Major Development: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Claims That House Is Done Passing Massive “Omnibus” Spending Legislation

Getty Images

Disclaimer:  This article may contain the personal views and opinions of the author.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared an end to omnibus spending legislation. 

Sounds good, but does the average American even know what that means? 

An omnibus spending bill is a type of bill created when the legislature puts together “many of the smaller ordinary appropriations bills into one larger single bill that can be passed with only one vote in each house of Congress.”

In a sense, it allows Congress to be lazy by only needing to vote on one big package rather than the “twelve ordinary appropriations bills that need to be passed each year (one for each appropriations sub-committee) to fund the federal government and avoid a government shutdown.”

An omnibus spending bill is the term used when two or more of those bills are combined into a single bill.

Most of the time, these omnibus bills are thousands of pages long and require a quick vote. A majority of the lawmakers have no idea what is in the bill when it comes time for the vote. 

While at a Florida press conference on the last day of a Republican retreat, McCarthy told reporters, “One thing you gotta know on principle too: we’re not taking up an omnibus.”

“It’s not going to happen. We gotta get back to doing the work that the American people expect us to do.”

According to Fox News, “Republicans exploded in anger over last year’s passage of a $1.7 trillion spending bill for the rest of the fiscal year 2023, which was introduced by Democrat leaders in the final days of the last Congress.”

“That ‘omnibus’ bill cobbled together all 12 annual spending bills into a single, 4,155-page bill that Democrats in the House and Senate rushed to pass just days before Republicans were set to take control of the House.”

These are the types of games that hurt the American people. The lawmakers in committee work on the bills, so they may know what is in the spending bill on which they worked, but there is no way to know all 12 unless you read the 4,000+ pages.

They sneak all kinds of things in there. They allotted $11 million “for LGBT-themed projects.” Nearly $1 million is earmarked for the Equity Incubator at the Universities at Shady Grove.

Here’s the most hypocritical one. $410 million is to “remain available” to “reimburse Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman for ‘enhanced border security.'” Yes, border security!!

After the late December vote on the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas said, “Everything the American people is watching right now is a complete sham. It’s a fraud, a fraud being perpetrated on the American people right before their eyes, right as we head into Christmas.”

Now that Republicans have the majority in the House, it is likely that they will back up Speaker McCarthy in his efforts to put an end to omnibus legislation.

“I believe in the process,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “I think we’ve got to get back to the foundation, the way Congress and the Senate was designed. They have ideas, they pass something, we pass something, we go to conference and work it out.”

Let’s get back to how Congress is supposed to work. Let’s do what’s best for the American people!