By Ron Paul, The Ron Paul Institute | Mar 25, 2024
This weekend’s late-night spending vote in Congress seems like another in an endless series of sequels to a bad suspense movie. Just at the brink of “disaster,” just before the stroke of midnight, Congress pulls off a miracle and passes an omnibus bill to save us from a “government shutdown!”
The heroes have saved the day!
Unfortunately, this latest sequel is as bad as the previous ones, as the American people are left with a massive $1.2 trillion dollar spending package to add to our already $34 trillion in debt. Military spending will, of course, be increased yet again, as the military-industrial complex demands more of our wealth to feed its ever-increasing appetite. And if this military spending increase is not enough, Congressional leadership is promising another huge supplemental bill to further fuel proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza – with some money to provoke China as well.
Republicans like to talk a good game about reining in spending – especially during election season – but as we learned with this “compromise” and all previous “compromises, it’s all talk. At the end of all the dramatic warnings about shutting the government down, we are left with a Washington-style compromise, meaning the leadership of both parties gets to throw anything and everything they want into the massive bill. Because it is only presented to the rank and file at the last moment before “disaster,” none of the Members get a chance to even read it, much less shape it through amendments and debate.
The Republican House leadership promised the Members 72 hours to read any new bill before a vote, but they broke their promise without hesitation. Members would not have the chance to read the more than 1,000 page bill, which was worked out in secret behind closed doors
There is likely a reason that Congressional leaders did not want Members to get the chance to read the bill. As Rep. Thomas Massie discovered, buried in the bill is funding for 13 year old children to get help with gender transitioning without consent from their parents. He also pointed out that although nowhere was it in the authorization bill, just hours after the omnibus passes the Department of Justice announces the creation of a Federal “Red Flag” center to attack our Second Amendment rights.
Who knows how many more items like these – and far worse – are deeply buried in the “must-pass” spending bill. Keeping these items from the American people by secretly embedding them in “must pass” legislation increasingly looks like a feature, not a bug. No wonder Congress enjoys such a low approval rate among the American people.
In the end, the bill only passed the Republican-controlled House with the support of Democrats, fueling a growing rebellion against Speaker Johnson among House conservatives.
The media-celebrated “bipartisanship” is not all it’s cracked up to be. It means that both parties embrace policies that are leading to our financial bankruptcy. This further threatens the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and will result in catastrophic changes worldwide that nearly no one in Congress seems capable of imagining. Republicans capitulating to Democrat demands to “save us” from a government shutdown may temporarily keep the appearance that “this is fine,” but in the end they are making the coming crash all the worse.
Ron Paul is an American physician, author, and politician who served for many years as a U.S. Representative for Texas. He was a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.
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