It’s the time of year when people have holly in their hearts and are thus more likely to take pity on the unfortunate they ignore for the other 50 weeks of the year. Knowing this, every charity solicits furiously for donations to help the poor, the ill, the halt, the lame, the homeless. And people do give to such causes, unless they are Members of Congress.
With scant hours to go before another government shutdown, the House and Senate managed to pass a $1.1 trillion budget, Until then, for the last year, they couldn’t be bothered. In the last six months of the year, the House for example was in session a total of 46 days, or an average of just seven days a month.
What did members have to do, other than their jobs? Oh, run for office, raise campaign funds from wealthy donors, and refuse to cooperate with the opposing party. That is disgraceful enough, but the budget they finally passed is more so.
Republicans, when they return in January for the 114th Congress, will be in charge of both houses. They used this budget as a preview of things to come. It wasn’t pretty. By stalling action till the last minute before a shutdown, they played chicken with Congressional Democrats and the President. Both blinked.
In the rush to get a deal, the so-called Cromnibus, a cross between an omnibus budget bill and a continuing resolution, was decorated like a Christmas tree with all sorts of last minute special interest additions that would never have passed on their own. Many members didn’t even know they had been added.
The Republican attacks on Obamacare have long complained about how the huge bill with hundreds of pages was rammed through at the last minute without a chance for anyone to read it. In fact, Obamacare clocked in at a little over 900 pages and was laboriously assembled over several years so interested members had every chance to understand its provisions.
By contrast, the Cromnibus was thrown together in the midnight hours before it came to an emergency vote and added up to a gargantuan 1,695 pages. After Obamacare, House Speaker Boehner vowed he would never let a bill come to the floor without giving members 72 hours to read it. He broke the promise for the Cromnibus. No wonder.
It turns out much or the ornamentation of the bill was cribbed directly from the wish lists of lobbyists who now write much of the legislation a pliant Congress enacts. A particularly blatant example this time concerns a rollback of a Dodd-Frank provision passed after the financial meltdown of 2008. One cause of the cataclysm was credit default swaps that sent banks into death spirals and cost taxpayers billions in bailouts.
Dodd-Frank required banks to do such risky business in subsidiaries not covered by government deposit insurance. Emissaries from Citicorp were allowed to sit in on the drafting of the Cromnibus and to write the language reversing that provision. So, once again, banks will be allowed to gamble and taxpayers will get to pay when their bets go bad.
At the same time that Republicans were protecting bankers from bankruptcy, they had no such compassion for ordinary Americans. So, the budget allows multi-employer pension plans who failed to adequately fund their pensions to cut promised benefits for retirees by as much as 60 percent. Merry Christmas, cheapskate employers. Lump of coal for you, pension recipients.
Congress being Congress and Republicans being Republicans, they reserved especially nice presents for the truly needy — themselves and their biggest donors. They refused to grant a pay raise to Vice President Biden, but they gave themselves $12,000 a year each to defray the cost of luxury automobiles. Really.
To help the deserving rich, they cut back funding for the IRS by a third of a billion dollars on top of earlier cuts that have caused 10,000 IRS employees to be fired. The result will be longer waits for average taxpayers to receive refunds, but far fewer audits for fat cats. It’s like a year round holiday for tax cheats. The cop has been taken off the beat.
Best of all (if you’re a congressman), lawmakers eased campaign finance laws to make it easier for those big donors to give big bucks to reward their favorite party for a job well done. Ho, ho, ho.
And along the way, the bill made sure to undercut the EPA so that Clean Water laws will not apply to polluting farmers, a big Republican constituency. They also refused to mandate healthy school lunches and declined to fund body cameras for police in the wake of the Ferguson and Staten Island police shootings. I guess their motto is, “may all your Christmases be white.”
A few members of Congress protested this fiasco, but too few to keep it from passing. Notable among them was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice crying in the wilderness. She took to the Senate floor to denounce the Cromnibus as proof that Congress was working for Wall Street, not for the people.
You’d think her message would strike a chord not just with Progressives on the left but with Tea Party on the right, in fact with an economically beleaguered populus no matter what their politics. Median household income peaked in 1999, so wages have been stagnant for over 15 years. Officially inflation is nonexistent, so Social Security recipients got a paltry 1.4% bump this year and many employees saw equally tiny pay increases.
Yet the real cost of living for ordinary people keeps rising. Food, shelter, utilities all have been increasing at 3% or more a year. Hershey, for example, has announced an 8% rise in candy prices. The cost to insurers for covered health services rose 21% between 2007 and 2013, but the price passed on by those insurance companies to the insured rose 39%. Some one is getting rich, as we all know, but it isn’t the average American.
The mismatch between the lived reality of the people and the priorities reflected by the budget Congress has just passed makes a strong case that Warren and other critics are right. The game is rigged to favor banks, insurance companies, corporations that don’t want to be regulated and wealthy donors who don’t want to be taxed. It is rigged to the disadvantage of pensioners, wage earners, children, the poor and minorities.
In light of all this, one can not help thinking of the man who said “at this festive season…we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.” To which the role model for the Republican Congress suggested they be sent to the prison or the workhouse or die and “reduce the surplus population.”
In short, the Cromnibus proves Scrooge is alive and well and living in Washington. God help us every one.