The Patriot Post® · Months Later and Congress Doesn't Have a Budget

The way Republicans in Congress are acting, it’s no wonder grassroots conservatives are angry. When Paul Ryan took the gavel to lead the House, he promised that the chamber would return to “regular order.” This nation’s legislature would create a budget, he said. It would pass 12 spending bills instead of the mishmash of “CRomnibuses,” continuing resolutions and threats of government shutdowns. But as Rob Bluey of The Heritage Foundation reports, the deadline for the House to pass a budget was on April 15. While taxpayers scrambled to file with the IRS on time, Congress let the deadline to decide how that money was being spent fly by. Whoops.

It’s a pity. In the 2010 and 2014 elections, Republicans rode a wave of voter discontent in Barack Obama’s policy failures so that they picked up the majority of seats in the legislative branch. This was the perfect opportunity for conservatives to offer up real conservative solutions to some of the nation’s greatest needs — and to demonstrate the party’s leadership chops ahead of the presidential election. But as John Boehner was heading for the exit and vacating the speaker’s position at the end of 2015, he struck a spending deal with the Obama administration. Conservatives in the House are fighting to contain the spending. The Senate, on the other hand, is embracing the plans while ignoring GOP promises. The Left has worked the discord and pushed through its agenda. The establishment once again betrayed the cause.

“Conservatives, meanwhile, are left wondering if that means they’ll once again be presented with a massive bill that spends more money, lacks conservative policy riders, and funds government programs that have proven to be ineffective,” Bluey writes.

This anger at establishment Republicans can be seen in the rise of Donald Trump. As Mark Alexander wrote last July:

“Trump’s support reflects very little about his qualifications, but a lot about his message and how dissatisfied millions of disenfranchised grassroots conservatives are with Republican ‘leadership.’ The status quo represented by Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, in effect, underwritten Trump’s rising stardom. Despite greatly increasing the numbers of conservatives in the House and Senate in the historic ‘Republican Wave’ elections nationwide in both 2010 and 2014, the much-loathed ‘establishment types’ still hold the reins and they have failed to counter Barack Obama’s socialist policies. GOP leaders continue to marginalize or ignore the concerns of the conservative/Republican base — grassroots conservatives — and we are rightly outraged.”