Senate Republicans Hold It Together, Pork-Filled Omnibus Bill Killed

The Senate Republicans were able to hold it together and force Harry Reid to back down and pull the omnibus bill full of Christmas goodies to various special interests because of a lack of support:

Sen. GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has long been known as an effective whip, and Thursday night he showed his prowess as he effectively stripped Democrats of the GOP votes needed to pass the $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill, killing the measure for good.

A visibly frustrated and angry Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, lashed out, saying that he had nine GOP senators supporting the measure, but that suddenly the support evaporated.

"This action taken by my friends on other side of aisle going to cause people to lose their job," Reid predicted.

"There's only one reason why cloture is not being filed...He doesn't have the votes.," McConnell chided, as he referred to the term for the process to shut down a filibuster. "And the reason he doesn't have the votes is because members on this side of the aisle increasingly felt concerned about the way we do business."

A McConnell aide said the leader "worked the phones" for days, pressing his members to quash the bill which contains $8 billion in earmarks (1% of the overall bill), several that belonged to the leader, himself, before he agreed to a pork moratorium.

Tempers flared in the chamber quickly, as Republicans gloated.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, crusader against pork, tweeted all day Wednesday and Thursday with earmarks he found in the bill, from money for disease-resistant wine grapes to a ceramics museum in Biloxi, Miss. And Thursday night, with a big grin, he praised GOP members for ditching the deal.

Two cheers for the Republicans for, actually, standing up for Republican principles. This bill needed to be tossed out and started anew. Hopefully, they will be able to do another one soon. Hold the pork, though.

They needed to do this to keep or regain the confidence of the people that elected them to turn things around. The GOP has been just as bad in this area over the last decade as the Democrats, which is why they got the boot in 2008. Luckily, the TEA Party was able to wake up the Grand Old Party this past year before were exiled into oblivion forever.

They are still are on probation with the voters. So, they need to keep working on being the fiscally responsible and cutting spending, if they ever want to get regain our trust for good.

Sen. Sessions: There’s “No Way” That I Can Read This Omnibus Bill and Master It Before We Vote

Republican Senator Jeff Session (AL) expressed his concern over the size and the limited timetable that the Senate has to comb through the bill before it would have to be voted on at the end of the week:

Sen. Jeff Session (R.-Ala.) told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that there is “no way” someone could master the full 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill before Congress votes on it later this week.

Other senators said they were working through the bill with their staff, and one remarked he would be “lucky” if he was able to read all of it.

The current government-funding package expires on Saturday at midnight, making it imperative for Congress to approve new funding of some sort before then. The House of Representatives passed a 13-month continuing resolution last week while the Senate is considering the massive omnibus package that combines each of the 13 appropriations bills that normally make their way through Congress.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he was currently in the process of reading through the measure, noting that it was nearly 2,000 pages long.

“We’re certainly in the process of doing that right now,” he said at a press conference on Wednesday. “It’s a lengthy bill – 1,924 pages long – and we’re going through it as others have and discovering a lot of bad stuff in the bill.”

Asked by CNSNews whether he would read the bill before the vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said there was “no way” senators could thoroughly examine the bill, but that he would do his best to read it through.

“There’s no way you can really thoroughly master that bill in two or three days time, to tell you the truth,” he said. “But yes, I’m going to try to look at each [provision], what’s in it.”

There is no way that any part of the government should ever have to “pass a bill, so they’ll be able to find out what’s in it”. They should have released this bill at the beginning of the lame-duck, in order to give people plenty of time to digest all of the pork that is in the bill. Of course, they do it, so they can hide things in this bill that they hope won’t see the light of day before it is too late, and it is already passed.

Reid: It’s My Constitutional Duty to Pass This Pork-Laden Omnibus Bill

Here are some tweets coming from Washington reporter Jamie Dupree, who was at the Harry Reid press conference, today, regarding the omnibus bill , full of thousands of earmarks, that’s being debated in the Senate:

1. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) telling reporters right now that "we have a constitutional duty " to approve earmarks
2. More Reid on earmarks: "I can't understand why more conservative members want to give up their power"
3. BROADSIDE ON REPUBLICANS: Reid labels GOP Senators who have earmarks but vote against them "hypocrites”

This isn’t the first time that Reid has said that it is his “constitutional duty” to spend your money. It not shocking about how clueless that Reid is on this. True, it is Congress’ duty to appropriate funds, but he is leaving out that the reason why there is so much angst against this type of spending is that it is often wasteful, and most of them wouldn’t pass muster, if it was ever given full-debate in Congress. It is, also, a problem that many of them look like bribes to certain representatives and senators in exchange for their vote on a particular piece of legislation.

He does have a point that many Republicans that are fighting this bill, now, have earmarks in the bill that they fought for before it was cool to be against them. Although, some of them say that they have “seen the light”, after last month’s elections.

As long as they continue to fight against the bill and vote against it, I don’t think that their flip-flop here won’t hurt them too much. However, I think that they should even go a bit further and push for amendments that would strike their earmarks from the bill. In the future, though, if they return to their old ways and include any earmarks in any future legislation, then, they should be chastised and protested against for such wasteful spending.