Last Gasp Socialist Omnibus Spending Bill Defeat Gives Hope for New Era of Responsibility

This last week was quite a momentous one for individual rights and more legitimate government, with the continuation of almost all of the lower tax rates of the Bush presidency, the declaration by Judge Hudson that the individual mandate and the penalties in ObamaCare are unconstitutional, the end of the ignoble Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy in the military, and the defeat of the last gasp effort of the Progressive Socialist Elitists to fund their program for the next year in an Omnibus Spending Bill.

The Democrats had completely neglected to fund the current fiscal year's federal government with the normal 13 appropriations bills, each to be studied, discussed, and debated by responsible adults in the Congress.  Instead, they proposed, in the manner this Congress has become accustomed to, to wrap the whole process into one massive, take it or leave it bill to be passed in the most rushed and ill-considered way possible.  Indeed, as with other bills in this Congress, this was a You Must Pass the Bill in Order to Find Out What Is in It kind of bill.  It was another Trust Us, We Know What is Best for You Bill.  The Omnibus Spending Bill had barely numerable evils embedded in it:

• 1,924 pages which few members of Congress had read and which were not debated appropriately.
• Total spending of about $1.27 trillion, which was way beyond the government's expected tax revenues.
• About 6700 earmarks costing about $8.3 billion, with the usual extra concentrations of earmarks for members of the Appropriations Committee.
• One year's worth of funding for ObamaCare so the coming Anti-ObamaCare House of Representatives would have no opportunity to defund ObamaCare for a year.  This socialist government wants to get a good start hiring those extra IRS agents to make sure everyone buys very expensive government-approved health insurance and that all businesses fill out and submit their 1099 Forms for every transaction or sum of transactions totaling more than $600 in a year with any vendor.
• The Legal Services Corporation would have its budget increased to $440 million so it could once again engage in class action lawsuits, which it had previously so abused that it was forced to stop class action lawsuits in the 1980s.  It says it now wants to force banks to stop predatory lending, which would just mean that more people would turn to payday lenders who charge up to 500% annual interest as banks are forced to bring down their interest rates.  Presumably the Legal Services Corporation would also presumably return to suing landlords and other targets it had previously chosen to harass and extort.

This sort of package deal with thousands of unrelated provisions is a strong bias toward wasteful and wrongheaded spending of the taxpayer's money.  The appropriate bias of Congress should always be against spending the taxpayer's money.  But just as our present-day interpretation of the Constitution is biased toward nearly unfettered governmental powers rather than toward maximal individual rights, the entire appropriations procedure of Congress has become biased toward thoughtless spending of the taxpayer's hard-earned money.  It is noteworthy that Senator Mitch McConnell actually marshalled the opposition of the Republicans to this bill, despite their own many earmarks in it, by correctly stating that this was no way to do business.  He noted that the bill was too expensive and that it was a grab-bag of junk provisions that flew in the face of the voters who made their disdain for such legislation only too well known in the November election.

Senator McConnell proposed a 60-day extending budget resolution, which I believe should have been a 30-day extension.  This would have been just enough time to let the incoming Congress deal with as much as possible of the 2011 fiscal year budget.  Unfortunately, I just heard that the continuing budget resolution will carry the government's excessive spending binge into March.  This will make the 2011 federal deficit much larger than it should be.  Socialism carries a very high price tag in lost individual freedom and the excessive spending of other people's money.