The Patriot Post® · Another Last-Second Budget Deal

As we imagine it, Joe Biden was awakened at some point on Saturday morning and told that Congress had indeed passed an eleventh-hour spending bill to keep the government from shutting down. So he rolled out of bed, put on his slippers, shuffled into the Oval Office, and signed the bill.

But before crawling back into bed, Biden acknowledged a fundamental truth about bills such as this: that they ultimately involve compromise and that “neither side got everything it wanted.” And then he took a weird swipe at his political enemies: “But it rejects the accelerated pathway to a tax cut for billionaires that Republicans sought, and it ensures the government can continue to operate at full capacity. That’s good news for the American people, especially as families gather to celebrate this holiday season.”

The good news for the American people is that they’ve once again dodged that seemingly annual government-shutdown bullet and that they’ll still be able to drive through the front gate at Yellowstone rather than driving around it.

Democrats, of course, wanted a shutdown because it would’ve allowed them to demagogue the issue and claim that Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans can’t govern. And, to a point, they would’ve been right. Budgeting is one of the fundamental duties of Congress, and the Mike Johnson-led House can’t seem to herd the Republican cats as well as iron-fisted Nancy Pelosi herded her fellow Democrats.

As The Washington Post reports, the stopgap bill “funds the government at its current levels through mid-March, providing $110 billion in relief to help natural disaster survivors and aid farmers, granting an extension for the farm bill, and funding to rebuild Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

To their credit, House Republicans took the original 1,547-page bipartisan abomination of a bill and slashed it down to 118 pages on Friday. In doing so, the 118th Congress kicked the budgetary can down the road into mid-March for the 119th Congress. As the Post adds, the bill “excludes several key provisions that were in the initial bill, such as a fix for stolen food stamp funds, changes to the operations of pharmacy benefit managers and pay raises for members of Congress.”

Another thing the bill lacks is a two-year extension of the debt ceiling. Why would the Democrats block this extension and postpone it until the near future? Perhaps, given their near-political wilderness, they’re trying to feign fiscal responsibility and show genuine concern for our mind-numbing $36 trillion national debt.

More likely, though, they see it as a bargaining chip for more spending on what our Constitution’s author once derisively called “objects of benevolence.”

Donald Trump had sought this provision, but he and his fellow Republicans will instead have to take it up again in a couple of months with an even more ornery bunch of Democrats. At that time, the minority party will no doubt hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to extort from the Republicans some additional spending upon which constitutional provision James Madison himself couldn’t possibly undertake to lay his finger.

Thus, it’s lather-rinse-repeat in broken Washington, where House Republicans will likely also have to decide whether Speaker Johnson should follow Kevin McCarthy into former speakerhood.

“In January,” Johnson promised, “we will make a sea change in Washington. Things are going to be very different around here.”

That sure sounds good, but we’ve heard that tune from Johnson before. As Texas Republican Michael Cloud said on Saturday, “The chaos of this past week was both predictable and avoidable. … Come January, we will need to revisit how Congress operates to ensure it is structured to deliver President Trump’s MAGA agenda. Whether that requires personnel changes, process reforms, or both will be a critical discussion we must have.”

Another discussion worth having would be one about the immorality of all this spending. As Fox News’s Mark Levin put it:

Budget, spending, debt. This debate is about morality. … It’s about what our generation, parents and grandparents, are doing to our children and grandchildren, and generations yet born. We are creating an economic and societal catastrophe [from] which our children and their children will not and cannot survive if we don’t hit the brakes. We’re stealing their wealth. We’re stealing their savings. We’re stealing their livelihoods. We’re stealing their retirements, even before any of it has been created. They will have to pay for everything we are doing, that Congress is doing, that the president is doing today. The profligate spending, the debt, programs — they are going to pay for all of it. And guess what? They don’t even have a vote. We just steal it from them.

For the next two years, the Republicans will control the presidency and both houses of Congress. If they can’t make serious progress during that time on these matters — budget, spending, and debt — then why on earth are we rewarding them with our votes?