Don't Get Drawn In

Your Curmudgeon, it is true, swore off getting involved in the current political miasma: there was nothing to be gained from trying to make one's voice heard in the welter of so much fake news and disinformation. I advised my readers to remain above the fray -- and that remains good advice.

However, there comes a time when the rule should be suspended, in the interest of keeping my regular readers confirmed in their course. And now, with President Trump's signing of the so-called "Omnibus Bill" -- a bloated monstrosity of legislative diarrhea if ever there was such a thing -- is the time to dive in and point out the facts which the mainstream media are withholding from the public.

The Omnibus Bill, pretty much everyone agrees, is a spending bacchanal -- there are few limits to what the Democrats want to spend money on, and supposedly likewise for the RINOs who are currently controlling the flow of legislation in Congress. Planned Parenthood?  It gets full funding, as always. The long-promised border wall? Only a stretch of fence is supposedly funded, and the President is supposedly barred from spending any of the fence money on his Wall.

Well, your Curmudgeon is here to tell you that what you read and see in the mainstream media on these points is all fake: it could not be farther from the Constitutional reality that our founders established in 1789.

You see, under the Constitution and Article I, it is Congress' responsibility to pass a budget -- which blueprint, if Congress wants its budget to become a Law of the United States, binding on the President and other branches, has to be in the form of a Bill (see U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 7).

As you may (or may not) have read in the media, the so-called "Omnibus Bill" was not a bill at all, but was technically a "Continuing Resolution." That is to say, although it likewise requires a presidential signature before it becomes effective (see Sec. 7 again), it does not bind the Executive branch the way that a Law does.

Let that sink in a bit. It means that although Congress, for example, voted funds to be spent on Planned Parenthood, there is no legal consequence for President Trump if he instructs his Secretary to sequester those funds. Congress may complain all it wants, but until it passes an actual budget bill, it has no means of forcing the President's hand.

And if Congress could have passed a budget bill, you may be certain it would have. It took the easy way out, drafting a 2,200-page Continuing Resolution in secret that kept the rank-and-file members themselves from knowing what was in it until they passed it. Passing a budget would have required the various committees with jurisdiction to break out the numbers, hold public hearings, and engage in compromises and trade-offs to get each segment of the budget out of committee and to the floor for a final vote. (That's the way Congress is supposed to function -- remember your basic civics?)

Unlike a real budget, which remains in effect throughout an entire fiscal year, the Continuing Resolution is good for just six months, until the current fiscal year ends on September 30. From now until then, therefore, it will be Trump, not Congress, who controls the purse strings.

I have heard speculation that President Trump signed the Resolution in full knowledge of this fact (given that he relies on his capable and experienced budget director, Mike Mulvaney). At the same time, he sent a signal to Congress by warning that he would "never, ever" sign such a resolution again. The speculation is that Trump may be setting up Congress for a big showdown this October, just in advance of the November elections. His message to the voters would be, in effect, "Don't re-elect any of these guys who think they can run the government by omnibus appropriations -- they're just flim-flamming you."

At any rate, your Curmudgeon felt that this information was important enough to bring it to your attention, since you will never read about it in the national media. Watch and see what happens over the coming months -- the proof will be in how Trump authorizes (or withholds authorization for) his Cabinet secretaries to spend the money that Congress voted.