Tom Cotton and Harry Reid Agree On Omnibus Spending Bill

When Senators Tom Cotton and Harry Reid agree on something, you could call it a pretty strong consensus. And they both see Paul Ryan’s omnibus spending bill as a huge win for the Democrats. Harry Reid ran a victory lap:

Senate Democrats on Friday boasted that they successfully managed to get just about everything they wanted in a massive spending and tax cut bill, despite being the minority party in both the House and Senate.

“Months ago, Democrats called on Republicans to work with us to craft a budget agreement. We wanted to get rid of sequestration, we were able to do that,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “We wanted to make sure there is parity between defense and the middle class, we wanted to make sure that we kept these poison pills off the legislation.”

“All three goals we had, we accomplished,” he said. Reid said Democrats were able to beat back GOP efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, and stop plans to tighten rules for accepting refugees. …

“The legislation caps off a successful year for Senate Democrats,” Reid said. …

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the positive results for Democrats came after his party blocked passage of key defense bills that would have boosted defense spending, without any promise to boost domestic spending. Blocking those bills eventually forced Republicans to agree to the Democratic demands.

The final spending bill increases spending by $80 billion over the next two years, ending a large part of the sequester.

Durbin also boasted that Democrats were able to push to renew the Export-Import Bank, after it was prevented from taking on any new business since the summer. The bank was renewed as part of a long-term highway bill.

A successful year for Democrats? That’s putting it mildly.

Senator Tom Cotton agrees with Harry Reid’s assessment:

A rotten process yields a rotten result, and this 2,000-page, trillion-dollar bill is rotten to its core, resulting from secret, backroom negotiations and getting dumped in the dead of the night on Americans with barely two days before the vote. Corporate lobbyists had a field day, but working Americans lost out. Take just one sordid example: this bill will quadruple the number of foreign guest-worker visas at a time when millions of Americans are still looking for full-time work and working-class wages remain stagnant.

It’s especially disappointing that the new House leadership, in fewer than two months on the job, broke its promise not to bring major immigration legislation to the floor this year. One must wonder how many other promises in the Capitol have an expiration date. But one need not wonder why our voters are in open rebellion and our presidential candidates are successfully running against Congress.

So apparently a rule is now being established that the Senate minority gets to dictate all tax and spending legislation. Let’s remember that if the Republicans are in the Senate minority after the 2016 election, as they likely will be.

Rush Limbaugh also expounded at length on the disastrous omnibus bill. Read it and weep; and wonder, with Rush, whether it is time to disband the Republican Party and abandon the pretense that the Democrats have serious opposition in Washington.

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