Congressman Jared Polis of Colorado posted on Facebook on Thursday, giving the general public a revealing look at the kinds of bullshit shenanigans that Congress allows itself to screw itself over with. In this case, the GOP leaders — likely in a fit of ‘not wanting to be caught being as fiscally irresponsible as they always are’ — decided to try to pass next year’s budget in the worst example of “by-the-letter” government corruption this week. Possibly month.
Let’s break that down a bit:
1) They didn’t create a budget bill. Instead, they ‘hid’ the budget inside of an older, irrelevant bill by editing the bill entirely away and replacing it with the budget.
2) They did this so that they could get around the mandatory 3-day ‘inspection period’ that Congress attempts to enforce on itself, so that these enormously complex laws can actually be read. Also, so that they could schedule a meager hour of House time to debate the bill (which is how much they would normally give to debate an amendment to a bill that has already been debated in whole.) One hour.
3) They revealed the deception at 1AM Thursday morning when they deposited an inhumanly large amount of text on each Congressman’s desk expecting them to read and understand it by the scheduled time of 9:15AM Friday morning, for that one hour of debate to start. 2,009 pages of text…one hour of debate…starting just 32 hours after the pages were delivered.
And we wonder why the House of Representatives is the acknowledged champion of government corruption!
Oh, and…
4) And if you remember CISPA — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that gives the government free, easy access to all of your online data with no warrants, no subpoenas, warnings, or ability to protest — well, it’s back! Someone — the tracking system doesn’t allow us to find out who, but of course no one is copping to it — amended it onto the Omnibus bill, which means in all likelihood, it will pass and our digital data will become government property without any say-so on anyone’s part. It will literally happen only because the other alternative is for the government to stop functioning, and the GOP leadership thought it necessary to use a series of ought-to-be-illegal tactics to keep anyone from actually being able to wrap their heads around this bill before the time to vote came.
Of course, that’s not nearly all the pork:
I think the Congressman’s face says it all.
So why did the GOP want to hide the Omnibus bill and keep it from debate using all of these classic tactics of unadulterated government corruption? Simply put, there’s something in it for absolutely everybody to hate.
- Brietbart.com unleashed a scathing editorial calling the Omnibus bill “a total and complete sell-out of the American people masquerading as an appropriations bill.” (Of course, they hate it for all the reasons we love it, but still!)
- Time Magazine pointed out rather brusquely that the bill includes riders that allow the U.S. to start exporting oil again, that protects political “dark money” groups from the IRS, that prevent the SEC from forcing corporations to reveal their campaign finance donations, and that take $35 billion in funding away from Obamacare.
- HuffPo derided the Omnibus for slashing $93 million from the WIC program that combats child hunger, revokes a significant part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to prevent the 2008 crash from recurring, and pays $93 million to Lockheed-Martin for warplanes that we literally have no use for.
Everyone hates this bill — yet the likelihood that it will pass is significant despite all the hate. Why? In part, because of the GOP’s corrupt way of unveiling the bill. In another part, because the American people are just done. We’ve given up on the government, because it’s given up on us. Unfortunately for everyone, that’s exactly what the crony capitalists want: people to not participate.
You have a few hours left. Contact your Representative right now and tell them you’d rather see the government shut down for a few weeks (it’s Christmas and they’re not doing jack anyway) than have this insanely destructive example of government corruption make it into law.
