The House of Representatives avoided a government shutdown
Thursday night, but Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., says it came at the cost of
letting the outgoing Senate Democratic majority have control over government
spending for nine months after they lose power, and he says Republicans
relinquished their strongest weapon for confronting President Obama’s
immigration actions in the new Congress.
“This was a huge surrender of the prerogatives of the
Congress to bring this administration under control, which is what the American
people clearly voted for us to do when we saw a nine-seat shift toward the
Republicans in the U.S. Senate,” McClintock said.
On Thursday night, the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives voted 219-206 to approve a $1.1 trillion spending package that
funds most of the federal government until the end of September 2015. However,
it only extends funding for the Department of Homeland Security until February.
The combination of an omnibus bill and a continuing resolution was tagged as a
“cromnibus” bill. Nearly 70 conservatives voted against the plan. Fifty votes
from Democrats put supporters over the top after heavy lobbying from
President Obama and the decision of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md.,
to back it.
McClintock said the “cromnibus” strategy never made any
sense to him. He and other conservatives preferred a short continuing
resolution into next year so Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress
could lead the way on spending.
“Instead of negotiating with the new Republican Senate that
has has the imprimatur of approval of the American people, they decided they’d
get a better deal, I don’t know why, by negotiating with Harry Reid, (outgoing
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman) Barbara Mikulski and the
Democratic Senate that voters just thoroughly repudiated,” said McClintock, who
argued those rejected leaders have largely handcuffed Republicans for most of
2015.
“So now, the cold, dead hand of Harry Reid and the
Democratic Senate will be steering the new Republican Congress’ spending
priorities for the first nine months of the new Republican Congress,” he said.
According to McClintock, the rationale for the “cromnibus”
strategy offered to him by GOP leaders was that they didn’t want “fiscal
distractions” interfering with policy priorities like approving the
Keystone XL Pipeline in January.
“First of all, these are not fiscal distractions,” he said.
“This is the entire spending plan of the United States government. There’s
nothing more fundamental than that. Secondly, there’s no reason why you
couldn’t take up issues like Keystone at the same time.”
Leadership has argued that passing all funding for the rest
of the fiscal year except for the Department of Homeland Security will allow
Republicans to fight tooth and nail against what they see as Obama’s
unconstitutional amnesty afforded to some five million people in the country
illegally. McClintock said that’s unlikely to work, either.
“The problem is, Homeland Security funds the entire border
security programs such as it is. That’s a hostage we’re not going to shoot, so
why would we want to choose a strategy that would require us to shoot a hostage
that we’re not going to shoot?” he asked, arguing that this approach only makes
it harder to thwart Obama’s actions.
“It makes no sense,” McClintock said. “Had we maintained the
choice over all of the budget, we would have been in a much stronger bargaining
position. I think this has greatly weakened out bargaining position going into
that discussion in February.”
The
congressman said the Republican approach should have been a simple continuing
resolution lasting only a few weeks until the Republican majority takes hold in
the Senate.
“The better way to go was simply to adopt a three- or
four-week continuing resolution to keep the government open, put all the
appropriations questions into the new Senate that’s just been freshly approved
by voters so that their priorities can be accurately reflected in the spending
plan that will be locked in until October 1 of next year,” McClintock said.
Some of the greatest drama in the House played out during the
vote for the rule allowing debate on the spending package. Normally just a
formality, the vote dragged on as GOP leaders lobbied members to vote for the
rule. The procedural hurdle was cleared after Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich.,
switched his vote and Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., finally cast his ballot
with leadership.
However, Stutzman later claimed he supported the rule only
after leadership vowed to pull the “cromnibus” and put forward a simple
short-term continuing resolution. The congressman alleges leaders reneged on
that promise once Obama supported the plan and leadership concluded it could
get the votes for passage from Democrats.
McClintock said he knows nothing about that squabble, but he
does admit to supporting the rule, noting his general approach is to support
rules to protect the power of the majority to set the agenda. But Thursday’s
vote is one he’d like to have back.
“In
retrospect, I think the bill raised such important fiscal and constitutional
issues that it shouldn’t have been brought to the floor in its current form,”
he said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Every now and then, I make a bad vote.
That was a bad vote, and I regret it.”
Several conservative members were seething over the tactics
used by House Speaker John Boehner and his leadership team to get the bill
passed and made it clear they’d prefer that he wasn’t speaker in the
next Congress. McClintock is not happy with leadership, but he said making a
change is easier said than done.
“The problem with replacing John Boehner as speaker is you
have to have a replacement that is competent to take that role,” he said. “The
problem is the people who were competent to replace Boehner were not willing to
do so, and the people willing to replace Boehner were not competent to do so.”
The congressman noted that no one inside the House GOP
Conference challenged Boehner for the post last month.
McClintock believes any challenge to Boehner going forward should
play out in the conference and not on the House floor during the vote for speaker
of the House next month.
Source: http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/cold-dead-hand-of-reid-steers-congress-in-2015/ Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Rep. Tom
McClintock, R-Calif.:
Comments
What is worse if the Dodd-Frank
revision that puts us on the hook to bail out derivative losses by the Big
Banks to accommodate the G-20 suicide pact.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party
Leader
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