The Big Broke Bill Keeps Getting Worse
Big Bills are awful. Because they’re awful.
Nigh no one reads the monstrosities. Certainly almost none of the people voting for them do.
Big Bills allow the Deep State to protect and grow the Deep State. You can park inside the bill’s fatty, flabby folds trillions of dollars of wasteful spending and debt increases - and a $5,000 rider for puppies.
And if anyone objects to the spending and debt? The Deep Staters point at him or her and screech “That person is against puppies.” Because you’re voting against puppies, see?
Once (allegedly) one of the Big Bills’ biggest opponents? President Donald Trump. On December 23, 2020 we had this story….
Except on December 28, 2020 we had this story…:
“President Donald Trump signed the massive $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law….”
“Never” ain’t what it used to be.
One of the Deep State’s current bete noires is Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie. For having the audacity to object to the Deep State’s latest Big Bill - woefully misnamed “The Big Beautiful Bill.”
Donald Trump Hits Back at Republican Thomas Massie: 'Not MAGA'
“Not Moron” is more like it. Massie has been very transparent and open about why he objects. And has even made some unilateral concessions - as a way to get to “Yes”:
“Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie revealed in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller that he could vote ‘yes’ on President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ if a ‘skinny’ version of the legislation materializes."
Except a skinny bill would defeat the purpose of the Big Bill. It isn’t as easy to hide mountains of terrible policy inside a skinny bill.
Meanwhile: Remember Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)?
They burst out of the gate like gangbusters. The world was filled with stories of the government’s rampant fraud, corruption and waste that Team DOGE was rapidly and effectively identifying.
Because it was great PR for an administration pretending to want to actually cut government.
But the way DC works is? No cut is permanent - unless and until Congress codifies it in law.
Congress then began work on the Big Broke Bill. One of the first decisions they made was to make the Big Broke Bill a reconciliation bill.
Which was a built-in, preemptive excuse to not codify almost any of Team DOGE’s identified cuts. Which had already amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars in annual waste, fraud and abuse.
But reconciliation bills don’t deal with discretionary spending. And most of DOGE’s work thus far has been on discretionary spending. See how Congress ducked actually doing anything DOGE?
The way to codify DOGE cuts alongside a reconciliation bill? Is via recession bills. Which is how to go back and undo past passed discretionary spending.
And President Donald Trump’s first recision bill request? Was…$9.4 billion. Which is a fundamentally unserious amount of money.
Musk is not a stupid person. He realized the Deep State fix was yet again in. And he began objecting. First quietly - then loudly.
Musk and DOGE thus became an impediment to the Deep Staters’ actual objective: The Big Broke Bill. So Musk had to go. And all those DOGE news stories evaporated like the micturition mist they always were.
Team DOGE has also done a lot of really great work at identifying government to cut - which DC can actually cut in the Big Broke Bill.
But DC is a government town. So there are all sorts of built-in protections of the Deep State. So even when Congress attempts to do the right thing? The wrong thing happens.
To wit: Team DOGE rightly identified the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) for elimination.
The CFPB is a horrible, unconstitutional creation of the horrible 2010 Dodd-Frank banking law. The law was sold to us as ending “too big to fail” banks. But that was more micturition mist.
The law was WRITTEN by the “too big too fail” banks. I doubt they’d write law ending themselves.
The law instead has made the Big Banks 30+% bigger. Mostly by murdering-by-regulation thousands of small banks - which the Big Banks then ate.
The CFPB is a key component of this ongoing, rolling murder-to-consolidation of the sector. Instead of dealing with the Big Banks’ many abuses? It abuses people like infinitesimally tiny short-term lenders - and any other impediments to the Big Banks getting ever bigger.
Team DOGE was right to call for the CFPB’s elimination. And - brace yourself - Congress attempted to heed DOGE’s call.
Both the House and Senate versions of the Big Broke Bill would cap the amount of money the CFPB could unconstitutionally get from the Federal Reserve. And basically reduce its funding to 0% - thus eliminating the agency.
But wait…. As stated, the Deep State has MANY layers of self-protection. It’s Big Government - wearing twenty condoms.
Behold Congress’s Parliamentarians. Unelected bureaucrats who allegedly:
“(P)rovides…nonpartisan guidance on parliamentary rules and procedures.”
Except the “non-partisan” Parliamentarians? Always end up siding with the side growing government. And the current Senate Parliamentarian is having a field day removing all sorts of actual less government things from the Big Broke Bill.
Including….
Senate Parliamentarian Nixes GOP Effort to Defund CFPB:
“Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled that several key pieces of the bill violated the decades-old Senate rule, the Byrd Rule, which prohibits provisions considered ‘extraneous’ to the federal budget.
“Among the changes by Senate Parliamentarian MacDonough, striking a provision that would have placed a funding cap on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a move that would have cut approximately $6.4 billion from the Bureau, and reduced its funding to zero percent, thus eliminating the agency.”
Of course, the Congress opened themselves up to the Parliamentarians taking potshots at their bill - by choosing to make it a reconciliation bill.
I’ll leave it to you to determine for yourselves whether Congress considered that a bug - or a feature.