Rodney Leland Blum - born April 26, 1955) is an American businessman and politician serving the U.S. Representative for Iowa's 1st congressional district, first elected in 2014. He is a member of the Republican Party and Tea Party movement.
Posted on 03/24/2018 4:02:54 AM PDT by iowamark
As a fiscal watchdog elected to Congress on the promise to rein in Washington’s out of control spending habits, this omnibus bill represents politics as usual in Washington.
The text was not released until the night before the vote, effectively giving Members of Congress seven waking hours to read the 2,232 page bill — the equivalent length of two Bibles. It is problematic voting on any legislation that I cannot study first in its entirety, and to skim this bill would have been impossible, let alone read and internalize everything it does.
Fundamentally, the “omnibus” is not an effective way to run a government. There’s a reason we have committees to draft individual appropriations bills: the expertise in any given spending bill typically resides in the appropriate committee. We must return to regular order and a normal appropriations budgeting process to restore fiscal sanity. The House passed all 12 appropriations bills 190 days ago – we did our job. However, the Senate did not take up even one of those bills.
Bad process usually leads to bad policy. With any 2,232-page bill, there are bound to be some things that I like; in fact, many of the policies in the omnibus are things that I have voted for in the past as stand-alone bills, and would vote for again in the future. However, this bill fails to deliver on the promises we made to the American people. This bill will not secure our southern border. It appropriates a limited amount of funds for border security, but also blocks that money from being used to build a wall based on prototypes that President Trump has reviewed. This bill also continues funding to Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities and infringes upon the Second Amendment rights of Americans to name but a few problems in the bill.
But beyond the individual policies, there’s one overarching problem: The most problematic part of the bill is the overall spending levels. Aside from former President Obama’s stimulus package in 2009, this is the largest discretionary spending increase in U.S. history. This bill will lead to a one trillion dollar deficit next year. Republicans have railed against deficit spending for years, and now under a unified government we have ignored all our pledges about fiscal responsibility. This is unacceptable, unsustainable and not what the voters in Iowa sent me to Washington to do. That is why I joined 166 of my colleagues to vote NO on the omnibus bill.
Cmon man, don’t you know you got to pass it to see what’s in it. Get with the program man. /s
The problem is the GOP has sold out on trade. As the dems are also sold out, but in a different way.
EVERYTHING is being made overseas now. Much of it in China, which buys NOTHING back from us, but some farm goods.
Both parties, are completely ok with China taking over the world.
All in the article is true.
And inevitable, given the size of the federal government.
McConnell is OWNED by the Chinese. Check out his holdings.
Anyone who voted for this or signed it without reading the whole thing should be voted out of office. Yes, that includes the one who signed it.
This is a process created by Obama and the Reid/Pelosi Congress.
The first thing they did was pass the Stimulus(ie Massive Govt Spending) bill then they illegally refused to pass a budget.
This baked in the stimulus spending. One continuing resolution after another.
Even though the Republicans have been in charge, they continue the same. Welcome to the Uniparty.
Secret Empires by Schweizer spells it out. Not a peep from the MSM.
Let's face it; the Republicans screwed Trump and on purpose to save their sinecures and avoid the Tar and Feathering they so richly deserve.
Yes, the DemonRatz are bad but they are the honest thieves in this fiasco.
Still.Backing.Trump!
Yes, vote out Trump and put in Kamala. That’ll help.
Talk and more talk is very old and insulting. They rail against it, but nothing changes. Indeed, many are celebrating how well their perfected hypocritical spending formula is now working. They stuff the CR with thousands of pages of spending, hold it back until the eleventh hour, and then ram it though with the threat it has to be voted in or the government will shut down.
I cooled off somewhat after learning that the military captured $700 billion, over half, of the total $1.3 trillion.
I won’t give up on Trump yet despite what I have said previously.
And last time I looked, Congress was still using baseline budgeting. So is any increase on top of that??
For all we or the members of congress know, there could be reparations buried in the bill courtesy of Keith Ellison and Mad Max.
Rodney Leland Blum - born April 26, 1955) is an American businessman and politician serving the U.S. Representative for Iowa's 1st congressional district, first elected in 2014. He is a member of the Republican Party and Tea Party movement.
He’s right. The particulars of the bill are downstream of the fact that it’s bad process. We should be rejecting this “continuing resolution” business right off the bat. We control the House and Senate. Why are we still doing business this way?
The nation is going down anyway with the disaster those fake Republicans in DC will face in November. With the nation going down anyway, let the dems have it. We the people gave them total control of the gov, and they didn't even care enough about us to get rid of Obamacare! And now we have to worry about if our Pres is marching to the globalists' drums.
Please....Those pages have been out and have been discussed for months. All they had to read was the revisions.....unless they never picked it up over the last few months.
Don’t paint the whole Republican Party with a broad brush. The failure to get rid of Obamacare was the fault of McCain, Murkowski and Collins.
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