After a week of passionate debate and late night votes, the Senate passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill this Saturday that will keep the entire federal government, except the Department of Homeland Security, funded through September 2015.
Here are three lessons conservatives should take away from the ordeal:
- Corporatism is King – Money talks and activists walk. That is the sad lesson from a $1.1 trillion spending bill that included huge payoffs to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Citibank, and corporations that use taxpayer subsidized loans to invest overseas. Meanwhile, House leaders did nothing to stop President Obama’s executive amnesty other than offer up a show vote on a separate piece of legislation that had no chance of even being voted on in the Senate.
- Republican Leaders Want To Cave On Amnesty – Not only did Republican leaders not even allow a vote on an amendment to defund Obama’s amnesty, even though they included plenty of other restrictions on federal spending in the omnibus, but they even included more than a billion in spending on programs to clean up Obama’s last amnesty, including $948 million for the Department of Health and Human Service’s unaccompanied children program and $260 million for the State Department to spend on Central American countries.
- Republican Leaders Lie – Not only did Republican leaders lie about Congress’s ability to defund the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office, the agency in charge of implementing Obama’s amnesty, but they also lied to Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) in order to get his vote on an early procedural matter, and they falsely claimed that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) empowered Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to sneak more Obama nominees past the Senate.
None of these lessons are good news for conservatives. If anything they show that with Reid out of the way in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) are going to be very eager to cut big deals with Obama so they can prove to Washington elites that they can “govern.” These deals will all benefit large corporations almost always at the expense of small businesses and middle class Americans.
