December 23 — As national lawmakers prepared to rush home for the holidays through icy conditions, they also rubber stamped a $1.7 trillion spending package that will keep the federal government going through September 2023 as well as an incredible host of other goodies — some of which are unbelievable.
The US Senate passed the omnibus spending package yesterday and the US House passed it just moments ago.
The bill contains more than 4,000 pages and some of the details include $3 million for Be Friendly Highways; $65 million to restore the salmon population; $286 million in Title X funding, which gives money to Planned Parenthood; $7.5 million to understand the domestic radicalization phenomenon.
In addition, a federal building will be dedicated to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a $3.6 million trail will be named after former First Lady Michele Obama.
There are also regulations for stock trading, money for offices and other government agencies are getting all sorts of additional funding.
There are more than 7,200 pet projects, pork barrel projects, buried in this omnibus bill that add up to more than $15 billion.
And it’s a done deal.
Keep in mind, it dropped early this week, giving lawmakers mere days to wade through more than 4,000 pages of legislation in order to take a vote.
How is this our government?
We will find out the full impact of what Congress passed over the next few weeks.
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM said, “Let me just read you the comment by a very well-known Senator. He said about the passing of the omnibus, ‘a rotten process yields a rotten result and this trillion dollar bill is rotten to its core, resulting from secret backroom negotiations and getting dumped in the dead of night on Americans with barely two days before the vote. Corporate lobbyists had a field day, but working Americans lost out.’ It’s Tom Cotton and he made this comment in 2015 when he was a newly elected, supposedly conservative Republican. However Tom Cotton voted for (this) omnibus bill in the last couple days, so I guess six years is all it took for him to get sucked into the swamp.”
Attorney Clint Barkdoll pointed out of the 18 Senators that voted for it, “you wonder, do they have some earmarks? Are there some pork barrel projects they got as part of this deal?”
Jansen said, “We got the list right. I left them plenty of scathing messages. I hope other people did, too. I don’t know, they don’t fear us anymore. It’s pretty obvious. Shelley Moore Capito, she was supposed to be in charge of getting the border right. There’s no protection for the border. We’re going to protect Jordan. We’re going to protect Ukraine, but we’re not going to protect our own border. Plus, guess what? There’s a lot of money in there to protect their own offices and federal buildings. People are getting angry and this anger sadly is translating into a few extremists minds into a threat. Rather than fix the policies that are causing this disruption in the country and discord, they’re going to give themselves a border wall. They’re going to protect their own borders where they work while the rest of us can just, you’re on your own.”
Additionally, the total package wasn’t posted anywhere before it was passed.
Barkdoll said, “I’m even seeing some journalists pointing this out. We can’t even report on what’s in it because we’re only able to report what members of the Senate and Congress are feeding to us piecemeal.”
