for those who don't get the WSJ subscription This Kimberly Stassel op-ed is a gem and right on.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week he was “pretty proud” of the $1.8 trillion-plus omnibus the Senate passed Thursday, since the GOP was able to “achieve . . . essentially all of our priorities.” That, America, is why Republicans are in the Senate minority. And why they arguably deserve to stay there.
Never has Washington contemplated such a monstrosity. If a satirist set out to describe a once-admirable institution in decline, its members cheerfully passing off their laziness, secrecy, cowardliness and graft as “success,” it’d be hard to compete with this week’s Senate show. The omnibus is everything that is broken in D.C., dumped in one steaming pile.
Congress has this omnibus only because Democrats wasted the year chasing
Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, while Republicans helped waste more with semiconductor payouts and other unnecessary legislation. The Senate couldn’t rouse itself to pass a single one of its 12 annual spending bills. Pretty much the only deadline Congress hit this year was the cutoff for submitting thousands of earmark requests for home-state pork. Priorities, priorities.
A handful of powerful leaders took advantage of this dilatory behavior by using it as an excuse to disappear at the last minute into a smoke-filled room and conjure up a “top line” number for funding—with no votes, no debate. Other leaders then disappeared to write the bill in secret—4,155 pages of it. It was unveiled in the dead of Monday night, with initial plans for Wednesday passage, the better to ensure nobody would know what’s in it.
Or what’s attached to it. Past omnibuses at least confined themselves to funding everything under the sun (especially monuments to super-appropriators like Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby). This omnibus has also become a vehicle for legislation Congress wanted to pass this year but didn’t. These aren’t small changes: An overhaul of retirement savings rules. Cosmetics regulation. Electoral Count Act reform. Major changes to healthcare. For all we know, there’s a provision creating 12 new cabinet positions. We’ll find out next year, when someone has time to read it.
Want to know if your senator approves of authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to micromanage your mascara? Or killing off drift-net fishing operations? Or letting athletes at service academies get a waiver to play professional sports? Good luck. Members of both parties will say they voted for this turkey solely to avoid a government shutdown, and they’ll duck questions on the other major changes. Lucky them. Zero accountability. Only this isn’t luck—it’s by design.
Senate Republicans spent this week telling the public there were only two options: Sign off on earmarks, bad policy and Democratic demands for huge increases in domestic spending (on top of $4.5 trillion in the past two years), or lose a 10% increase in defense dollars. We can add dishonesty to the list of transgressions. The GOP could have insisted on zero domestic increases and dared Democrats to own a shutdown and the loss of military readiness. But who wants a spending fight when we can simply spend?
That’s a central problem for Republicans—even if they don’t want to admit it. They haven’t shown a whiff of interest in fiscal restraint since the early days of Paul Ryan’s tenure as House speaker. Their majorities broke the bank during the Trump administration, enabling Democrats to point to deficits as reason to resist further tax reform. They held hands with the left to partake in five Covid bailouts in 2020 alone. They joined again to pass Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill and the semiconductor slush fund. Members of the new, supposedly responsible Republican House majority weeks ago voted to keep the earmark gravy flowing.
Voters in 2010 put Republicans in charge of the House to serve as a brake on the Obama administration. Next year’s House majority is no guarantee of a repeat. Democrats have figured out that the bait for “bipartisanship” is the promise of dollars, and today’s Republican Party bites every time. Eighteen Senate Republicans voted Thursday for the ugliest, least transparent spending bill on record. As Republicans scratch their heads over their disappointing midterm, they might consider that voters don’t see much of a defining difference with Democrats.
The real scandal of the holdouts to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker is that they are stomping on an important message. A far bigger and more serious group of House conservatives are appalled by the practices that lead to omnibuses, and want changes to require the House to return to “regular order.” Committees. Votes. Amendments. Debates. This would return a focus on fiscal discipline, with members again subject to transparency and accountability.
But Reps. Andy Biggs and Matt Gaetz are more interested in grandstanding than actual victory. The battle helps Republican House porksters ignore substantive demands by casting the race for speaker as a fight over personalities. It enabled Senate Republicans to justify their mess of an omnibus on the grounds that House Republicans can’t be trusted to do better.
Right now, neither chamber can. Your government at work.
The Back End of an Omnibus - WSJ