The Real Problem with the Omnibus

In the wake of the President Trump’s signing the omnibus budget act, I am hearing and seeing a frenzied (indeed, almost apoplectic) reaction from my fellow conservatives. But I want to to stop you now, stop you dead in your tracks, because I am now going to tell you who is most responsible for this thing’s passage.

YOU.

Yes, that’s right. YOU are the reason Congress just spent $1.3 trillion it doesn’t have. YOU are the reason that by the time the next Congress is seated, the federal debt will have swelled to $22 trillion.

By the way, I’m just as guilty of this fiasco as the rest of you.

Why are we responsible for this mess? Because we ignored the most basic tenet of our system of government. We’ve been great at describing our positions to one another. We’re lousy at describing them to anyone who doesn’t share those views. American government is not about just ramming your agenda through. Nothing lasts that way. No, it’s still about winning the marketplace of ideas. Think about it: the founders of this country traded speeches and newspaper editorials until the public eventually chose the vision of the federalists over that of the anti-federalists. That same dynamic still exists, and we’ve been terrible at the art of persuasion.

A big part of that is that while we’re all willing to talk the talk, almost none of us are willing to walk the walk. The last national elections pretty much embodied everything wrong with the conservative movement, and still we haven’t learned that lesson.

Think about it – a guy whose idea of fiscal discipline is going bankrupt and leveraging himself to the hilt managed to convince the nation he’s a fiscal conservative. From what I’ve been seeing throughout the day in my Twitter and Facebook feeds, he managed to convince a sizable number of you of the same. The guy who swore he could deliver the first balanced budget in two generations without touching entitlements (when anyone who can do basic arithmetic knows better) did enough reasonably conservative things over the first year of his Presidency to make you think he could somehow pull off that bit of alchemy.

Therein lies the problem. We are supposedly the people who want less government, which by definition means we want government to do less. But how many of you truly want less government across the board? I constantly hear we want less welfare, but: save the fuel subsidies. Enforce the ethanol mandate. Don’t touch my mortgage deduction. Hey, my job relies on that outdated weapons program!

We have an innate inability to reconcile, even in our own heads, that limiting government means actually taking more responsibility for own fiscal lives. We haven’t been able to realize that before we can ask a liberal to give up their government handout, we have to be willing and ready to give up our government handout.

In this respect, Congress is doing exactly what we want of it. We want our government programs, though we’re loathe to acknowledge they are a form of redistributionist welfare. Of course, liberals also want their government handouts, but the difference is they are not being intellectually dishonest with themselves. They know it’s redistributionist government. So, in order to get something passed, “conservatives” get their favorite programs and liberals get their favorite programs. The net result is that Congress passes a $1,300,000,000,000 spending bill with at least $880,000,000,000 in new debt. And of course, the President who thinks “debt is good” is going to sign it. (Indeed, the only reason he gave for almost vetoing the thing was it didn’t spend even more money).

If you’re truly outraged by this, it’s time to prove it. Call, write, go to town halls – and tell your congressman you’re ready to give up every government dime that floats your way. AND I MEAN EVERY SINGLE ONE. Because until you do, liberals will continue to smirk and call us hypocrites.

The sad thing is, they’ll be right.