The Omnibus Congress is like a bad sequel to a Hollywood movie – OpEd – Eurasia Review
The late-night spending vote in Congress this weekend looks like another link in an endless string of sequels to a bad thriller. On the brink of “disaster,” just before midnight, Congress pulled off a miracle and passed a sweeping bill to save us from a “government shutdown!”
The heroes have saved the day!
Unfortunately, this latest sequence is no less bad than the previous ones, as the American people are left with nothing but a massive $1.2 trillion spending package, adding to our already $34 trillion in debt. Naturally, military spending will rise again, with the military-industrial complex demanding more of our wealth to satisfy its growing appetite. And if this increase in military spending isn’t enough, congressional leaders are promising another massive supplemental bill to further fuel the proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza – with some money to provoke China as well.
Republicans like to talk good about reining in spending — especially during election season — but as we’ve learned from this and all previous “compromises,” it’s all just talk. At the end of all the dramatic warnings about a government shutdown, we are left with a Washington-style compromise, which means the leadership of both parties will have to put anything and everything they want into the massive bill. Because it is only presented to the general public at the last minute before the “disaster,” none of the members will have a chance to even read it, let alone shape it through amendments and discussion.
The Republican House leadership promised members 72 hours to read any new bill before voting, but they broke their promise without hesitation. Members will not have the opportunity to read the more than 1,000-page bill, which was prepared secretly behind closed doors.
There’s likely a reason why congressional leaders don’t want members to get a chance to read the bill. As Rep. Thomas Massie discovered, the bill includes funding for 13-year-olds to get help transitioning without their parents’ consent. He also noted that although there was nothing in the authorization bill, just hours after the sweeping law was passed, the Justice Department announced the creation of a federal “red flag” center to attack our Second Amendment rights.
Who knows how many other items like this – and much worse – are buried deep in the “must pass” spending bill. Keeping these items away from the American people by secretly including them in “must-pass” legislation increasingly looks like a feature, not a bug. It is no wonder that Congress has a low approval rating among the American people.
Ultimately, the bill only passed the Republican-controlled House with support from Democrats, fueling a growing rebellion against Speaker Johnson among House conservatives.
The “bipartisanship” that the media celebrates is not all it is cracked up to be. This means that both parties are adopting policies that lead to our financial bankruptcy. This would threaten the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and would lead to catastrophic changes around the world that almost no one in Congress seems able to envision. Republicans’ capitulation to Democrats’ demand to “save us” from a government shutdown may temporarily maintain the appearance that “it’s okay,” but they ultimately make the coming collapse worse.
This article was published by the Ronpaul Institute
