, thereby sabotaging the leverage of the incoming GOP House majority.
What is scary about the past couple of weeks of budgetary negotiations is that even as Republicans and Democrats disagreed, they really agreed on 99% of the budget and 100% of the policies. They merely fake-jousted over $26 billion in broad generalized spending out of a $1.7 trillion budget. Essentially, both sides agreed to write the military a blank check of $858 billion for its woke and aimless policies. The only disagreement was that Republicans wanted to spend the same level as Biden on non-defense spending – $787 billion, while Democrats wanted to spend $813 billion. In other words, they were arguing over 1.5% of the discretionary spending budget.
So how did they solve the “impasse”? Democrat Pat Leahy and Republican Richard Shelby – both senators who will no longer be in the chamber for the remainder of the fiscal year – announced they would drop an omnibus bill in the coming days, while passing a seven-day stopgap bill so they can pass the omnibus next week. The top-line non-defense spending numbers will be somewhere in between $787 billion and $813, but they are keeping them quiet so members can’t complain!
This is the great suspense – the exact decimal point of a spending increase. Republicans like Biden’s budget top-line, which is 8% above last year’s levels for non-defense spending; Democrats wanted slightly more, and they split the baby. This perfectly encapsulates the uniparty.
Here we have a government that is spying on the American people, criminalizing political opposition and free speech, mutilating our kids, funding pharma’s biomedical security state on our bodies, working with the cartels to invade our country, handing our inheritance to Ukraine, and choking off our energy during an energy crisis. Republicans are content with all of that and are even fine with blocking Republicans in the House from dealing with these crises until next year. For example, our government is paying Pfizer yet another $2 billion for its COVID drug, for which there is no independent study showing it’s safe and effective. All they are fighting over is a few billion in extra general spending, when the malfeasance agencies being funded are already flush with cash even under the Republican proposal.
Hearings in the House can be meaningful if they serve as the hammer driving into the anvil of a budget deadline in which Republicans will defund the policies that are found to be harmful and unlawful in the hearings. Senate Republicans have taken that off the table for a full year. Just consider the border invasion issue alone. The Biden administration is preparing for up to 14,000 illegal aliens a day, which is an annualized flow of 5.1 million! The president will have no budget bill hanging over his neck to keep him in check.
On Wednesday, Rep. Chip Roy asked the Rules Committee to consider his stopgap bill that would fund government until Feb. 3. It was rejected. That should have triggered automatic Senate GOP opposition to the budget deal, but of course Senate Republicans have a lot more in common with their Democrat colleagues than they do with their voters.
The final bill will contain extra Ukraine funding because both sides agree to this insanity. McConnell said on Tuesday, unfortunately with merit, that “continuing support for Ukraine is the popular mainstream view that stretches across the ideological spectrum.” This is on top of the $60 billion – all without any oversight whatsoever despite everything we now know about the money pit. This, at a time when the public share of the debt is almost 100% of GDP, up from 35% in 2007, when we thought George W. Bush was a big spender.
Republicans balked at extra spending on COVID (beyond the unfathomable amounts already baked into the base budget), but only because they felt there were existing accounts that were unspent, not because the COVID agenda is killing us and needs to be banned.
Thus, the entire funding for this fiscal year and all the policies it encompasses were set in motion by a number of retiring senators, led by Richard Shelby (RINO-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee.
Interestingly enough, Democrats only have a two-vote majority in the House, due to recent vacancies. Yet nobody seems concerned that they will lose a single vote on a contentious issue like the omnibus. Why is it that only one “side” of the uniparty is always united?