The news is filled with the clamor over the confirmation process for a certain nominee to the Supreme Court. Since this post is not about that, I won’t say more about that. Instead, we will move on to this little quote.
WASHINGTON – The House approved a spending package Wednesday that avoids a government shutdown and puts off until after November’s mid-term elections a nasty fight over funding a wall along the southern border.
President Donald Trump signaled he will sign the bill.
“We’re going to keep the government open,” he said after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in New York.
The bill, which passed on a 361-61 vote, provides funding for the departments of Defense, Education, Labor and Health and Human Services through the fiscal year that begins Monday. It also includes a short-term measure that would keep the government open through Dec. 7 while negotiations continue on unfinished budgets for other departments. (continued here)
How much spending are we talking about? $854 billion (from here). Think about that. Meanwhile, both our news media and we are consumed with politically motivated, decades old, uncorroborated, salacious gossip.
Should we be concerned instead with what truly concerns our leaders? That’s a possibility. Stephen Moore thinks so.
Even at this late hour, Donald Trump can save the Republican Congress in November — if they want to be saved. To understand how, we need to rewind back to this time last year.
That’s when Donald Trump made one of the few policy mistakes of his young presidency by failing to veto the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill. One of the Republican Congress‘ biggest mistakes was sending him that bloated appropriations bill in the first place. It has only demoralized the conservative Trump voters — the same group that hasn’t been showing up in special election races this year.
These runaway all-in-one spending bills have left a wake of trillion-dollar deficits and have only reinforced the antipathy that conservatives feel toward Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. Instead of buying votes, the lack of spending discipline by the Republican Congress has only reinforced a suspicion by voters that it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge: The budget keeps flying into the stratosphere.
In private, Mr. Trump has told his staffers that he wished he had vetoed that oinker bill last year, and he’s right to feel like he got his wallet pick-pocketed. But now he will have a chance to redeem himself. (continued here)
Because we were not paying attention, Trump will just sign the bill. Unless we squawk, Trump is not going to have the votes to sustain a veto.
It is a fact that many if not most of the Republicans in Congress are next to useless. Like the Democrats they supposedly oppose, too many of them just want to spend our money. However, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We elected these people, and we are not very good at paying attention to what they are doing. We don’t hold them accountable. Watching them spend “other people’s money” is too boring. Still, I bet you paid more in taxes than you might think. Congress gets most of its money from ordinary citizens, not the fabulously rich. The rich got rich because they pay attention to where their money is going.
Do we want to continue living in a decent and prosperous nation, or we want to leave our children enslaved and impoverished? If we want a good future for our children, then we need to discern the difference between being entertained by destructive gossip and being informed.
When we vote on November 6, we will be voting to fill seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Because the news media exists to provide an audience for advertisers, not to informed us, we all need to do a little research. That’s just the way it is.
Citizen Tom 
Good point, Tom. The Supreme Court doesn’t set the budget so it doesn’t matter who sits on the bench when we run out of money.
The Republicans strategy is to do nothing to create waves b4 the Nov election, in my opinion.
If the dems win, the.borrowings by Gov will more likely be spent to subsidize more Gov programs on the form of social benefits that do not require people to work.
At least the Trump program’s borrowings are being incurred to allow investment that create jobs in USA.
In time, workers will pay taxes whereas people who are subsidized will never pay taxes.
There is s difference of hope that a better economy and livable job wages have less damage to the USA than Obama subsidy Gov programs.
Once the economy is fixed, it will be a.better time to pay down debt.
Regards and good will blogging
@Scatterwisdom
The problem with government borrowing is that it misdirects resources and inflates our money. Useless spending stifles economic growth.
Agree. Another problem with government is legislators make decisions to stay in office instead of making prudent agreements to consider the future consequences of excessive debt.
Regards and goodwill blogging
I just read about that stealth spending bill recently Tom and I feel the same way. This out of control spending has got to stop and it’s up to us to elect people that will actually do something about it.
@Tricia
We definitely need to elect good people, but that will take a commitment. Our election system has become a mess. Instead of having run-off elections so that a candidate has to have a clear majority to win, we have primary elections that allow incumbents to partially control their nomination. In addition, we don’t verify voter registration and identifcation the way we should. We have no idea how crooked the process may be. We are just lucky our news media is so unbiased and worthy of our trust. NOT!
As citizens we have a duty to participate in the process. That begins by fighting for the best nominees. When we wait for the general election, we can be stuck with an awful choice. If we did nothing, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.