Ted Cruz, the Republican Senator from Texas will be voting “no” on the bloated 1.07 trillion dollar spending bill. This bill is expected be signed into law this week by the president.
Senator Cruz’s statement reads:
“The spending bill passed by the House yesterday is a missed opportunity. While I am pleased to see increased funding for our men and women in uniform and their critical missions across the globe, this bill fails in a number of ways, including by continuing to fund sanctuary cities, Planned Parenthood, and Obamacare. Last November, the American people voted to give Republicans control of both houses of Congress and the White House. We should be funding our priorities, not perpetuating Democrats’ big government programs. While I cannot support this bill, I look forward to the opportunity moving forward to enact our shared conservative policies — repealing and replacing Obamacare, securing our Southern border, and reducing taxes and regulations to help create more good-paying jobs in Texas and across the nation. Those are the priorities voters demanded in November's elections, and that we must deliver on.”
Conservative author and speaker Ann Coulter described this bill as “losing.” She wrote:
“Admittedly, Trump has the enormous handicap of having to work through congressional Republicans, who are feckless cowards. If Speaker Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell had been around for Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, they would have been hysterically screaming, No! You can’t do that — the planes will crash! This isn’t new information. We knew Washington Republicans were useless. That’s why we elected such a comically improbable president as Donald J. Trump. The deal was that we were getting the Hollywood version of a New York businessman: an uncouth, incurious rube — who would be ruthless in getting whatever he wanted. In addition to being the only candidate for president in either party taking America’s side on trade, immigration, jobs and crime, what set Trump apart was his promise that we would finally win. Remember? There would be so much winning, we were going to get “sick and tired of winning,” and beg him, “Please, please, we can’t win anymore. … It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.” We’re not winning. We’re losing, and we’re losing on the central promise of Trump’s campaign.”
Senator Cruz is correct; this bill funds sanctuary cities, Planned Parenthood, and Obamacare. The most horrendous of these is the funding for America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Ann Coulter is also correct; this is a loss and not a win for the folks who voted for President Trump.
The White House and congressional leaders have had since November 9 to negotiate this budget and get some of the president’s agenda included. Instead of getting ahead of the game and demanding Planned Parenthood be defunded, the wall be built and sanctuary cities defunded they instead folded on all of the above. The president should have told Congress that if his agenda isn’t included in this bill that he would veto it and possibly shut down the government until the House and Senate agree to fund his priorities.
I believe that shutting down the government would actually make President Trump’s poll numbers sky rocket. On Tuesday he tweeted that “our country needs a good "shutdown" in September to fix [this] mess!” referring to the budget deal. Tea Party folks like me have been begging for a government shutdown if that’s what it takes to make Congress do the right thing. President Trump should blame the Democrats and Congress for the shutdown and urge them to pass a budget he likes and would sing.
President Trump might want to start putting pressure on Congress to fund his agenda come late September or we’ll be right back at the same place we are now, losing. What would fix this mess is if House Speaker Paul Ryan would force the House to get back to regular order. This means the House passing twelve appropriation bills which fund the government and sending them over to the Senate for final passage. Once passed these bills would then make it to the Oval Office. Instead, Congress keeps passing these temporary and bloated spending bills which don’t go through the appropriations process. Right now they lump these spending bills together in the matter of a week and ram them through Congress.
When taking the speakership in 2015 Mr. Ryan said "We need to let every member contribute, not once they earn their stripes, but now. The committees should take the lead in drafting all major legislation: If you know the issue, you should write the bill. Let's open up the process. In other words, we need to return to regular order."
I agree with Speaker Ryan that the House needs to return to regular order. The time to start is today. Congress only has twelve working weeks between now and September to pass twelve appropriation bills and send them to the Senate for consideration. Will it be done? We shall see.
Our country is desperate for change in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump was elected to be the agent of change. The only thing keeping the president from implementing the change most Americans want is the swamp.
