The $1T lame-duck sellout
[Methinks this graphic will be getting a lot of work during the upcoming congressional session.]
Voters just gave Republicans one hell of a mandate: Stop Obama. Stop ObamaCare. Stop Amnesty. Stop it All. What did Republican leaders do? They struck a deal that pretty much gives Barry and his team everything they wanted.
The spending proposal — set to be voted on Thursday — spends $1 trillion to fund the government through the end of September 2015 but only funds the Department of Homeland Security for three months. So, the GOP will have the majority starting in January. But this deal gives the Democrats an incredible amount of leverage in setting the budget for the first year of the upcoming Republican era on Capitol Hill. DHS will oversee the administration of Barry’s executive action on amnesty. Republicans are promising to go after amnesty when the new Congress starts work. Fight another day. That sounds a lot like what we got told about ObamaCare. *We don’t need to defund anything now. We can get ObamaCare later.* ObamaCare is still being funded, BTW.
Let’s look to Politico, the Bible of the DC establishment, for more:
[…]
Already, the abundance of policy riders — backed by trucking, mining and securities interests — shows the GOP’s new clout. But the giant measure also reflects a genuine give-and-take with Senate Democrats in hopes of averting a government shutdown veto fight with President Barack Obama.
“The bill will allow us to fulfill our constitutional duty to responsibly fund the federal government and avoid a shutdown,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). In her blunter style, his Senate counterpart, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), appealed to Democrats to support the measure.
“In today’s era of slam-down politics, we were able to set aside our differences,” she said. “Working across the aisle and across the dome, we created compromise without capitulation.”
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — herself a veteran of many past spending deals — withheld any decision but said she was “hopeful” she could support the package. “We have confidence in our appropriators as they have over the last weeks sought to negotiate a position that represents the values of our Caucus.”
OK. So, big-government RINO Hal Rogers, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Mikulski are all fans of this deal? Does that make anybody else out there feel a little queasy? MORE:
Prior budget agreements made the task easier since the White House had already agreed to a freeze on domestic appropriations. The Internal Revenue Service and Environmental Protection Agency, two favorite Republican targets, still face real cuts below current spending. But the broader picture is of a largely flat domestic budget with modest increases for scientific research, hiring more immigration judges or dredging the nation’s harbors.
Where big new money is added, it is largely to meet threats from overseas such as the deadly outbreak of Ebola in West Africa or the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Nothing on the domestic front comes close to the $5.4 billion in emergency funds dedicated to fight Ebola, for example. And where the administration won concessions from Republicans, it was at a price.
After years of effort, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will finally get a substantial increase of $35 million — bringing its budget to $250 million. And the GOP agreed to also bring the much larger Securities and Exchange Commission up to $1.5 billion, a $150 million increase.
But as part of the bargaining, Republicans won an important concession for the financial industry related to “swaps push out” rules for banks under the Dodd-Frank reforms.
The financial industry wants more protection from federal insurance to protect some of its riskier practices — like those that led to the 2008 financial crisis. So, this is not exactly a small-government victory MORE:
[…]
Elsewhere, Republicans appeared more circumspect. In the case of nutrition and school lunch standards promoted by first lady Michelle Obama — a clear flash point — the House retreated to compromises crafted by Senate Democrats.
School districts are promised more flexibility in meeting requirements for some items such as whole grain products. But this is far less than the broad waiver that had been promoted in the House.
The bargains struck regarding the Clean Water Act and other environmental issues appeared to require both sides to give ground. Democrats blocked some of the biggest ticket items impacting greenhouse gases.
[…] Eager to go home, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said the House is pushing for a floor vote as early as Thursday. Some short-term continuing resolution or CR will be needed to buy more time for Senate action. But the goal is to put most of the government on firm footing, free of shutdown worries through next September.
The sole exception is the Department of Homeland Security, which will be kept on a shorter leash so Republicans can revisit Obama’s immigration policy after Democrats surrender the Senate in January. But there’s no attempt to interfere with the operations of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the office in DHS that is charged with implementing Obama’s recent executive order.
[…]
So, we’re not really fighting the implementation of amnesty, after all, huh? MORE: 
Following is a section-by-section summary of major elements in the spending package:
—The Pentagon is promised $490.2 billion for its core operations and another $64 billion in OCO funds counted outside the budget caps. The OCO number is significantly more than Obama first anticipated last spring and reflects the stepped-up U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria as well as $175 million to aid Ukraine and Baltic states like Latvia in the face of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
—The State Department and foreign aid accounts, including almost $9 billion in OCO funds. The extra OCO funds will help preserve what’s become a greatly expanded refugee assistance program of just over $3 billion annually. Almost $1.9 billion is provided in disaster assistance — again heavily dependent on OCO support.
OCO? THAT is “Overseas Contingency Operations.” It’s uncapped federal spending devoted to alleged non-war spending. MORE:
Closer to home, the bill provides an estimated $260 million for a basket of programs to help Central America address some of the economic and social ills that drove the spike in child migrants this past year.[…]
—The cuts from the IRS are the most severe, and the $10.95 billion provided is $346 million below the tax agency’s current funding. This is relatively close to what House Republicans had first proposed and dramatically less than Obama had requested. But as part of the same bargain, the bill drops House language that would bar the IRS from playing its critical role in implementing the president’s Affordable Care Act.
[…]
Gosh. We sure are seeing a whole lot about Democrats getting what they want, and Republicans conceding. This is JUST a sneak-peek at what ‘holding your nose’ has earned you.
And next time around, we’ll get the same song and dance routine about party loyalty and pulling together to support the imperfect, because doggone it, at least they arent Democrats.
lol, these crooks. It’s really, really disgusting how corrupt and pro-big government they really are, and how little effort they have to go through to have the American people accept and sanction it.
What is the difference between a Nancy Boehner or a John Pelosi? They are one and the same, and they are both Obama enablers. Boehner set the last CR to run to a lame duck session instead of to the next Congress, where the Reublican hand would be much stronger for the very purpose of selling us out. Boehner deliberately arranged this CR to run 9 months so that Obama’s policies like amnesty could get established rather than a short term CR to just after the first of the year where they could have been nipped in the bud.
Boehner is a very evil force in all of this, and he is as bad as Pelosi. They are two peas in a leftwing pod. Boehner always wants to put fights off to a tomorrow which never comes. On amensty, Boehner’s game was revealed when he hired a major pro-amnesty activist as his immigration adviser. This is a deliberate sellout of the Republican platform and the Republican base by Nancy Boehner. To top it all off, we have the Pelosi-Boehner tactic of a huge bill that no one has a chance to read thoroughly before it is passed – we have to pass the bill to find out what is in the bill.
This is NOT what American voters thought they elected in November. We are being betrayed by an out of control beltway ”leadership” that is sticking its finger in the eye of the American voter. This treachery will end badly for the Republican Party and it is all the fault of Boehner and his clique.
The more I research the “Anti-Federalist Party,” the better it sounds. It was responsible for getting the Bill of Rights added to our Constitution.
In an anti-federalist government, each state decides how to handle issues, so residents are be better represented and have much more local control. Fedzilla gets stuffed into a constitutionally-prescribed cell with lots of thick, strong bars and huge locks — and swatted on the nose, if it so much as growls.
If you disagree with your state’s laws on tobacco products, guns, taxes, abortion, immigration, etc., then you can move to another state with a different tax structure and more liberties.
Americans must somehow create an alternative to the traitorous Demo-publican Party. That monster can’t be trusted, and we need to quit fooling ourselves that we can change it. We can’t. In the meantime, it’s turning America into a squalid, dangerous, socialist hellhole.
Here are a couple of links to info on Anti-federalism, in case you’re interested:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/is_it_time_for_an_antifederalist_party_.html
http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/anti-federalist-pa
Hmmm! The Anti-Federalist Party does have a nice historical ring to it, and I also believe that at the time it existed, it was the party of Thomas Jefferson.
Something does need to be done quickly, either remove the cancer of the Big Government Republicans from that party, or create a new political vehicle, as seems to be happening so many places these days. I have used the UKIP example that is currently happening in the UK, but there is one closer to home. It used to be the big two parties in Canada that alternated in government were the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives, but the latter kept drifting left, leading to the rise of the Reform Party, starting in western Canada, which stood to the right of the Progressive Conservatives. It did not take many elections before the Reform Party was the main rival of the Liberals, and eventually, the very reduced rump of the Progressive Conservatives merged into the Reform Party, under the Reform Party’s leadership as the new Conservative Party, which is the party governing Canada today.
Well, the key vote has been taken, on the rule that puts the bill on the floor, the best choke point to stop it, and that thug Boehner was busy twisting arms. It initially failed until he went down and twisted a few arms to get people to switch their votes.
The only North Carolinian who stood up to this Obama-enabling bill was Walter Jones, who is the only true conservative and true Republican in the NC delegation. The rest are poseurs and need to be primaried and defeated. Thanks to them, our chances of stopping the Obama amnesty and ending the scourge of Obamacare have just been almost destroyed. They have betrayed the Republican platform and the Republican grassroots voters.
Boehner has made liars out of most of the House Republicans. They were elected to stop Obama, but instead they are shoring up Obama’s most hated programs. Boehner is a disgrace to the Republican Party, as are those who backed his betrayal. Boehner has created a poisonous climate in which conservatives will not be motivated to vote in 2016. He is the Democrats secret weapon.