Trump never should have signed the terrible, awful, no good GOP spending bill

H.R. 1625 – the omnibus bill – is an awful piece of legislation that was rushed through in the dark of night by GOP leadership and it upsets me greatly that President Trump signed it.

“It’s the very thing that we belittled Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] over, when she said ‘we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it,’ ” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said. “You have a 2,200-page bill … and you got 24 hours, maybe 36 — it’s just, it’s insane. It’s no way to govern.”

The president said that military funding, critical to national security, was the reason he decided to sign the bill. The 2,000+ page monstrosity contains an epic amount of garbage and could not have been read by members of Congress or the administration. Members of the House were given about 17 hours to read the measure – that would have required them to read more than 100 pages per hour just get through it – understanding and contemplating the consequences of the contents would logically have taken longer.

“I’ve learned to be a quick reader in this job, but the anticipated time frame of less than a day simply is too short for me to read this omnibus in its entirety,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) said in a statement Thursday.

The bill contains a wish list for progressives and does almost nothing to further the conservative agenda. Chuck and Nancy are holding the funding measure up as a total success while the president is forced to make excuses for having signed it.

“At the end of the day, as the minority party, we feel good about being able to succeed in so many ways,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “We don’t have the House, we don’t have the Senate, we don’t have the presidency, but we produced a darn good bill for the priorities we have believed in.”

The bill contains a provision preventing any of the border security funding from going to the border wall. Only inadequate fences and levies can be constructed – that hasn’t worked up to now and it won’t work in the future. Democrats can say they gave Trump money for the southern border, but the president can’t use it to build the wall. It also contains taxpayer dollars for Planned Parenthood and a bridge between New York and New Jersey … of course the left is happy.

“There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced — if we want to build our military — we were forced to have,” the president said during a signing event Friday. “There are some things that we should have in the bill.”

Some in Congress have expressed displeasure with the bill citing the massive deficits the measure will likely produce.

“It just boggles my mind that we continue to spend at a level that’s no different than the last three or four years of the Obama administration,” said Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee caucus.

He said the GOP looked “hypocritical” and “disingenuous.”

Estimates predict that deficits could exceed $1 trillion as soon as next year given the new spending hikes and the GOP tax-cut bill approved last year.

Annual debt interest payments alone could rise to $1 trillion within the decade.

And the latest damage to the nation’s fiscal health has been done with Republicans in charge at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

President Trump sounds as though he had no choice but to sign this awful thing into law, but he, and Congressional Republicans did have choices.

The president should have vetoed the bill and forced Congress into an emergency session over the weekend to craft a responsible funding measure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should have suspended the 60-vote threshold on appropriations measures and passed a fiscally-sound, conservative-based funding measure using a simple majority. But, no one has ever accused McConnell of fighting for conservative principles – or any principles for that matter.

If Republicans wonder why their base stayed home in the 2018 midterm elections, here’s your sign.