Monday afternoon, President Obama signed a two-year budget deal saying it was, “a signal of how Washington should work.”
Avoiding an election-year budget showdown, the bill suspends the debt limit until March of 2017 and brings the national debt total to a staggering $20 trillion.
According to USA Today:
Some House Republicans had proposed the former debt limit — which was set to expire Tuesday — to leverage more spending cuts from the administration.Outgoing House speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, put together a plan to avoid breaching the debt limit, saying that doing so would threaten the nation’s credit rating.The bill sets the federal budget for fiscal years 2016 and 2017, with an end to spending caps that had affected both national defense and domestic programs.”By locking in two years of funding,” Obama said, “it should finally free us from the cycle of shutdown threats and last-minute fixes. It allows us to, therefore, plan for the future.”
The two-year budget deal was passed by the Senate Friday with a vote of 64-35. All 35 dissenting votes were Republican.
Several Senate Republicans vocally opposed the budget deal which essentially robs the Social Security Trust Fund of about $150 billion. Senator Lee referred to the bill as, “the last gasping breath of a disgraced bipartisan Beltway establishment on the verge of collapse.”
Sen. Lee explained:
“The bill is a product of an unfair, dysfunctional, and fundamentally undemocratic process, a process that is virtually indistinguishable from what we promised the American people a GOP-controlled Congress would bring to an end. We made that promise, precisely because negotiating legislation behind closed doors without input from a majority of members and then rushing it through for final passage without debate or opportunity for amendments violates our party’s core principles. It also inevitably leads to bad policy. Many proponents of the bill say, well, the bill isn’t perfect, but while it isn’t perfect, it does include some meaningful entitlement reforms. The sales pitch we hear most often alleges this budget deal will save the Social Security Trust Fund from insolvency. But, we’re never told exactly how this bill would do this.”
The bill’s passage didn’t quiet Sen. Lee. Following the final vote, Sen. Lee sounded off on Facebook:
His post contained the following video of Senator Paul:
At the time this post was published, Sen. Lee’s post had been shared well over one million times. Interest in Lee’s sentiments mirror polling released by Rasmussen Monday indicating voters don’t believe politicians want to cut spending, nor will they honor voter wishes do to so.
Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye
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