House Republican lawmakers are speaking out against a $1.2 trillion spending package released early Thursday morning ahead of a potential partial shutdown of the government.
The 1,000-plus-page package of bills includes funding for the State, Education, Defense, Labor, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services departments in fiscal year 2024 as well as for “general government and foreign operations” and the Internal Revenue Service, The Hill reported.
“This FY24 appropriations legislation is a serious commitment to strengthening our national defense by moving the Pentagon toward a focus on its core mission while expanding support for our brave men and women who serve in uniform,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a written statement early Thursday.
However, some of Johnson’s Republican colleagues expressed strong opposition to the legislation.
“Less than 24 hrs to review – the #SwampOmnibus – 1000+ pages & $1.2 Trillion – busts spending caps to fund the WHO, woke DOD, a weaponized FBI new headq, & 100% fails to stop Progressive Democrats’ mass releases of criminals across our borders,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote Thursday in a post on X.
“No Republican should vote for it,” Roy added.
Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., similarly expressed dissatisfaction with the spending package, which Congress must pass by midnight Friday to prevent a partial shutdown of the government.
“Well, the D.C. cartel is at it again. They released a $1.2 trillion minibus at 2:32 a.m. this morning, giving us somewhere in the neighborhood of about 48 hours to review it before they’re going to bring it up for a vote,” Rosendale said in a video he shared on X.
“It’s chock-full of additional pet projects and earmarks as we see these things time and time again and we’re going to be asked to suspend the rules and pass it,” the Montana Republican said.
“Again, I will fight to hold the line against the spending that this apparatus has created over the last several decades,” he said.
In a post on X Thursday afternoon, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., used a derogatory term for Democrats and Republicans who act together against the public interest, writing: “The Uniparty’s $1.2 trillion minibus would use taxpayer dollars to fund benefits for illegal aliens, late-term abortions, and DEI initiatives across the nation.”
“It is insulting to hardworking Americans and the issues that matter to them,” Biggs added.
David Ditch, senior policy analyst in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation, posted a lengthy thread on X highlighting “gimmicks, earmarks, and a few wins” in the spending package. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“A way for Congress to get around spending caps is ‘rescissions,’ or cuts to previously enacted spending. Every dollar ‘cut’ makes room for more spending,” Ditch wrote. “For instance, this ‘rescission’ is an annual fake cut; the money wouldn’t have been spent.”
Further down the thread, Ditch cited two Senate Democrats from Rhode Island:
Senators [Jack] Reed and [Sheldon] Whitehouse get a $1.8 million earmark for Women & Infants Hospital. That sounds innocent unless you know that they’re an abortion provider.
Dollars are fungible, and federal support helps keep the abortion facility open.
Heritage Action for America, the grassroots arm of The Heritage Foundation, issued a lengthy press release at 6 p.m. Thursday detailing what’s wrong with the spending bill and identifying it as a key “no” vote on the organization’s legislative scorecard.
The legislative process and the spending package are “indistinguishable from typical Swamp behavior that’s taken our economy and country to the brink of disaster,” Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts said in the release.
Roberts, also president of The Heritage Foundation, said:
In the middle of the night, Congress released the text of a $1.2 trillion, earmark-filled spending bill that bankrolls sanctuary cities, corrupt NGOs, and Biden’s open border policies. Lawmakers are using arbitrary deadlines and shutdown politics to extort the American people and force lawmakers to vote for a bill they don’t have time to read. The text may have been dropped under the cover of darkness, but nothing can hide the bill’s unbelievable abuse of taxpayer dollars and continuation of Biden’s dangerous border crisis.
Conservatives were told that the days of omnibus spending bills shrouded in secrecy were over. But this process and the bill it produced are indistinguishable from typical Swamp behavior that’s taken our economy and country to the brink of disaster. If we want to change Washington, we have to start by breaking this cycle and rejecting this indefensible bill.
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