ROOKE: House Speaker Gives Tone Deaf Speech Defending The Swamp’s Last Funding Stunt Before Trump Comes Home
House Speaker Mike Johnson is promoting a pork-filled spending resolution that would give Congress more power and waste billions of taxpayer dollars, making this the coal in Americans’ Christmas stockings.
Johnson promised members (and voters) under his leadership that massive spending bills would be an open process led by committee chairs. He also said that members would have at least 72 hours to read the bill before they were expected to vote and that the passing of any Christmas omnibus spending packages would be a thing of the past.
People call me “NostraThomas” for accurately predicting @SpeakerJohnson would use the Christmas recess to force a massive spending bill through Congress.
After claiming he would not, Johnson is embracing a D.C. tradition that’s nearly as old as decorating Christmas trees. pic.twitter.com/TRd1ZiCXtc
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 18, 2024
However, in the past 24 hours, he has broken almost all of these promises by introducing the Christmas Continuing Resolution (CR), which would keep the federal government funded until March 2025. Worst of all, Johnson is shamelessly trying to sell the American people on the idea that passing the CR is the conservative way to handle the funding issue. (ROOKE: Biden Fell For Legal Trap Set By Trump Appointees)
Johnson tried to make his case Tuesday night in an interview with Newsmax.
“This was the conservative play call. We don’t normally like what’s called a Continuing Resolution, a CR. But in this case, it makes sense because if we push it into the first quarter of next year, then we have a Republican-controlled Congress and President Donald J. Trump back in the White House, we’ll be able to have more say about funding decisions in 2025,” Johnson said.
“Now, that would have been an easier thing to do, but then we had circumstances outside of our control. We had these emergencies that are required. We had, as you know, a record hurricane season. We had Helene and Milton, and they just did massive destruction across our red states, frankly,” Johnson continued. “And then we had farmers who are in jeopardy of permanently going under. They’ve had three loss years in a row because of Bidenomics and inflation and other circumstances outside of their control. So when you coble those two things together, there’s a desperate need for that aid, and that’s what adds another 100+ billion dollars to the bill. That’s where everyone is uncomfortable with it.”
Republicans CANNOT allow millions of Americans devastated by the historic hurricane season, or our struggling farmers, go without the help they desperately need.
We will decide FY25 spending in March, when Trump is back in the WH and Republicans control the Senate and House. pic.twitter.com/f8OpQleOoJ
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) December 18, 2024
The problem that Johnson expects the American people to be either too stupid or too lazy to understand is that Congress has known about this funding deadline since the last time they passed a CR funding bill in late September, around the same time hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated the country. There is no reason why Congress couldn’t have gone through the standard process earlier in the last quarter to avoid the rushed vote right before members wanted to go home for Christmas. (Heated Committee Chair Race Puts Two Eras Of GOP At War, May Show Whether Mike Johnson Will Stab Trump In Back)
Most Americans sympathize with the victims of the hurricanes and Biden’s economic policies. However, adding aid for these emergencies isn’t really the issue here. It’s the decision to drop an almost 2,000-page spending bill that includes way more than aid to desperate Americans right before Christmas. We can see that this bill is supposed to allow policies Americans wouldn’t support to go through and designed to drop when it did in order to avoid a public debate.
One of my promises to the people I represent was to fix our badly broken institution – the United States Congress. 🇺🇸
I see only one way to do it at this point – bring transparency to the American people how bad it has become.
Watch my @CNN interview this morning. pic.twitter.com/uq0Uo6l1HD
— Rep. Victoria Spartz (@RepSpartz) December 18, 2024
In his defense of the omnibus, Johnson did not mention that Congress would receive a massive salary increase or that a carve-out would give members the legal freedom to avoid subpoenas of their electronic conversations. Nor did he tell Americans that the Christmas omnibus would fund the Global Engagement Center (GEC) for another nine years. The GEC is part of the federal government’s Censorship Industrial Complex, which worked to pressure social media companies to censor Americans.
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This CR is putting in a section that allows them to “quash or modify any legal process…if compliance with the legal process would require the disclosure of House data…”
House data = “any electronic mail or other electronic or data communication”
They’re also applying… https://t.co/YHt9nIOXuH pic.twitter.com/iIaOhrxN9n
— Jon Herold (@patel_patriot) December 18, 2024
Johnson continues to signal that he and other Republicans believe business in Washington will continue as usual despite the American voter mandate handed down Nov. 5. We are emaciated, exhausted, and ready to fight the federal government over the abusive relationship it’s formed with us. We are tired of the status quo. We want fighters willing to end the swampy business Washington elites conduct. This Christmas Omnibus is a red flag.
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