Do you have all this stuff figured out in D.C.? On one hand, we have what seems like 80% of Congress pushing-back on everything this President wants to do that requires legislation. They end up passing into law a boondoggle of a bill that is full of pork and gratuitous spending provisions that are hidden from citizens. All the while, they simply refuse to enforce the southern border: period.
But the logjam and misanthropy on the part of leftists for Donald Trump does not just extend into the legislative branch of government. The Judicial Branch is full of it as well. We knew of the corruption in the Department of Justice. We watched as the Obama DOJ initiated some of the most incorrigible and illegal programs and acts the resulted in the deaths of a number of Americans. But what is worse is than we thought. Any accountability by the perpetrators of those acts and programs (which reach as far as the Obama White House) were just summarily dismissed by almost everyone in government!
Until today, we have seen just a scant fraction of those unspeakable acts exposed. And every day, more new atrocities at the hands of Congress and the DOJ show their ugly heads.
They’ve been hidden for too long. The reckoning is here: at least the first part of it –– “In Full Disclosure…”
“Full Disclosure” is here!
Today, in Part I of “In Full Disclosure…” we will reveal the Congressional villainy that has plagued America’s lawmaking process for so long and costs American taxpayers trillions of dollars. We will disclose the attitude of entitlement that is nowhere else more obvious than among members of Congress who with impunity year after year literally “steal” billions from us in the name of doing what’s best for Americans.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives now controlled by Democrats feel that the power their majority gives them is a permission slip to intervene at any time in any way they so choose in the government funding process to reward their minions while penalizing their opponents with the power of money. Nowhere else is this illustrated better and in a more timely fashion than the funding bill, “Consolidated Appropriations Bill, 2019 (H.R. 648)” President Trump just signed into law to keep the government open. But that bill does MUCH more than just that. It includes multiple examples of the graft and corruption that literally fuels Washington D.C.
In Part II of this story, we will together peel back the layers of the onion called “Corruption” in the Department of Justice. Part II comes tomorrow.
Folks, this expose’ has been fun to research and put together for you. Even though we knew we have horrible issues in Washington, it has been unnerving to uncover them and to learn just how far-reaching into the dark corners of government they have been.
This ride will certainly be unsettling for you.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 (H.R. 648): America’s “Current” Boondoggle
Nobody could wait for this bill to be passed by each house of Congress, be signed into law by the President, and start the erection of that southern border wall while protecting government employees from another work stoppage when government funding expired. It passed just in the nick of time! Of course, everybody got everything they wanted, right? WRONG! But they got a lot — an 1169 page bill full of $$$$$ — OUR dollars and cents.
You haven’t read it yet? I cannot believe that! Everybody should have read the bill — especially those who passed the bill: members of Congress. But, as usual, NO MEMBER OF CONGRESS HAD READ THE BILL BEFORE VOTING! They each received copies of the bill — all 1169 pages — at midnight the night before the vote. It was impossible for any one of them to read and understand everything it includes. But as usual, Congress followed the Nancy Pelosi instructions that accompanied Obamacare: “We must pass the bill so that we can know what’s in the bill.” They passed it; it’s law.
Certainly, by now, you’ve read the bill, right? You haven’t yet? Here’s your chance: here it is:
It’s lengthy, it’s verbose, it continuously refers one back to the Omnibus bill from 2018, so let’s just summarize its contents for you.
Border Security
Obviously, the linchpin in this bill was funding of “Trump’s” border wall. It is amazing to me that in discussions of a bill that funds the entire federal government with about $1 trillion through September of this year, the only item that receives discussion is a tiny segment of a barrier that constitutes less than $2 billion — the “wall.” But Congress had to address it to prevent another government partial shutdown. It did. And it was a pittance.
What you have NOT heard and will NOT hear anyplace but here is this:
The bill provides a de facto amnesty pipeline for all illegal alien household members of MS-13 gang members who arrive in the United States as “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UACs). As part of a bipartisan “compromise” spending package, lawmakers included provisions that prevent federal immigration officials from deporting anyone who has close contact with UACs who are readily resettled throughout the U.S. with so-called “sponsors” after being trafficked across the southern border. These sponsors are often times illegal alien relatives, in many cases parents, of UACs. Federal officials have repeatedly noted how the UAC program has been widely used by the MS-13 gang to import more gang members into the country.
Last year, New York City Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Angel Melendez said there are roughly 22,000 UAC “potential recruits” who are resettled across the country every year out of about 40,000 total UACs. These are mostly young men trafficked across the southern border from Central America, especially El Salvador.
But we can put up with that little “oops” in the bill, right? We’re getting a big chunk of border wall/barrier out of this. But wait, there’s more:
The new law mandates that the White House have approval from left-wing Starr County, Texas officials before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can begin building a wall at the region’s U.S.-Mexico border.
Slipped into this funding bill that provides about $1.3 billion for 55 miles of border wall construction is a provision that prevents the Trump administration from constructing the barrier until DHS officials seek input from Starr County, Texas locals and city officials. The spending bill mandates that Trump must “seek to reach a mutual agreement regarding the design and alignment of physical barriers” with Starr County “local elected officials,” including those from:
- Roma, Texas
- Rio Grande City, Texas
- Escobares, Texas
- La Grulla, Texas
- Salineno, Texas
The deal demands Trump’s DHS to continue “such consultations” with local elected officials about the border wall until September, or until an agreement is reached. In the meantime, the spending bill stipulates that the administration cannot build any barriers “while consultations are continuing” with local elected officials.
But there’s still more. I know you may find this hard to believe, but there are a bunch of “gimmicks” included in the almost 1200 page monstrosity that, only now, are showing their ugly little heads.
(You need to follow this line of explanation very closely. Congressional members love making it difficult for everyday Americans — most of us — to understand what they are really doing when they craft and pass spending bills.)
Gimmicks
Changes in Mandatory Programs are one of the most commonly used gimmicks in the appropriations process. On paper, mandatory spending is delayed, creating new savings that can be put toward unrelated discretionary spending. In reality, the vast majority of the delayed funding would never have been spent in the first place and generated no real savings. Each year, billions of dollars in new spending is enabled through Changes in Mandatory Programs.
The largest change each year is delayed spending from the Department of Justice’s Crime Victims Fund. The bill caps spending from the Crime Victims Fund at $3.35 billion dollars in the fiscal year 2019. However, that fund consistently carries a balance of around $13 billion, meaning that any unobligated balance above $3.35 billion can now be captured as savings and used to circumvent the Budget Control Act caps. And the Crime Victims Fund is not the only Change in Mandatory Programs. In the fiscal year 2018, changes with no real savings increased spending by nearly $18 billion.
The area of the bill with the most potential for harm is in the critical areas of immigration enforcement, particularly detention beds. As the number of caravans, children, families, and asylum seekers has drastically risen, the administration has been handcuffed by loopholes and prevented from quickly removing many illegal immigrants. The result is that many illegal border crossers or asylum seekers are “caught and released,” and many will disappear into the public and never be seen again. The Trump administration has attempted to limit catch and release, both at the border but also in the interior, by expanding the number of detention beds.
In this bill, Democratic efforts to set a hard cap on immigration detention were stopped, but the bill does try to push the administration to reduce the number of detention beds by limiting funding. That said, the administration is allowed to transfer or reprogram funds to expand detention, but does so at the expense of other homeland security programs. In essence, the bill forces the Department of Homeland Security to steal from other important security and preparedness missions in order to fulfill the immigration enforcement mission.
Critically, the bill fails to address the key loopholes in U.S. immigration law that have encouraged the drastic increases in asylum claims and families and children coming to the border. Without fixes to these loopholes and other immigration enforcement tools, border security is only a superficial fix and detention beds will always be too few.
More “Hidden”
- The omnibus includes a 1.9 percent pay raise for federal employees, costing roughly $3.3 billion in 2019, and more than $40 billion over the next 10 years. This overturns a December 2018 executive order from President Donald Trump freezing federal pay. And, for more than half of federal workers, it serves as their second pay raise in 2019 because federal workers receive both cost-of-living increases as well as step increases based on tenure. On average, federal employees receive $121,000 in total compensation, compared to average private-sector total compensation of $69,000. Part of this differential stems from the fact that federal workers have more education and experience, on average, but studies consistently find that federal employees receive a significant compensation premium.
- The text of the 1,169-page compromise bill was released just before midnight on Wednesday, February 13, 2019. Both houses of Congress had to debate and vote on it. It was already law two days later.
Once again, Congress is ignoring its own budget rules. The House requires that text of legislation be available for at least 72 hours before a vote is held. This is not the way the process is supposed to work. It leaves no time for lawmakers to even read the bill, let alone have a chance to debate and offer amendments to improve the legislation. That’s just a symptom of the larger problem. The fiscal year is already more than four months old and Congress still hasn’t finalized funding. If lawmakers were doing their job and passing budget and appropriations bills on time, continuing resolutions, omnibus bills, and government shutdowns could become obsolete, or at least the exception rather than the rule.
State of Emergency
Democrat after Democrat from both sides of the aisle have taken to the airways and declared how unjust, un-American, and illegal is the declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent plan of the President to divert funds to pay for the construction of the border barrier. Even several Republicans are against the wall! It’s purely partisan and in no way reflects any actions contemplated or taken against the previous 61 such declarations made by this and other presidents. Politics at its worse.
We won’t waste a bunch of time, but Nancy always chimes in with a quote of remarkability when it comes to Congressional matters of historical nature. At a news conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi railed against Trump declaring a national emergency, saying Republicans “should have some dismay to the door that they opened, the threshold they crossed.” She continued, “The precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans and, of course, we will respond accordingly,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi said an emergency declaration opens the door for other presidents to do an end run around Congress. “Just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people,” Pelosi added. She didn’t say specifically how Democrats will respond but said that they would “review our options.”
Summary: “Full Disclosure”
This action in Congress had NOTHING to do with southern border security. They don’t want better border security:
- Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and six other House Democrats who chair subcommittees of the judiciary panel signed a letter to the president, writing that “we believe your declaration of an emergency shows a reckless disregard for the separation of powers and your own responsibilities under our constitutional system.”
- Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who chairs the Armed Services Committee, called the reallocation of funds “utterly disrespectful of U.S. national security and the needs of our men and women in uniform, and it further undermines his credibility in requesting the upcoming defense budget.”
- And it’s not just Democrats. Centrist Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is up for re-election in 2020, called Trump’s planned move a “mistake” in a statement Thursday. Collins also argued that the National Emergencies Act was only “intended to apply to major natural disasters or catastrophic events, such as the attacks on our country.”
- Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, whose districts covers about 800 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, said on The View that the declaration was “unnecessary” and expressed concerns about the land seizures that would have to take place in order to build the wall.
The corruption in Congress is unfathomable — until now. Let’s be perfectly clear and honest: on the most part, those who serve in either house of Congress face every bill presented for their consideration, not from the perspective of “how do we need to process this measure to maximize all our resources to best facilitate meeting the needs of American citizens?” Their almost unilateral perspective — Democrat AND Republican — is “how can I get what I need out of this bill: money, power, and favorability among voters in my district.” Their perspectives blow as the political winds in D.C. blow on the particular day of their considerations.
The bottom line is this: truthful consideration of the resources we give to them, the needs that WE have, and the rule of law are GONE in Congress.
In conclusion, here’s what they have almost entirely missed: the American electorate in sufficient numbers walked away from “business-as-usual” in Washington and voted for the one person who entered the race for the presidency that voters felt could and would fulfill campaign promises to fix legal immigration while stopping illegal immigration at our southern border. And in doing so, those same members of the electorate sent a message to Congress that “We are done with status quo, identity politics perpetrated by the elitists in D.C. that want nothing but control over all of us Americans.”
Have members of Congress gotten that message? With the spending bill passed simply to temporarily pacify the President with the pittance allocated for the border barrier, apparently Congress still has not gotten it.
And here’s the look “down the road” current members of Congress and those who want in better see and understand: Congressional hypocrisy is being exposed in greater measure than ever day after day. And Americans in seeing the corruption is being summarily rejected. Sending those members home is just part of the equation. Prosecution for wrongdoing is pending. There WILL be a price to pay.
They have underestimated this President. He’s not stupid — far from it. His validity resonates far greater with Americans than the abomination being unearthed in the midst of today’s lawmakers.
And it’s not just in Congress: it’s in the Department of Justice. Tomorrow come back for “In Full Disclosure…Part II.” The DOJ is front and center. You think you know all the corruption there is there? Get ready: there’s far more than you know today!
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