Cruz to House GOP: Punt Spending Debate Into 2015

Sen. Ted Cruz is launching an effort to push the House into a continuing resolution that funds the government into the next Congress.

“It would be a serious mistake for House Republicans to pass a Continuing Resolution that would ensure that Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats would come back to Washington, after many of them will have likely lost their seats, for a no-holds barred lame duck session where they will be free to pass legislation that the American people will never be able to hold them responsible for,” the Texas Republican said in a statement provided to CQ Roll Call.

“Americans cannot trust politicians they can no longer hold accountable at the ballot box,” Cruz said. “The Continuing Resolution should, at a minimum, fund government operations until after the new Congress is sworn in next year; House and Senate Republicans should both insist on this basic principle.”

The statement followed a letter sent by Cruz and Lee to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledging to object to consent requests to move on more contentious proposals in the lame duck.

“[S]ome lawmakers in Washington have recently suggested that significant legislative matters would deliberately not be addressed during the 113th Congress until after the elections,” the two Republicans wrote to Reid. “Presumably, a lame-duck session would be used to try to pass partisan, unpopular bills in November or December that might be indefensible before the federal election on November 4th.”

The two conservatives added that “if a lame-duck session is deemed necessary this year, we urge you only to consider emergency legislation requiring immediate, unforeseeable action or noncontroversial housekeeping measures.”

The issue of the duration of the stopgap spending bill came up at a meeting with House conservatives with Cruz held Tuesday evening.

House Republicans have delayed consideration of the currently proposed continuing resolution. That decision came in light of a request by President Barack Obama for additional funding and authority related to training and equipping opposition rebels in Syria, as part of the broader fight against the terror group known as both the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

As currently drafted, that CR would fund the government through Dec. 11, setting up the potential for an omnibus appropriations package before the end of the year.

“Why would we want to go into a lame-duck session? I think we ought to do it through March, March 1st,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., who attended the meeting with Cruz on Tuesday. “It only makes sense that we finish our business now and avoid a lame-duck situation with unelected representatives coming back and making big policy decisions.”

“I’m a total March 1st person,” Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann said after the gathering with Cruz. “Listen, we’re not done, because I think the media needs to know that Harry Reid has a plan. He’s got a plan, he’s committed. He wants to make sure that we’re going to have a brand new, never-before-seen Internet tax.”

“The American people are going to go crazy when they find out that that’s his Christmas gift to America,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann was referring to the possibility of moving legislation in the post-election session known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, which provides for Internet retailers to collect sales taxes from jurisdictions where purchases are made. The legislation passed the Senate with support and opposition on both sides of the aisle, with particular opposition from lawmakers from states without sales taxes.

That group includes Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who told CQ Roll Call after an event at a manufacturing facility in the Granite State last month that she was talking about the issue with constituents and would push against the lame-duck strategy.

“You know, the Internet Tax Freedom Act comes up, it expires in November, which for 16 years you haven’t been taxed when you get on the Internet. There’s broad bipartisan support for that,” Ayotte said. “There have been some who have been trying to push the sort of shenanigans I see of doing a short-term extension of that so you can attach the Marketplace Fairness in lame duck. I think otherwise they couldn’t get it done, because the votes aren’t there in the House.”

The continuing resolution unveiled Tuesday evening by the House included the shorter extension of the moratorium on Internet access taxes.

NOW from RUSH Limbaugh:

The Establishment's Plan for the Lame-Duck Congress

Rush Limbaugh transcript - September 10, 2014

RUSH: You might have to look a little harder to find this. But it involves the Republicans in Washington and lobbyists and the funding of the government through the end of the year via a continuing resolution and some of the things the Republican Party has planned, which many of its supporters are going to consider to be yet again another sellout and yet again another participation by the party in the expansion of government, the expansion of spending and a firming up of the relationship between the party and K Street lobbyists.

There is much concern about this that's happening in our nation's capital today, but it is not anywhere on the radar because of the Ray Rice situation and the president's speech on ISIS tonight. But I'm gonna spend some time on that before our busy broadcast comes to a screeching halt later this afternoon to bring you up to speed on that. It's disconcerting, it's upsetting, it's uncalled for.

We're here on the verge of a major victory, not because of anything we're doing, by the way. We're just the opposition. We're on the verge of snatching a measure of defeat. We're gonna take some steps that are totally unnecessary to take involving the budget, involving spending and letting the Regime have some things that it wants because actually the Washington establishment, both parties, wants these things. But they are things, they are policies, if you will, I don't mean to be speaking cryptically but I don't want to give it all away here, but they're things that you wouldn't do if you were planning on winning big. And yet it appears these things are on the table.

Continuing resolution during the lame duck. Getting some votes from members of Congress who are leaving at the end of this term so they won't be able to be held accountable for their votes on this. The continuing resolution, funding of the government, the revival and survival of the import-export bank. Just a bunch of stuff that if we were serious about reversing some of the things that have happened the last six years we wouldn't be involved with, we wouldn't be doing.

Folks, basically what it is -- and I don't... I just hate this. I hate having to report this stuff. I'm not comfortable. What's going on -- I mean, if I had to boil it down to a nutshell -- is the stage is being set for a huge bunch of crony capitalist relationships that will be forged during the lame-duck session of Congress, primarily after the November elections.

One of the ways this is going to happen is the continuing resolution. We continue to flout the entire budget process, so we're gonna have a continuing resolution, and the threat is gonna be bandied back and forth about another government shutdown to put pressure on Republicans. But what is being contemplated now is to pass a continuing resolution only through December, which would make it somewhat small in scope, making it supportable.

The purpose of a continuing resolution only through December is to get the support of lame-duck members of Congress (especially Republicans) to vote for more spending -- and they might even roll amnesty into this, as well as other policies and programs -- before a new Congress is sworn in. In other words, there's gonna be a lame-duck Congress after the election in November.

The new Congress gets sworn in in January. There is a stratagem that's been developed to ram a whole lot of things through in the lame-duck session voted on by people who may be leaving office, for whom there will not be any further accountability, and it will cement ties with Republicans and Democrats to lobbyists on K Street, the whole crony corporatism (crony socialism, I call it) arrangement that's that that has now taken place in Washington.

It used to be thought that Big Business was Republican. They wanted government out of everybody's life, including their own. They wanted to compete on the basis of merit. They wanted to go out there and beat their competitors into the mud, and they wanted the government out of the way and they wanted to eliminate regulation.

Now it's the exact opposite. Corporations have decided it's easier to get in bed with government and let the government take care of their competition by wiping 'em out, with regulations that the cronies are immune to. I mentioned this many, many weeks ago now when pointing out how, for example, Walmart, out of the clear blue, is doing everything to help Obamacare get passed.

Walmart!

You say, "Wha...? What? Why?"

Because they know their competitors can't afford it. What better way to get rid of competitors than make 'em have to close shop 'cause they can't afford Obamacare, when Walmart can? Costco is another one. Costco is in support of raising the federal minimum wage because they claim they can afford to pay it to their people but their competitors can't. So it's this kind of crony relationship that really sprang to life with the Obama administration.

General Electric was one of the early signatories to this. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO, signed on, on the premise of advancing "clean energy" with government grants and all this, but he wasn't alone. There were others. You remember the left always ripped Halliburton, claiming that Halliburton had a relationship with Bush 'cause Cheney used to run it, and we went to war only so Halliburton could profit?

Well, that was bogus, but that's the kind of a stuff that actually is going on here, and there is a stratagem to plan and set up even more of it in the lame-duck session. They could include amnesty in it before the new Congress is sworn in. This kind of thing happened in 2010, before the Tea Party landslide election. Well, after the election, but before the Tea Party Congress was sworn in.

Remember when in the House, the Republicans swept back into control with 50 or 60 some odd seats because of the Tea Party midterm victories in 2010? There was a lame-duck session of Congress where all kinds of stuff was done. Democrats and Republicans of the establishment alike got together and rammed through a bunch of stuff before the Tea Party guys got there and had a chance to vote on it.

Speaker Boehner has announced the Export/Import Bank is gonna be funded in the next continuing resolution. Do you know what the Export/Import Bank is? It's a welfare program for huge international corporations that use tax dollars to subsidize their exports. Export/Import Bank is simply a way for Big Business to have government support in running their day-to-day affairs. IMF is another one. There are all of these massive funds of money, and the corporate tie is paid for in support for candidates.

It's a back scratch kind of thing, but it is crony socialism or capital, however you wanna call it, to the max degree. The point here is that I have been advised by several insiders that there's all kinds of this that's being planned even as we speak. Now, the way this is manifesting itself is that the House and Senate Republican leaders are telling everybody in private that the very best thing they're gonna be able to do is to get a continuing resolution 'til December. That's the best thing they can supposedly get. That's it. That's the max.

So the question is why would Senate Republicans be telling Republicans in the House that, "Hey, all we need to do is pass this continuing resolution 'til December and go on"? They're being told that there's gonna be a vote Thursday on this massive continuing resolution that just got filed. They're big. They can't be read quickly. You can stuff a whole lot of stuff into a continuing resolution. And nobody reads legislation anymore anyway. Witness Obamacare.

The Republican leaders back in 2010, they promised, "You put us in charge of the minority and we're gonna make sure that there's time to read the bill." Remember that? Put us in the majority and we'll make sure the bill is read. They were promising this to the Tea Party people. The Tea Party people voted in great numbers. Nobody had read Obamacare and yet they voted on it, and it was a disaster. So the Republicans claiming to hear the voters, hey, put us in power, part the campaign, and we will always give enough time to read the bill.

But this is Wednesday and the CR supposedly is gonna be submitted and voted on tomorrow. There won't be time to vote on it. And the vote is to extend it only until December. And again, the key to that is it's before the new Congress is sworn in. And it's not just the Democrats, too. There's some Republicans in the Senate who want a continuing resolution that only goes to December, despite the fact that virtually everybody is thinking the Republicans are going to take over the majority in the Senate, so why not wait for that, is the thing.

If the Republicans are gonna have the House and the Senate, if you just wait 'til January, why do all this stuff before then? And the answer is because it might not be able to get done after the new Congress is sworn in. So keep a sharp eye, folks. The establishment is circling the wagons and doing what it can to, I don't know, enrich or protect itself against whatever happens in the election and what then might result from Republican control of the House and the Senate.

You know, Ted Cruz went to the floor of the Senate yesterday. The Democrats, Dingy Harry, have mounted a piece of legislation that's actually an attack on the First Amendment. They're attempting, and I'm not kidding when I tell you that the end result of this bill, I mean, this is Soviet. This bill would prevent criticism of politicians, elected officials, and officeholders in Washington. You'd be under penalty of punishment. And Cruz went to the floor of the Senate last night and said (paraphrasing), "You know what? This means the end of Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live could be fined out of existence."

So he went to that idiot Al Franken who used to write for SNL, "Hey, Al, you're supporting this damn thing. You actually think your buds at Saturday Night Live should be criminals?" And Franken's usual answer was, "Buuuuu. Uhhhhh. I have a meeting." I mean, this is the height of arrogance. These people now think they are above criticism. And some of this, not all of it, but some of it descends from Citizens United. They're still fuming over that. They're still fuming over the fact that corporations are people now and can donate to political campaigns. There's all kinds of ways they're trying to shut that down, and any criticism whatsoever. The Incumbents Protection Act or some such thing.

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