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Spending Now 13.7 Percent Higher Than During Obama’s Last Year

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A strong economy is one key to debt reduction, but spending restraint is a necessary component that must be vigorously pursued.”

Those are the words of the GOP platform adopted at the 2016 convention. Nearly three years later, following two years of GOP trifecta control of the House, Senate, and White House, spending for the first six months of this fiscal year is 13.7 percent higher than during Obama’s final year. Despite the best job market in decades, the debt under GOP control has surged even higher than under Obama, putting to rest the notion that a good economy can grow its way out of a spending binge this deep. Excessive government spending inhibits economic growth.

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its monthly budget review for March, which also tallied the spending and debt figures for the first half of fiscal year 2019. Despite a one percent increase in revenue, the deficit for just the first six months of this fiscal year is $693 billion, $94 billion more than this time last year. That is because spending has increased by five percent over last year.

In just the first half of the year, our government has spent $2.2 trillion, 13.7 percent more than the first half of FY 2016, the final year of Obama’s presidency, when Republicans were railing against the unconscionable rise in debt. The gross national debt is now $2.6 trillion higher than when the GOP drafted its new platform. More importantly, roughly 86 percent of that $2.6 trillion increase is composed of the public debt, not the so-called intra-governmental debt from Social Security (the money we “owe ourselves”).

While corporate tax revenue was down due to the tax cuts, payroll tax revenue rose by 4.7 percent, which more than offset than loss of revenue from corporate and individual income taxes. This lends credence to the notion that the tax cuts helped fuel job gains, resulting in higher payroll tax revenue, even as income tax rates dropped. Lower taxes and more people working should be a recipe for debt reduction. But spending has increased at such a quick pace that even record revenue fails to even slow down the deficit.

The fastest-growing expenditure is ironically the interest on the debt itself, which rose 13 percent over this time last year.

The increase in interest and debt might also be the culprit behind the relatively modest economic gains compared to the roaring job market. GDP growth seems to be hovering just below three percent and is not climbing to four percent. There are also numerous signs that the economy is slowing, as the Federal Reserve is warning.

As interest rates are pushed higher, more private money is used to purchase higher-interest Treasury securities rather than invest in capital goods, such as factories and plants. The more government is desperate to service this debt, the more it will drive up interest rates, which in turn will divert and misallocate more investors into Treasury bonds. This further makes interest on the debt even more expensive, constantly reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle of debt and higher rates.

In absolutely dollars, $2.2 trillion is the most we’ve ever spent for the first six months of a fiscal year, and adjusted for inflation, it is roughly on par with what we spent during the first six months of 2009. That was at the pit of the Great Recession and included Obama’s massive spending binge, unemployment benefits, and a surge in welfare spending. It’s truly unprecedented to be racking up such high levels of spending and debt during a period of 3.8 percent unemployment.

The unemployment rate has been below four percent for a full year and below five percent for three years. The only comparable periods of such low unemployment were during the late 1990s and late 1960s. During the late 1960s, there were years of growth over six percent. Likewise, from 1997 to 2000, our economy experienced four percent growth or higher during four consecutive years. We have not experienced four percent growth since 2000 or three percent growth for a full calendar year since 2005, although we just barely missed it in 2018.

Clearly, the misallocation of resources to service debt and the market distortions inherent in the government programs supported by that debt serve as an albatross of dead weight on our economy. It’s why it is likely we will never experience four percent annual growth so long as the debt and market distortions remain in place. We no longer have a free market economy, even during periods of relative prosperity.

In 2016, the Republican platform stated, “Our national debt is a burden on our economy and families” and that Obama’s spending binge “has placed a significant burden on future generations.” It promised to “impose firm caps on future debt, accelerate the repayment of the trillions we now owe in order to reaffirm our principles of responsible and limited government, and remove the burdens we are placing on future generations.”

Truer words never spoken. Falser actions never taken. (For more from the author of “Spending Now 13.7 Percent Higher Than During Obama’s Last Year” HERE)

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The Bipartisan Spending Binge Is Now Worse Than Under Bush and Obama

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We’re now $22 trillion in debt, yet despite all that red ink, the Mexican cartels have control of our border and we’re not one bit closer to spending money on our own security. We’ve gone into deep debt for everything except the core function of the federal government.

It feels like it was yesterday when I was watching the news as a kid with my parents in 1995, listening to Newt Gingrich, during the infamous shutdown fight, warn about the dire consequences of crossing the $5 trillion debt milestone. It feels like it was yesterday when I was writing press releases for candidates in “the year of the Tea Party” on how Obama and the Pelosi Congress took the debt to $14 trillion in such a short period of time. Now, over eight years into varying degrees of GOP control of Congress and the White House, we have crossed the $22 trillion mark, expanding the debt more rapidly than at any time in our history. Whereas the debt exploded by $5 trillion during Bush’s eight-year tenure, a shocking figure at the time, it has now increased $8 trillion just since Republicans controlled the House in 2011 and by $4 trillion over the past four years, since they controlled at least two of the three political organs of government.

Now, the only question Republicans have is how many pennies of border security they will fight for, while refusing to challenge any of the nonessential and even harmful programs of the federal government. The GOP platform on debt and spending is a lie from top to bottom, as Republicans plan to pass more budget bills allowing us to blow through the budget caps without any effort to systemically reform the way we budget.

Now that Republicans are planning to cave on border funding, can they at least force a confrontation with Democrats over spending levels for functions of government that are nowhere near as important as border security? Thus, departments like HUD, which were able to completely shut down for a month with nobody noticing, will continue to enjoy record spending. We will continue to provide security for Kabul and Baghdad with the beefed-up military budget since last year’s budget deal, but no funding for our border or meaningful use of the military to protect our own sovereignty from the daily incursions by the most brutal cartels on earth.

Why even have a Republican Party any more?

Even more indefensible, unlike during the end of Bush’s years and the beginning of Obama’s tenure, when we first began accruing trillion-dollar annual deficits, we are not facing a deep recession. In fact, we are enjoying the most robust period of job growth since the late 1990s, and revenue is at a record high baseline.

Let it be known for all of time that dire predictions of revenue slumping as a result of the tax cuts were fake news. The entirety of the current deficit problem is due to increased spending. According to the latest monthly report released by the Treasury Department yesterday, spending was up 9.6 percent for the first three months of fiscal year 2019 relative to the first three months of FY 2018. What about revenues? They actually rose slightly by 0.2 percent, despite some declines in certain revenue categories. This is an important statistic, because it is the first clean metric we have comparing a period of time with the tax cuts in full implementation to a period before the tax cuts.

Moreover, some of the increased tax revenue from more payroll taxes likely would not have occurred without the job creation spawned by the tax cuts. If you isolate the revenue tallies for individual and corporate taxes, the government obviously did lose some revenue in certain categories, but it was made up by a $15 billion increase in payroll tax revenue (FICA, Social Security taxes), in addition to increased revenue from excise taxes.

The annual deficit after just three months stood at $319 trillion, well on pace to smash the trillion-dollar deficit mark for the first time in a booming economy.

Thus, this bipartisan era of debt is worse than anything we’ve seen this generation, and it is all happening with record revenue and a booming economy – with no world war consuming our economy and budget.

Thanks to Republican-approved budget deals, for the first three months of the fiscal year, outlays for HHS are up 12.5 percent, outlays for the Department of Education spiked 23 percent, and outlays for the Department of Commerce have doubled! Meanwhile, outlays on Homeland Security have actually been down by 30 percent because of less disaster spending under FEMA than last year. But it’s not like we went on a spending binge for Border Patrol and ICE. Outlays on military spending are up 8.45 percent, but again, what is the purpose of the military if we use it everywhere else in the world except against those who most directly harm us at our own border?

All of this spending is creating a crisis with interest payments on the debt. Net interest payments for the first quarter are up to $100 billion. That is an annualized pace of $400 billion, almost twice the level it has been in recent years. And this is just the beginning.

What is driving the most debt? The issue where Republicans now agree with Democrats: socialized medicine. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is now bashing the Freedom Caucus for opposing the key element of Obamacare responsible for driving up the cost of insurance, thereby generating the massive spending and the monopoly created by the health care industry.

Health care is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Federal spending on health care (not including state expenditures) is projected to be $17 trillion over the next 10 years, dwarfing the cost of Social Security and the military. By 2047, health care spending will be about 25 percent greater than the insolvent and crushing cost of Social Security. As such, health care in itself is the largest driver of the other great crisis, as noted: the mushrooming cost of the interest on the debt itself. Health care spending alone will be greater than all the revenue from payroll taxes and corporate income taxes combined and almost as large as individual income tax revenue.

This is all going to the creation of a monopoly in a circuitous death spiral of price inflation and increased government spending. It’s no mystery why our national expenditures on health care have popped from $27 billion in 1960 to over $3.3 trillion today. Assuming health care would rise at the same rate as the rest of the economy, that number would be under $250 billion today. If we flushed $1.6 trillion down the toilet every year, we’d come out with a better result because we’d just waste money. Now, we are taking that wasted money and artificially inflating the cost of health care to the point that nobody can afford it without government continuing the death spiral of spending, monopolizing, and price inflation.

Yet Republicans have acquiesced to every degree of this baseline and are only debating how much more socialized medicine they will countenance while fake-fighting the rest. Then they will say we have to agree to the new socialized medicine in order to fight the next plan. Rinse and repeat.

Now, instead of looking to cut spending elsewhere, Republican senators met with Ivanka Trump to see how they can create a new entitlement of paid family leave like they have in Europe, but of course without adding to the deficit and distorting our job market! They will find a “conservative way” to agree to Democrats.

With the deficits for FY 2019 skyrocketing just as much as the illegal immigration numbers, at some point conservatives need to asses their rate of return on the Republican Party.

All of this spending is creating a crisis with interest payments on the debt. Net interest payments for the first quarter are up to $100 billion. That is an annualized pace of $400 billion, almost twice the level it has been in recent years. And this is just the beginning.

What is driving the most debt? The issue where Republicans now agree with Democrats: socialized medicine. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is now bashing the Freedom Caucus for opposing the key element of Obamacare responsible for driving up the cost of insurance, thereby generating the massive spending and the monopoly created by the health care industry.

Health care is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Federal spending on health care (not including state expenditures) is projected to be $17 trillion over the next 10 years, dwarfing the cost of Social Security and the military. By 2047, health care spending will be about 25 percent greater than the insolvent and crushing cost of Social Security. As such, health care in itself is the largest driver of the other great crisis, as noted: the mushrooming cost of the interest on the debt itself. Health care spending alone will be greater than all the revenue from payroll taxes and corporate income taxes combined and almost as large as individual income tax revenue.

This is all going to the creation of a monopoly in a circuitous death spiral of price inflation and increased government spending. It’s no mystery why our national expenditures on health care have popped from $27 billion in 1960 to over $3.3 trillion today. Assuming health care would rise at the same rate as the rest of the economy, that number would be under $250 billion today. If we flushed $1.6 trillion down the toilet every year, we’d come out with a better result because we’d just waste money. Now, we are taking that wasted money and artificially inflating the cost of health care to the point that nobody can afford it without government continuing the death spiral of spending, monopolizing, and price inflation.

Yet Republicans have acquiesced to every degree of this baseline and are only debating how much more socialized medicine they will countenance while fake-fighting the rest. Then they will say we have to agree to the new socialized medicine in order to fight the next plan. Rinse and repeat.

Now, instead of looking to cut spending elsewhere, Republican senators met with Ivanka Trump to see how they can create a new entitlement of paid family leave like they have in Europe, but of course without adding to the deficit and distorting our job market! They will find a “conservative way” to agree to Democrats.

With the deficits for FY 2019 skyrocketing just as much as the illegal immigration numbers, at some point conservatives need to asses their rate of return on the Republican Party. (For more from the author of “The Bipartisan Spending Binge Is Now Worse Than Under Bush and Obama” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

The Home Stretch: Big Numbers to Know From the Week in Politics

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The weekend’s on tap. In spite of the adjoining photograph, we’ve already had our say on Omarosa. Same with John Brennan (here’s one more take, for your consideration). Now, off we go…

[40,000] – The approximate number of employees at one firm who’ve now received bonuses, thanks to the GOP tax reform law. Every Congressional Democrat opposed the bill — with party leaders sneering at the “crumbs” from which workers are benefiting and rolling their eyes at exceptionally robust employment figures. Some politicians may not be impressed by any of this, but I’d bet most of these folks are:

[26] – As of yesterday, two more than two dozen Circuit Court judges have now been confirmed during the Trump era, far outpacing other recent presidents’ clips on this important front. We wrote about these developments earlier today, but as a follow-on, please enjoy this latest expression of impotent shouting from a top former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign:

. . .

[Two] – That’s how many weeks it took after the Supreme Court handed down its 7-2 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision for Colorado’s Grand Wizards of Right Thinking (known to some as the “Civil Rights Commission”) to issue another authoritarian decree against the exact same small business. The High Court rebuked the commission for its heavy-handed approach to compelled speech, which was laden with anti-Christian animus. Undeterred — or even defiant and resolute to prove the Court’s point — these unaccountable, miniature autocrats have this time sided with an obvious troll, prompting yet another lawsuit. (Read more from “The Home Stretch: Big Numbers to Know From the Week in Politics” HERE)

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List: These 32 Senators Voted to Shut Down the Government Before Christmas

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The Senate approved a short-term spending plan to keep the government open Thursday but not without nearly a third of the chamber dissenting for various reasons.

The funding bill, called a continuing resolution, keeps the government open through mid-January.

The legislation needed at least 60 votes and passed by 66 votes, with 32 nays and two senators not voting. That’s double the 14 Democrats who dissented against the temporary spending bill two weeks ago.

Most of the nay votes were from Democrats who are desperate to deal with immigration issues.

During a caucus meeting Thursday, Democratic Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois criticized Schumer for not caring about the future of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals, and for “throwing them under the bus,” The Washington Post reports.

Schumer, who voted no on the spending bill, issued an ultimatum to the GOP that his party would not vote for anything more than a short term bill until Congress addresses immigration and wider domestic spending issues.

He also mentioned that the $81 billion emergency spending bill the House passed Thursday would not go forward until the Senate addressed other issues.

“We’re not going to allow things like disaster relief to go forward without discussing some of these other issues we care about,” Schumer said. “We have to solve these issues together.”

Two Republican senators — Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joined the dissenting votes for the spending bill.

The spending bill again waived rules that would have mandated steep cuts to Medicare and other entitlement programs, which Paul didn’t want to see happen.

“Do federal deficits matter?” Paul asked.

Here are all the “nay” votes:

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Nay

Michael Bennet (D-CO), Nay

Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Nay

Cory Booker (D-NJ), Nay

Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Nay

Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Nay

Ben Cardin (D-MD), Nay

Bob Casey (D-PA), Nay

Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Nay

Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Nay

Dick Durbin (D-IL), Nay

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Nay

Al Franken (D-MN), Nay

Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY), Nay

Kamala Harris (D-CA), Nay

Maise Hirono (D-HI), Nay

Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Nay

Mike Lee (R-UT), Nay

Ed Markey (D-MA), Nay

Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Nay

Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Nay

Chris Murphy (D-CT), Nay

Patty Murray (D-WA), Nay

Rand Paul (R-KY), Nay

Jack Reed (D-RI), Nay

Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Nay

Brian Schatz (D-HI), Nay

Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Nay

Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Nay

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Nay

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Nay

Ron Wyden (D-OR), Nay

(For more from the author of “List: These 32 Senators Voted to Shut Down the Government Before Christmas” please click HERE)

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Report: Federal Government Blows $247 Billion on ‘Wasteful and Inefficient Spending’

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The federal government has wasted at least $247 billion in domestic and overseas spending, says a new report. In his second annual “Federal Fumbles” report, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) highlighted 100 examples of “wasteful and inefficient spending” and the threat of an almost $20 trillion national debt.

The federal government, which announced a deficit of over $500 billion in the 2016 fiscal year, spent $223 billion on interest payments alone in 2015. Even if the nation had a $50 billion budget surplus, “it would still take 460 years to pay off our national debt,” according to Lankford’s report.

In tracking down examples of federal wastefulness, “we are really dealing with four different main areas,” the senator explained in the press conference releasing the report. The areas are “grants that need oversight, regulations and regulators that need oversight, agency bureaucracy and inefficiency, and then a lack of coordination between agencies.”

Federal Misspending

Below are several examples of the report’s highlights of federal misspending:

$180,000 has been spent on an outside group’s effort to tag and count sea ducks.

Nearly $200,000 to hire a historian for three years for the Smithsonian to examine the history of American beer brewing

$18 million to help fund organic farms. Organic farms are part of a $39 billion industry as of 2014.

In 2014, the Federal Bureau of Prisons spent $143 million more providing health care to prisoners than it would have if it had followed the practices of other agencies, by paying contractors the reimbursement rates mandated by Medicare. As the report notes, while taking care of prisoners may be innately more expensive than health care provided by other agencies, the rates charged at some locations, as found by the Government Accountability Office, are much higher than necessary.

The State Department spent one million dollars to bring movie producers and others from Jordan, Turkey and other nations to study American filmmakers and then use their new skills to benefit other countries.

More than $500,000 went to digging up graves and religious sites to study the transition of churches in the late seventh through 12th centuries. In Iceland.

In Afghanistan, a $48.7 million contract from the U.S. Air Force was meant to build a new headquarters for the Afghan Ministry of Defense. Due for completion in 2010, the project ran five years late and $106 million over-budget.

The report also highlighted improvements since the first “Fumbles” report was issued. Among other successes, a tax credit is being phased out, and the Social Security Administration has modified processes that could save millions in the disability fund. (For more from the author of “Report: Federal Government Blows $247 Billion on ‘Wasteful and Inefficient Spending'” please click HERE)

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These State Pensions Are Most Likely to Enforce Benefit Cuts

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A new research note from Moody’s found that State pension funds were underfunded by $1.3 trillion at the end of FY15 but was expected to grow to $1.8 trillion at the end of FY17 as pensions continue to struggle with low returns. We’ve discussed the unintended consequences of the Central Bank’s low-rate polices on pension funds multiples times (see “Pension Duration Dilemma – Why Pension Funds Are Driving The Biggest Bond Bubble In History”)…with the two most likely outcomes being benefits cuts for pensioners and/or crippling tax hikes for citizens.

Total US state aggregate adjusted net pension liabilities (ANPL) totaled $1.25 trillion, or 119% of revenue in fiscal 2015, Moody’s Investors Service says in a new report. The results, based on compliance with new GASB 68 accounting rules, set a new ANPL baseline and are poised to rise for the next two fiscal years as market returns fall below annual targets.

“The median return for public pension plans in FY 2016 was 0.52% compared to an average assumed investment return of 7.5%,” Moody’s Vice President — Senior Credit Officer Marcia Van Wagner says. “We project that aggregate state ANPL will grow to $1.75 trillion in FY 2017 audits.”

The states with the highest pension burdens — measured as the largest three-year average ANPL as a percent of state governmental revenue — were consistent with previous years. Illinois topped the list with pension liabilities at 280% of total governmental revenue, followed by Connecticut (Aa3 negative) at 209%, Alaska (Aa2 negative) at 179%, Kentucky at 162%, and New Jersey at 157%.

Given that pretty much every state pension is now underfunded, Moody’s introduced a new metric which they referred to as the “Tread Water” benchmark. The largest underfunded plans in Kentucky, Illinois and New Jersey would require an incremental 7 – 7.5% of annual state revenue for contributions in order to simply stop unfunded liabilities from growing further. (Read more from “These State Pensions Are Most Likely to Enforce Benefit Cuts” HERE)

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3 Reasons New Flint Spending Will Make Things Worse

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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:

1. It uses federal tax dollars for something that should be appropriated at the state level.

2. It authorizes federal dollars at a time when the nation is nearly $20 trillion in debt.

3. 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. (For more from the author of “3 Reasons New Flint Spending Will Make Things Worse” please click HERE)

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House Conservatives Resort to Spending Plan B to Avoid Government Shutdown

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When Congress returns to Capitol Hill on Monday to hammer out a stopgap spending measure, House conservatives plan to introduce a spending safety valve that would eliminate the possibility of a government shutdown.

Congress has struggled for months to reach a spending agreement.

As the end of the fiscal year approaches and government’s spending authority expires Oct. 1, lawmakers have opted to pass a temporary funding extension. Known as a continuing resolution, that measure will extend spending authority into December and requires Congress to revisit the issue shortly before Christmas.

Now, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., a founding member of the caucus, say they will introduce an amendment to that short-term spending bill.

The amendment would trigger an automatic, 40-day extension of government funding if Congress fails to pass a long-term spending bill in December, during a lame-duck session between the Nov. 8 election and the beginning of the new Congress in January.

“I’m trying to give as much flexibility [as possible] to our leadership and appropriators, while at the same time realizing that a potential [government] shutdown should not be the focus of any conversation,” Meadows told The Daily Signal.

“This 40-day extension amendment would allow us to negotiate in good faith,” he said.

The Freedom Caucus considers itself a group of the House’s most conservative members. The new proposal is part of conservatives’ effort to be part of a process that already is moving quickly in the Senate.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced the Senate version of that legislation Thursday, over complaints from some in his party that it doesn’t include conservative policy proposals.

“There have been broad requests for a clean continuing resolution,” McConnell said, referring to the fact that the measure has no policy riders tacked on to draw votes. “So that’s what I’ve just offered. It’s the result of many, many hours of bipartisan work across the aisle.”

McConnell’s unwillingness to fight in the Senate puts conservatives at an early disadvantage in the House, Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal on Friday:

Unfortunately, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is caving in to this irresponsible behavior by surrendering important conservative policies while allowing liberal interest riders to be attached to government funding.

The view of Flores, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the House’s largest GOP caucus, carries weight. Some of his fellow House Republicans complain that they didn’t have a say in negotiations.

Earlier in September, before the party reached a unified agreement on spending levels, McConnell announced he was working with the White House and Senate Democrats to reach a deal.

A temporary fix, the Senate measure extends federal funding at the current $1.07 trillion level until Dec. 9. That timetable sets up another fight over spending during the lame-duck session after the election.

The Senate’s legislation also includes relief funds for victims of the flooding that battered Louisiana in August and money to combat the Zika virus that has spread in the South all summer.

It does not contain a provision that would keep money meant to fight the Zika virus from flowing to the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Democrats torpedoed three earlier Zika bills that contained the prohibition.

But Democrats still weren’t satisfied.

Democrats want Republicans to include funds to address the Flint water crisis in the stopgap spending bill. Their request comes months after President Barack Obama publicly drank a glass of water in May to reassure residents of the Michigan town that the public health crisis was over.

Raising the possibility of a government shutdown for lack of a budget deal to fund the government, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, called on her colleagues “to vote against” the legislation because it didn’t contain money for Flint.

Conservatives weren’t pleased either.

The Senate’s continuing resolution doesn’t contain any language barring the White House from relinquishing U.S. control of ICANN, the nonprofit that functions as the directory of the internet by curating website domain names.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he was “profoundly disappointed” in McConnell’s final spending bill. The Texas senator had quarterbacked an effort to stop the transfer of ICANN to an international body for more than a month.

The Senate recessed after introduction of the spending measure and it’s not clear when, or if, it will pass.

That could be to the benefit of Democrats. If the process drags on, Republican senators considered vulnerable on Election Day are kept on Capitol Hill and off the campaign trail.

“I would’ve thought we’d be done by now,” a senior GOP aide told The Daily Signal. “But the Senate has just stalled and stalled. From my perspective in the House, it looks like [the Democrats] are trying to shut down the government.”

By law spending bills must originate in the House, but House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., appears to be waiting on the Senate to send over its version of the continuing resolution. After months of infighting among House members, Ryan predicted a vote on the Senate measure would be “low drama.”

House factions have clashed all year over how to fund the government, with conservatives conceding on every point.

They originally opposed any bill that exceeded the $1.04 trillion spending limits established in the 2011 Budget Control Act and allowed lawmakers to move major legislation during the lame-duck session.

Conservatives fear the lame duck because it provides an opportunity for outgoing—and thus unaccountable—members of Congress to legislate.

Recently, however, Flores and several members of the House Freedom Caucus told GOP leadership that they could concede on both points in exchange for additional screening for Syrian refugees and a stop to the ICANN transition.

Though conservatives said those “sweeteners” would be enough to help them swallow a spending bill they loathe, Democrats decried both as “poison pills.” Neither made the cut in the Senate bill.

“That doesn’t really give conservatives hope for anything,” a second GOP aide told The Daily Signal. “And if we’re not getting anything now, how are we going to get anything better in the lame duck?”

Unable to add anything to the legislation so far, conservatives remain dissatisfied. If that doesn’t change, Republican leadership likely will have to seek Democrat votes to pass the short-term spending measure out of the House. (For more from the author of “House Conservatives Resort to Spending Plan B to Avoid Government Shutdown” please click HERE)

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One Lawmaker’s Plan to Rein in Spending and Assert Conservative Principles

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Before lawmakers in the House could read the Senate’s plan to fund the government after the end of the month, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, was dismissing the measure out of hand, calling it “unconstitutional.”

Congress is trying to hammer out a compromise to extend federal funding before the government’s annual spending authority expires Oct. 1. But King complained that GOP leadership, in the process, is furthering President Barack Obama’s executive actions to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

The Iowa Republican has drafted an alternative spending package. And although he admits his plan isn’t likely to pass, he says it provides a conservative benchmark that contrasts with the short-term spending solution pushed by GOP leadership in both the House and Senate.

“They’re asking us to vote for an appropriations bill that funds clearly unconstitutional acts,” King told The Daily Signal, citing Obama’s move to exempt the children of illegal immigrants from deportation. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., predicted Thursday morning that House passage of the Senate’s continuing resolution would “be low drama.”

Shortly afterward, King predicted that Senate Republicans’ package could not pass the House without Democrats’ support.

“A greater percentage of Democrats will vote for this [short-term spending measure] than the percentage of Republicans in the House,” King said. “I think that’s true, and to me that says there’s not a reason to hold back and put an alternative down.”

That alternative, which King said he would introduce Friday, is further to the right than anything proposed previously, even by the conservative House Freedom Caucus and the much larger Republican Study Committee.

His plan is meant to serve as a “benchmark,” King said, to show what’s possible if Republicans keep both chambers of Congress and retake the White House in the Nov. 8 elections.

It contrasts with the Senate measure, unveiled Thursday, which locks in spending at the current $1.07 trillion level until Dec. 9 and doesn’t include any of the policy riders conservatives have pushed. The Dec. 9 expiration date would mean that defeated or retiring lawmakers, who don’t leave until January, would vote on a new measure to continue to fund the government.

On the fiscal front, the King plan adopts a spending position that even conservatives abandoned as politically impractical this year. It would lock in a government spending level of $1.04 trillion, nearly a $30 billion reduction from the current level.

The plan, some of which reads like a carbon copy of the Republican Party’s 2016 platform, calls for repealing 14 of Obama’s marquee accomplishments.

King proposes to defund Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank regulation of the financial industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. He calls for barring resettlement of refugees in the U.S., halting implementation of the nuclear deal with Iran, and stopping the transfer of internet regulation from a U.S. agency to a global body.

The King plan also would halt funds for executive enforcement of the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage and the Department of Education’s transgender bathroom directive to schools that receive federal funds. It would block federal funding of Planned Parenthood and implementation of the EPA’s Waters of the United States regulation.

King also would stop new regulations from the Labor Department, defunding implementation of new overtime rules and fiduciary rules, which govern private retirement investment.

And it would take aim at the Obama administration’s executive orders relaxing immigration enforcement and implementation of the Paris accords on climate change.

King admits the “odds of succeeding aren’t good” for his grab bag of conservative priorities. But that’s not the goal, he told The Daily Signal:

It puts a marker down that says to the negotiators that there are a core of people here who actually believe in our platform and our conservative principles, and we’re just not willing to walk away without expressing them.

(For more from the author of “One Lawmaker’s Plan to Rein in Spending and Assert Conservative Principles” please click HERE)

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House, Senate Republicans Jockey to Advance Short-Term Spending Measure

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The chairman of the largest conservative caucus in Congress is pushing House Republicans to pass a stopgap spending package before the Senate can finish work on its version.

The government’s authority to spend money expires at the end of the fiscal year, Oct. 1. And Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is racing ahead on the upper chamber’s version of the spending package before that deadline.

But the House is stuck in neutral.

Pointing to that inactivity, Republican Study Committee Chairman Bill Flores, R-Texas, introduced a continuing resolution that would put federal spending on autopilot until Dec. 9, advance a Zika aid package, and fully fund veterans affairs and military infrastructure programs.

“What our CR does is try to advance a responsible spending program for the federal government that has a few key conservative riders and has no leftist riders on it,” Flores told The Daily Signal, referring to the short-term budget measure and “policy riders” that lawmakers often attach to spending bills.

Those policy provisions would require tougher vetting for refugees who are “from areas dominated by radical Islamic terrorists.”

It also would halt the White House plan to relinquish control of ICANN, the global nonprofit that functions as the phonebook of the internet by curating website domain names. Flores described the administration’s move as “Obama’s internet giveaway.”

The package is more compromise than conservative wish list, Flores admits. Since the beginning of the year, RSC has spearheaded the effort to reduce spending and avoid legislating during a lame-duck session of Congress—the period after the election but before the next Congress convenes.

Though the plan concedes both priorities, Flores said it’s the best possibility in the current political climate.

“Look, I don’t like [continuing resolutions].” Flores said. “I don’t think it’s a responsible way to fund the government. However, when you get put in a position where the government is going to be held hostage—particularly troop pay—then we’ve got to do this in a responsible manner.”

The Texas representative blames McConnell, the Senate majority leader, for caving to Democrats and creating the current debacle.

Before House Republicans could agree on a unified position on spending, McConnell announced he would negotiate the details of a continuing resolution with Senate Democrats and the White House.

Though by law spending bills must originate in the House, the Senate has repurposed a bill from the lower chamber as a “legislative shell.” But while that procedure gave the upper chamber a head start, it still hasn’t been able to agree on what will be in the final package.

Democrats insist they won’t vote for any bill that includes conservative policy riders that they call “poison pills.” And Flores said he is worried that Senate Republicans, eager to skip Washington for the campaign trail, are willing to oblige.

“The way Mitch McConnell has conducted these negotiations,” Flores said, “we were afraid that too many conservative priorities would be thrown into the ditch and liberal priorities would be attached.”

McConnell’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

The spending plan also excludes some Democrat priorities. Flores said it would prevent revival of the Export-Import Bank, stop renewable energy initiatives, and prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving any funds to fight the Zika virus.

The Zika issue has caused consternation among conservatives, who don’t want money appropriated to fight the virus to be used by Planned Parenthood. It’s not clear that the absence of an earmark alone is enough to stop money from flowing to the nation’s largest abortion provider, though.

The Flores proposal has attracted backing from the more conservative corners of Congress. Tuesday night, several members of the House Freedom Caucus expressed initial support for the Flores bill and frustration at the current situation.

“We want regular order. Speaker [Paul] Ryan talked about regular order. Well, by golly, let’s have regular order,” said Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., before launching into an explanation of how the House is supposed to pass spending bills before the Senate.

“But they don’t want to do regular order,” Duncan said. “They want to work out all the differences in the front end, then drop this big bill in front of us and say this is all you have a chance to vote on.”

Flores said he has pitched the idea to leadership. But when asked by The Daily Signal, a Ryan aide would say only: “House Republicans continue to work with our Senate colleagues on a continuing resolution.”

The plan didn’t come up during a Republican conference Wednesday morning, however, a source inside the closed-door meeting told The Daily Signal. (For more from the author of “House, Senate Republicans Jockey to Advance Short-Term Spending Measure” please click HERE)

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