Liberal lawmakers held a liberal spending bill hostage this week until the Republican-controlled Congress agreed to even more big government priorities.
Here’s what happened: For the past few weeks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., worked with Democrats to propose a 10-week government funding bill, commonly referred to as a continuing resolution.
That bill failed to include countless conservative priorities. It failed to keep spending levels within the reasonable levels set by the Budget Control Act. It failed to protect life by opening the door for more taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood. And it failed to do anything positive through the addition of conservative policy riders like stopping the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers transfer in the interest of protecting internet freedom, requiring a more stringent vetting process for refugees, or blocking the Labor Department’s new overtime rule.
On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his fellow Senate Democrats defeated a key procedural vote on this continuing resolution because it was not liberal enough—it did not include federal taxpayer money for the water problems in the city of Flint, Michigan.
With government funding set to expire at midnight Friday, House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed to add $170 million in federal aid for Flint’s water issues in a water infrastructure bill that was under consideration in the House.
There are three major problems with the Flint spending bill:
- It uses federal tax dollars for something that should be appropriated at the state level.
- It authorizes federal dollars at a time when the nation is nearly $20 trillion in debt.
- It sets the precedent of allowing liberal lawmakers to take bad spending bills hostage until they receive even more.
State, Not Federal Funding
State, not federal, funds and resources should be used to solve Flint’s crisis. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, made this point repeatedly when objecting to the inclusion of Flint spending in an earlier version of the Senate version of the Water Resources Development Act, speaking to The Daily Signal:
If we create a precedent that suggests any time there’s a significant problem with a locally operated utility that operates entirely intrastate, I would ask, where’s the stopping point? What’s the limit?
Unnecessarily Additions to National Debt
America’s spending is out of control. Every penny counts when our nation is nearly $20 trillion in debt. Earlier this year President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency for Flint, authorizing more than $80 million in aid to help in the cleanup effort.
There are additional funds built into the state budget to help provide for local clean up and rehabilitation. Flint has already squandered federal funding sources, as The Daily Signal reported earlier this year: “Michigan has squirreled away $386 million in an emergency fund and collected a $575 million surplus in 2015. Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has already requested $200 million in relief funds from the state legislature for Flint.”
Bad Precedent for Capitulation
After Senate Democrats blocked the liberal continuing resolution, the Republican-controlled Congress could have moved forward with a conservative bill. Instead, Republican leaders looked at Reid, Pelosi, and Obama and asked which additional bad funding provisions should be added.
If these lawmakers won’t stand up for the principles of their constituents before an election, we shouldn’t expect them to in a post-election lame-duck session, either.
