{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/speeches?ContentRecord_id=D493B07F-5DB6-4DF3-8B5A-EF6C7734063B", "Another Spending Extravaganza", "2019-12-19", "2019", "2019-12", "Republican", "House", "UT", "Mike Lee", "L000577", "www.lee.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "It's December, Mr./Madam President. And so America's attention turns once again to the great debate of our times: which is the best Christmas movie? White Christmas? Elf? A Christmas Story? Die Hard? I'm partial to It's a Wonderful Life myself.\r\nWe have to debate the best Christmas movie that we all watch every year because there really is no debate about the worst. The worst Christmas movie is the one that runs every year on C-Span the week before Our Savior's birthday: it's called Omnibus.\r\nCritics and fans have hated it for years. And as is always the case in money-grabbing sequels, the actors and writers and directors are all just mailing it in. The only plot-twist this time around is that instead of a continuing resolution or an omnibus, leaders and appropriators have put the single negotiated spending agreement into two bills, so that we can all pretend it's better than just one. Even though they were negotiated at the same time, released to the public at the same time, and will be voted on within minutes of each other.\r\nThe secretive, undemocratic, irresponsible process that produced this bill is a joke. But then again, so is the substance.\r\nIt's been like this for years now. Instead of actively setting and passing budgets to stay within  as we expect from any other organization  we make it up as we go along, in as abusive and dysfunctional a manner as the American people will let us get away with.\r\nThe last time Congress passed its respective appropriations bills  unbundled and on time  was in 1997.\r\nFor this Fiscal Year, we have already passed 2 continuing resolutions.\r\nNow, an omnibus bill in and of itself does not necessarily have to be a bad thing.\r\nAn omnibus could, in theory, be a decent legislative vehicle  if members of the House and Senate were given time to read it, and to debate and amend its different components.\r\nBut unfortunately, that is never the case anymore. These bills are written behind closed doors, by a small handful of leaders from the two parties  thousands of pages spending trillions of dollars and released to public scrutiny within a few hours of a government shutdown.\r\nThis we call bipartisanship.\r\nAnd like too much of what Washington calls bipartisanship these days, these spending bills are a fiscal dumpster fire.\r\nDiscretionary spending will be set at record-high levels in nearly every category.\r\nThis omnibus will add $2.2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. By that time, we will be spending more on interest on the debt than we do on national defense.\r\nThis is embarrassing, Mr./Madam President.\r\nWhen we had a trillion-dollar deficit after the 2008 financial crisis, everyone admitted it was reckless and out of controleven President Obama. And now we are borrowing just as much at the top of the business cycle, with wages up and unemployment at record lows.\r\nIt's an awful, corrupt cycle on repeat. Congress breaks its own spending rules, creates new ones to spend more, and then breaks the new ones and tries to hide the evidence  racking up ever more national debt all the while.\r\nWhat's worse, we are willingly putting the brunt of the cost on future generations.\r\nGorging ourselves on debt  to the tune of another trillion dollars each year  means that we are saddling our children and our children's children with debt. And setting ourselves up for disaster come the inevitable next recession.\r\nJohn F. Kennedy famously said to govern is to choose. But Congress's defining dysfunction is that it doesn't choose. We don't budget. We don't reform. We don't prioritize. We just spend, and hope we're retired or working as lobbyists or consultants when the bill for our negligence and recklessness comes due. Not only does this package feature reckless spending, but it includes many bills that it should not  funding broken, inefficient, and even harmful programs.\r\nFor instance, this bill reauthorizes the National Flood Insurance Program  a program which subsidizes beachfront properties right in the middle of dangerous flood plains, and which is already in $20.5 billion in debt to American taxpayers  for a full year without a single reform.\r\nIt maintains the broken status quo for Overseas Contingency Operations, the Pentagon's increasingly unaccountable slush fund  insulated from scrutiny and unchecked by budget caps. The deal appropriates another $71.5 billion for OCO, a $4 billion increase from last year.\r\nThis only days after America learned that civilian and military leaders have been lying to the American people for years  across multiple presidential administrations  about our failures in Afghanistan.\r\nInstead of reform or oversight, these bills would put another $4.1 billion into the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and limit our ability to negotiate peace and bring the war in Afghanistan to an end.\r\nIn an era of rampant fake news, even the media is outperforming Congress on this issue.\r\nThese bills include $495 million for the Land and Water Conservation Fund  a 13% increase from the last fiscal year, and the highest appropriation it has had in 17 years  for a program that has been of particular detriment to my state of Utah.\r\nThe LWCF has been used as a tool for the federal government to greedily acquire more lands, even as it is failing to care for the ones it already owns, with a current maintenance backlog of $19.4 billion.\r\nWorse, in addition to funding broken programs, it funds blatant cronyism.\r\nThe bill reauthorizes the Export-Import Bank -- Washington's favorite corporate favor bank, which doles out taxpayer-backed loans to help American exporters  for a full seven years, without such much a word of debate.\r\nTheir biggest customer is Pemex  Mexico's famously corrupt, state-owned oil company. So corrupt, in fact, that its own employees collaborate with Mexico's cartels to facilitate the theft of the best of their oil.\r\nAnd ranked right after Pemex is the People's Republic of China, whose state-owned enterprises are granted generous American taxpayer-backed financing for purchases they could fund through their own communist government.\r\nThe reauthorization even includes provisions instructing the Bank to pretend it is helping American to compete against China, at the same time that it is sending that very government billions of dollars.\r\nAnd then there is the extension of the Brand USA Act: a 7-year reauthorization of a government- chartered non-profit, Brand USA, to use thousands of taxpayer dollars to advertise for tourism.\r\nTo top things off, a last-minute tax-extenders deal was added to the package late on Monday night  spending billions of dollars on central economic planning and picking winners and losers in the marketplace.\r\nOver the next 10 years, the package provides about $2.7 billion in tax benefits through programs that use the tax code to incentivize businesses to invest in government-selected communities, seeking to control the flow of investment instead of relying on the free market.\r\nAnd it includes naked handouts to cronyist, special interests.\r\nFor example, it spends over $2.1 billion on subsidies for the energy sector  awarding $113 million for coal production on Indian lands, $331 million for facilities to refuel alternative fuel vehicles, and $1.5 billion for biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credits, for instance.\r\nBeyond these, it hands out $187 million in write-offs for owners of motorsport entertainment complexes\r\n $18 million in tax breaks for the production of movies and TV shows\r\n and $3 million in tax credits for the purchasers of two-wheeled plug-in electric vehicles, to name a few examples.\r\nNo, it is safe to say that this package does not have the best interests of all Americans at heart.\r\nAnd not only that, but it features new levels of absurdity, too.\r\nThis deal actually includes a special-interest bailout to make up for the failures of a faulty pension plan while at the same time authorizing another pension plan to follow in its very same footsteps.\r\nCongress authorized a group of coal miners' multiemployer pension plans under problematic rules, allowing them to underfund the plans by over 70%.\r\nBut all the while, they still promised their workers full benefit -- setting up unreasonable expectations for their return on investment.\r\nInevitably, they have not made up the shortfall and now taxpayers are being forced to bail them out.\r\nAnd in this very same bill in which we are bailing them out, we are authorizing a select group of community newspapers to follow the same practice: allowing them to once again underfund their workers' pensions, while again promising them full benefits.\r\nWith this bill, we are rubberstamping the expectation that employers can raid from their workers' promised retirement benefits for short-term gain and setting the precedent that the government will reward this bad practice when it inevitably fails by bailing them out.\r\nThis bill, however, does include some good measures that I support  like repealing the medical device tax, fixing a tax provision that would inappropriately subject new churches to more taxes, and making retirement account reforms that allow Americans to access these funds in times of particular need.\r\nAnd sadly, I will be forced to vote against these measures that I do support because they have been lumped into this massive package as a whole.\r\nThe thing about these omnibuses is that they put us in a take-it-or-leave it situation. We are given no choice but to support or oppose the whole thing  good and bad measures alike.\r\nUnfortunately, just like every other episode in this squalid saga, Omnibus 2: The Bussening will come to a predictable, sorry ending. Congress will pass this mess  indulging in a process, substance, and long-term result that are all an affront to the viewers.\r\nBecause at the end of the day, the audience members are the real-life victims. I yield the floor.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/speeches?ContentRecord_id=D493B07F-5DB6-4DF3-8B5A-EF6C7734063B"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8541960269212723, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}