The Wall Street Journal reports that “The GOP passes its first big spending test–barely.” More on that in a second.
If we have to — and we probably do — we will spend the next however-many-are-necessary years sounding like Tea Party inspiration Rick Santelli trying to drive the message home:
I want the government to stop spending.
Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending,
STOP SPENDING!That’s what we want! Stop spending!
Why? Because the GOP’s strength in this past election wasn’t its recent track record on spending, it was foremost its circumstance of being the only way left for citizens to stop the Obama agenda, given that Obama and the Democrats had proven that they would deliberately and haughtily force-feed their agenda down the throats of the citizens they are supposed to represent, in full knowledge of their betrayal of the principles of representative government in so doing. The GOP also promised to stop the spending and reverse the course of Obamacare and out-of-control government, promises that Republicans would be wise to fulfill and Tea Party patriots would be wise to suspect.
The proposed $1.1 Trillion omnibus spending bill certainly seemed like just more cynical government as usual, and here I pick up with excerpts from WSJ:
Senate Republicans’ stunning defeat last night of the Democrats’ omnibus spending bill was anything but boring.
What our great nation just watched was the Democratic Party preview its political strategy for the next two years. It also watched a united Senate GOP defeat that approach, though not before a handful of Republicans considered walking straight into the Democratic trap. The whole episode was an early peek at the GOP’s biggest challenge going forward.
That challenge is, as it always is, spending. Republicans lost in 2006 primarily because of their profligacy, and they won this year primarily because they swore off that profligacy. It’s that simple–and don’t think Democrats don’t know it. President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi understand that the surest, quickest and most delicious way to undermine their opponents is to tempt them into renouncing their own promises of fiscal responsibility. …
This week Democrats unveiled a $1.2 trillion omnibus, legislation as pure an insult to the electorate as it gets. … Yet to this legislative Frankenstein Democrats carefully attached the spenders’ equivalent of crack cocaine. To wit, omnibus author and Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye dug up earmark requests that Senate Republicans had made in the past year (prior to their self-imposed ban) and, unasked, included them in the bill. …
Read on. A battle was won, but final victory still hangs in the balance.
