That the debt, deficit, and budgetary constraints continue to be issues in Washington – as elusive as Taliban fighters in the mountains of Pakistan – was evidenced this week by the omnibus bill. It’s a 2,000 page bill with $1.1 trillion in spending that we had but three days to review. Like any of these bills that combine many areas of government spending, there is enough good and bad to give all members of Congress a reason to vote for or against – and that generally means the taxpayer is the one losing in the process.
Let me submit five reasons why I don’t think this omnibus bill is in your best interest, and leave it for you to decide whether or not I represented you in voting no.
One, it perpetuates Washington’s denial of our pending budget crisis. The old saying is that the surest way to get out of a hole is to quit digging. This bill did not do that. It added $50 billion in spending which was not off-set – which means it simply gets added to the deficit. Here is another way to think of this: $50 billion equates to roughly an additional $400 of federal spending per American family. Based on what you know, would you rather be billed for the extra $400 this year, or spend it on Christmas presents?
Two, it extends an array of new programs that will exacerbate the funding crisis headed our way. Let me give you an example. The Zadroga Act was put in place in the wake of 9/11 to help those whose health was affected as a result of their efforts as a first responder on that tragic day. So far, so good. But this bill authorized this expenditure through 2090! That means if every responder was 20 or below, they would all have to get to 110 years to live up to the authorization in this bill. Leaving aside probabilities on life expectancy, is this financially reasonable?
Three, even in the age of terrorism, civil liberty is a cornerstone to each of the liberties the Founding Fathers envisioned and enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Without the debate that goes with so-called “regular order,” intelligence language was inserted into this bill that would substantially expand authority. Doesn’t this deserve a debate on the merits of doing so?
The Founding Fathers believed that for freedom to exist, there had to be a zone of privacy around our private lives and personal property that should only be pierced with probable cause. In the event that there was, they set up a process, now built around things like a warrant and the need to show cause on why government should pierce this zone of privacy.
What this bill would do is, for the first time, codify executive authority in capturing and using American’s private phone records, electronic communications, or cloud data. So, for all the good done by intelligence, it’s important we not codify things that work directly against what the Founding Fathers enshrined in the Constitution.
Four, since 1973, our country has prohibited the export of crude oil. It made sense from the standpoint of energy independence to say then that we will hang onto what oil we have so we won’t be as reliant on places like Venezuela, Nigeria, or a host of countries in the Middle East who have never had America’s best interests at heart. Fast forward to today, and we all understand the ways in which we have had a revolution in natural resource extraction in this country. But how does it make sense to say now, let’s for the first time open up lease areas off the coast of Beaufort County under the pretense of a further move toward energy independence…only to have what might be extracted sent to France?
Five, it left untouched the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) land grab in the form of an expanded definition of “Waters of the United States.” I have long been a proponent of the environment, but what is being done here by the agency will have far-reaching negative effects in a place like Bluffton or Lobeco, given the amount of low land we have in the county. The idea that we would have to go to a federal bureaucrat to clean a neighborhood ditch defies common sense.
I could go on with another fifty policy or spending items that are imbedded in this bill and range from bankruptcy bailouts for Puerto Rico to Syrian refugees, but my conclusion on this bill is that the bad outweighed the good for the taxpayer. Speaker Ryan has promised a return to “regular order” in the new year, and doing so will be vital to avoiding Santa coming next year with another omnibus bill.
