HERE WE GO AGAIN

This is a broken record that always has the same ending; some huge spending bill that nobody reads.  It is as Pelosi says, “We have to pass the bill to learn what is in it.”  And like Obamacare, we learn that everything in the bill is more spending, more government control, and less freedom.
 
The lack of a spending deal with fewer than 20 legislative days remaining until the August recess is prompting some GOP senators to discuss the possibility of cutting short the Senate’s August break.  Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who is up for reelection next year, said he will ask Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to consider trimming the annual recess in order to tackle government spending bills.
 
The effort to shorten the recess was successful in 2018 after Perdue and other lawmakers sounded the alarm on a pileup of spending measures. This year, the Senate is even further behind schedule on its to-do list.  Senators have done little legislating this year and still have on their agenda a border supplemental spending bill, defense authorization, a highway reauthorization and the annual appropriations bills.
 
“We only have 19 working days between now and the end of July. If we don’t stay here in August at least some of the time, it’s hard for me to believe we’re going to get all of this appropriated by Sept. 30,” Perdue said Tuesday, citing the end of the fiscal year.
 
“We have got to get defense and HHS done,” he added, referring to the two biggest spending bills funding the Pentagon and the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services.
 
“If we don’t get it done, I’m still of the mind that we need to be here in August. I don’t know how it would be any other way. It’s just a reality, we’re not doing our jobs and we got to get it done,” Perdue said.
 
What do they do?  The budget is their primary function.  We know they do nothing about the border.  We know they do nothing about the deficit except pass last minute bills to increase it.  We know they have time to pontificate.  We know they have time to pass bills naming post offices and giving wonderful citations.  But they never have time to preform their most important function.  Perhaps this year, and we can only hope it happens, President Trump will veto this last-minute spending bill, a bill that contains lots of surprises, and utilize the sequestration rule.  Let us hope so.