House Speaker Paul Ryan
The “barn cleaning” that’s needed in Washington to clean up the way the U.S. budget is assembled – what special interests are paid off and whose projects are killed – is started, but is a long way from finished.
That’s the verdict from conservatives whose interests once again have been bashed and bludgeoned in the latest funding bill negotiated by new House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan.
The conservatives’ take on the result is “disaster,” but they also say that Ryan has begun the process to make future work more palatable to those who are not on the big-spending, pro-abortion, socialist bandwagon.
“The end product here is just cleaning the barn; it’s a disaster,” Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., told Politico. “We’re breaking our pledge on the budget caps to the American people, we’ve lost fiscal discipline, and we’re throwing it all on the next generation.”
But he also said Ryan is “saying the right things” as well as “lining it up to do the right things … and then leadership can’t hijack the budget at the end of the year and throw the kitchen sink, which we just did.”
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., agreed that the process is on an upward curve.
“I can tell you I’ve had more meaningful conversations with the speaker and leadership in the last couple of weeks than I think I have in the last couple years,” he said.
The overall verdict among conservatives for the budget deal, a $1.1 trillion spending plan accompanied by $680 million in tax breaks, is it’s trash.
“Sadly, this bill not adequately address the security issue, nor does it have the common sense, widely supported pro-life riders that we suggested,” Rep. Jim Ordan, R-Ohio, told the Daily Signal.
One of the top conservative priorities was cutting off the flow of federal taxpayer dollars to abortion industry behemoth Planned Parenthood, which a series of undercover videos revealed to be participating in the sale of the body parts of unborn children to researchers for massive amounts of money. One Planned Parenthood executive, negotiating prices, said, “I want a Lamborghini,” a $200,000-plus exotic car.
The other was stricter security for those “refugees” arriving in the United States, a flow radical Islamic terrorists have confirmed they intend to exploit to create jihad in America.
Rep. John Fleming, R-La., said it would have been so simple to address some of the conservatives’ concerns.
“I think the more riders that could have been added, the more you would’ve peeled Freedom Caucus members to support the bill,” he said.
Ryan pointed out that “no one gets exactly what they want” in the negotiations over the budget, but when far left Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., calls it a “good product,” conservatives are alarmed.
“The product here is an F,” Brat told the Signal.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said more should have been done to address the concerns of voters.
The bill, he said, “contains dramatic changes to federal immigration law that would increase by as much as fourfold the number of low-wage foreign workers provided to employers under the controversial H-2B visa program … It approves the president’s request for increased refugee admissions, allowing him to bring in as many refugees as he wants … and allow[s] them access to unlimited welfare and entitlements at the taxpayer expense.”
He continued, “Because of this bill, sanctuary cities will continue to get federal funds … illegal aliens will continue to get the tax credits … and the president’s executive amnesty continues.
“The American people sent us to Washington … to protect their interests, to protect the people’s interests, to ensure the defense of their families and to advance the common good, the public interest. They did not send us here to bow down to the president’s lawless immigration policies nor to line the pockets of special interests and big business.
“We do we represent? This bill explains why Republican and Democratic voters are in open rebellion. They elect people that they believe are going to take action to protect their security, their jobs, their wages and what do they get? A bill that is worse than current law, goes in the opposite direction.”
That issue has been cited as the reason why billionaire Donald Trump, a Washington outsider, has been stomping all competition in most polls for the GOP nomination for president.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., cited the source of the game plan for the bill.
“Somebody on K Street wanted that, but Main Street didn’t.”
The fact that hundreds of billions of dollars will be added to the national debt was one of the horrors cited by critics.
Trump, in fact, has warned the U.S. is at risk of becoming “a large-scale version of Greece.”
“We are doing damage to the fiscal health of the country by borrowing this mind-boggling amount at a time when the debt is so high,” warned Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in Politico.
“It’s absolutely at odds with the priority Republicans are making – the debt – when they’re campaigning, and with the Republican budget that was passed out of the House.”
The nation’s debt of about $18 trillion, half of which was incurred by President Obama, has been cited by Sen. Rand Paul as the nation’s greatest threat.
The borrowing even left some Democrats quaking.
“I’m not voting for it,” said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., “There are so many things in there that raise astounding debt.”
The Washington Times pointed out that among the beneficiaries of federal money under the plan will be racehorses, NASCAR racetracks, green energy companies and oil giants. And, of course, Planned Parenthood.
What it does do is meet the priorities of Obama, who is known for verbally bludgeoning opponents in Washington into submission.
“It appears to meet the priorities the president outlined first at the beginning of this year,” Jennifer Friedman, a White House spokeswoman, told CNBC.
The Hill reported that the plan continues all funding for Planned Parenthood’s abortion business, one of Obama’s favorite causes.
The report said Planned Parenthood Vice President Dana Singiser “praised congressional Democrats for ‘holding the line.’”
Not even a compromise that would have let states choose to fund Planned Parenthood or not was included.
Another of Obama’s personal goals, spending billions of taxpayer dollars overseas for battling “climate change,” even though tens of thousands of scientists have signed onto a statement that it poses no threat, was fully approved.
The bill doesn’t formally block funding to the “Green Climate Fund,” so Obama administration officials are expected to use discretionary funding streams to tax Americans for their political campaign on the issue world-wide.
The Weekly Standard, calling it a “lose-lose” for the American people, noted that it will make it harder to fight Obamacare, the massive tax-and-spend program adopted by only Democrat votes in 2010.
The plan has been in the court system ever since it was adopted through a questionable maneuver in which the Senate simply took the number off a previously approved House bill and slapped it on the thousands of pages of Obamacare, then adopted it.
It still faces further review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Hill also noted that a “cybersecurity” plan was inserted.
“It’s a surveillance bill more than a cyber bill,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., “I’m going to vote against the omnibus as a consequence.”
It would open the channels for businesses to share data with the government.
In a telling article, Jim Newell at Slate described the deal as “just like all of the ones that infuritated conservatives under [former House Speaker John] Boehner.”
He continued, “Republican congressional majorities again will fail to deliver a high-profile, base-pumping, ideological victory over some nefarious aspect of the ‘Obama agenda’ on which conservatives had drawn a red line.
“Conservatives also lost on their most well-publicized demands that have dominated cable news. Language restricting Syrian and Iraqi refugee resettlement, defunding Planned Parenthood, or blocking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration will not be included.”
He concluded they result is “an awful lot like the packages that Boehner would have negotiated and the way in which he would have negotiated them.”
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