Out of order

It’s become almost as much a Christmas tradition as hanging stockings or decorating the tree – our national government gets another stopgap spending measure in lieu of a regular budget in order to avoid a Christmas government shutdown. We’ve done this practically every year since Barack Obama became President, and this year is no exception.

You can read any number of opinions about how bad this deal will be, such as this one from my friend Rick Manning at Americans for Limited Government or the fine folks at Heritage Action. It’s not a done deal yet, for the vote is expected to come tomorrow, but there will be a lot of pressure to vote this out and beat it out of town before Christmas. We already have the tax package that was a series of tradeoffs.

Yet I want to focus on one representative, and he happens to be ours. You may recall Andy Harris voted on an equally controversial bill last year that he explained away, as well as the same thing earlier in 2014. There’s obviously some who also still hold a grudge against him for voting for John Boehner to stay on as Speaker of the House. Somewhere in the back of my mind I seem to recall him saying something along the lines that this year’s budget process should be smooth because we could do it in regular order. So much for that.

If anything deserves explanation, the reason all this couldn’t be done in regular order would be the first thing on my mind. In November 2014 we gave Republicans a majority in Congress – they have the “power of the purse” that was the excuse as to why things couldn’t get done in the previous four years. No longer did we have only 1/2 of 1/3 of the government. So why is this still a problem?

As I see it, if Congress does its job and passes a budget that does what conservatives want to do such as defund Obamacare, rein in the regulators, and make other prudent spending cuts, the onus is on Barack Obama to sign it or deal with the consequences of a government shutdown. It’s on him. After all, if people are still blaming George W. Bush for a government shutdown 4 1/2 years after leaving office, it must be the president’s fault.

So I think tomorrow we will see another long social media post from Andy Harris explaining away another vote for bloated government. We already have the narrative that these were the cards dealt by John Boehner to Paul Ryan and next year things will be different.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before. I’ll believe it when I see it.

One thought on “Out of order”

Comments are closed.