When D.C. has the will they can work together to climb every mountain and ford every sea. Alas, these accomplishments are usually a bane to the well-being of the nation and its citizens.
There was more proof
of it yesterday when the notorious $1.7 trillion omnibus bill was passed
in the Senate by a vote of 68-29.
The Bill in question spans 4,155 pages. It's impossible that any of the Senators who voted for the bill have actually read and comprehended the impact of this bill.
Yet all efforts were
spent to pass it.
Senators in D.C. who
must have been exhausted from the constant exercise of repeated standing
ovations and applauses for the address
to a joint meeting of Congress by Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, burned their midnight oil perhaps striking a shady deal to ensure the passage of the bill.
As they were reaching
the finishing line Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a rare independent
voice in the Senate, placed an obstacle by introducing an amendment that would
have prevented the Biden administration from rescinding Title 42.
Title 42 allows U.S.
border officials to expel migrants and
aspiring asylum-seekers owing to COVID-19. Title 42 was set to expire, but the
Supreme Court issued
a temporary order to retain these provisions.
Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer was probably concerned that ‘centrist’ members could
support Lee's amendment. If Lee's amendment were to pass in the Senate, it would
essentially render the omnibus bill dead on arrival once in the House
since where progressive Congressional Democrats support ending Title 42.
Lee’s amendment cut
funding for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s office
unless the Biden administration reinstates the Trump-era Title 42
policy.
The old fox Schumer played a cunning game by circumventing Lee’s amendment. He worked with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-Montana) to develop an amendment similar to Lee’s amendment that increases border funding and extends the Title 42 policy.
But unlike Lee’s
amendment, Sinema and Tester’s proposal would serve Democrat interests by
granting $85 million for immigration judges to speed up asylum claims.
https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1605948247012306944
https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1605948248115511297
But the purpose was never for the amendment to pass but instead to give ‘centrist’ Democrats an excuse. They could claim that they voted to extend the Title 42 policy in Sinema and Testers’s amendment hence there was no reason to vote for Lee’s amendment which did the very same thing.
In the end, the Sinema and Tester amendment failed by 10-87, but it archived its purpose by consuming votes to doom Lee’s amendment by 47-50.
https://twitter.com/AnthonyAdragna/status/1605974136186085376
The next step was a vote on the floor.
The $1.7 trillion
omnibus bill passed the Senate with the help of eighteen Senate Republicans and
all Democrats.
The names of these
GOP Senators are as follows
Sens. Roy Blunt (MO),
John Boozman (AR),
Shelley Moore Capito
(WV),
Susan Collins (ME),
John Cornyn (TX),
Tom Cotton (AR),
Lindsey Graham (SC),
Jim Inhofe (OK),
Mitch McConnell (KY),
Jerry Moran (KS),
Lisa Murkowski (AK),
Robert Portman (OH),
Mitt Romney (UT),
Mike Rounds (SD),
Richard Shelby (AL),
John Thune (SD),
Roger Wicker (MS),
Todd Young (IN).
The Bill heads to the
House where it is likely to pass
The passage of this
bill is unprecedented because seizes the power of the purse from the incoming
GOP House till October 2023. The authority to decide spending is among the most
important powers for a political party holding a majority in the House.
Undercutting that power for 10 months is anti-Democratic because the people
voted to give full control of the House to the GOP for 24 months.
But since the
Democrats are doing it and are, the media ‘defenders of Democracy’ were silent.
So what are the
specifics of the bill?
The bill grants $45
billion in military, humanitarian and economic aid for Ukraine and
funds to replenish Pentagon stockpiles of weapons the U.S. sent to Ukraine,
along with additional aid for NATO allies.
This adds to the $66
billion of taxpayers’ money lawmakers have already approved for Ukraine. To put
this in perspective American taxpayers
have given more aid to Ukraine in 2022 than Afghanistan,
Israel, and Egypt combined in 2020. The amount of U.S. aid to Ukraine in just a
few months has surpassed three of the largest recipients of U.S.
military aid in history.
There are no tracking
or accounting measure for these funds for Ukraine
The same bill prohibits U.S.
Customs and Border Protection from spending more than $1.5 billion to
"acquire, maintain, or extend border security technology and capabilities,
except for technology and capabilities to improve Border Patrol processing."
Apart from dispatching
aid to Ukraine, the bill consists of many of Democrats' pet ideas, which
were chronicled by U.S. congressman Dan Bishop in a Twitter
thread.
The bill grants
around $575 million towards “family planning” and
“reproductive health,” including in areas where population growth “threatens
biodiversity;”
The bill grants
around $1.2 million to centers that support LGBTQ students at San Diego
Community College District and $3 million towards a New York LGBTQ Museum and
$750,000 to the Trans Latina Coalition.
The bill provides
$2.6 billion for US Attorney “to further support prosecutions related to the
January 6 attack on the Capitol and domestic terrorism cases.” This is a
euphemism for targeting political opponents.
The bill would
provide $576 million for the Environmental Protection Agency.
The bill funds the
creation of a new “pandemic czar” in the White House., there is no clarity about the powers of this czar.
The bill
eliminates Medicaid coverage protections from the public health
emergency. Millions of people who enrolled in the Medicaid public health
insurance program during the COVID-19 pandemic could lose their coverage in
April 2023 in the spring if their state determines they no longer meet the
program’s eligibility requirements. Since the Democrats are doing this, there
is no media outrage.
The bill
includes a plan to change the Electoral Count Act which helps
Democrats engaged in electoral fraud. It raises the requirement for objections
to a state's electoral votes from one member of the House and one senator to
20% of the members from each chamber.
It also adds to the
debt, which is at $31 trillion.
It grants Joe Biden a
legislative victory.
Yet eighteen
Republicans readily jumped on board to support this bill. Make no mistake,
the goal behind this support isn’t driven by principles but by self-interests.
Perhaps Schumer struck some deals with them in ‘appreciation’. Part of it was
probably scorn for the MAGA wing of the party whom they want to purge from D.C.
In the end, this
becomes a one-party system masquerading as democracy.
It is said that an ineffective and unreliable ally is worse than a sworn enemy. The enemy is doing what is expected by working against your interests and attacking you. But the real betrayal occurs when your ally either becomes a bystander or worst, joins the enemy to mount a blistering attack against you.
Also appears on American Thinker
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