All on the same day, both the House and the Senate approved H.R. 2029, Obama signed it into law, and then he still had time left over for staging a press-conference propaganda event to produce soundbites in time for the evening news. Spin was carefully crafted to make the day's work seem like something that could plausibly be signed into law by one espousing the middle-class values that Obama likes to talk about.
This instant legislation starts when Santa Obama cuts the deal directly with the few party leaders who control the flow of money and other benefits within the parties. The Omnibus process is rigged to skip all the ordinary legislative steps. It is totalitarian in its nature in that it issues a virtual decree by a small ruling junta at Santa's workshop without advance notice, committee hearings, or much time for deliberation or in some cases even knowledge by legislators responsible to the people, let alone knowledge by the people themselves of the gifts the bill contains.
This is the junta at which Bernie Sanders' "political revolution" strategy is directly aimed, making him the leading prospect among presidential candidates because he seems authentically intent on overthrow.
To create dramatic tension, the Omnibus bill is purposely delayed until the government's funds are scheduled to run out. Special-interest lobbyists all show up with their Christmas wish lists at the end of the year, a week before Christmas, for a TGIF party. If Santa approves, their wish list gifts all get attached to an appropriations bill necessary to continue funding the government. The whole package becomes law before the public has any opportunity to sort out the provisions on a large variety of different subjects -- actually everything that government does.
The annual Obamnibus appropriations bill and Influence Peddlers Protection Act delivers its bipartisan Christmas goodies to plutocrats as if from a down-the-chimney black-box found in Santa's special gift bag for special interests. It bypasses the normal legislative process where laws having the consent of the governed are supposed to use the front door, the door where the governed can observe laws and money coming and going.
Here's the tick-tock: The same process used in 2014 was used again for the 2015 caper, with the Senate stripping another House bill of its content to use as a vehicle to be sent back over to the House for substituting, this time, two interdependent amendments: Amendment #1, the over 2000 pages Omnibus titled the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, and Amendment #2 titled the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015, which contained tax-break "extenders." Extensions of tax exemptions are sold each year as a standard form of graft, almost like a generic gift certificate.
The two amendments represented the two halves of the basic extortion deal. One contained the tax expenditures and the other the appropriations needed for the government to keep its doors open. These amendments remained separated in the House, since each amendment had different supporters and different opponents there. The votes could be close on each, and insufficient to carry them both, if joined. They were fashioned into a single Omnibus bill when sent back to the Senate and on to Obama.
This way the Senate Democrats, who could otherwise filibuster the separate bills, and Obama would have to accept both amendments representing the full extortion deal or neither. This provided Obama his familiar overused refrain that the Republicans made him swallow the large amount of bad policy to keep the government open and to also get what little good medicine the bill contained.
Obama's "good medicine" left in the bill for later advertising to liberals -- like funding for Planned Parenthood -- the Republicans already know from reading the polls would be "political losers" for them anyway. "Speaker Paul Ryan warned his troops that Republicans, going into an election year, could not withstand the bad publicity of being held responsible for another government shutdown." Matt Taibbi suggested an atmosphere in 2015 where plutocratic centrists similar to Paul Ryan, "John Boehner and Mitch McConnell [were] fleeing toward Obama politically in an attempt to escape the public relations carnage caused by the Republican presidential campaign."
Some combination of these two factors meant Obama owned CRomnibus II, particularly since he is a lame duck with nothing to lose from a shutdown. He never in the past was known to have given any consideration for other than his own career, so it is unlikely he would be moving to the right out of sudden though misplaced concern about the prospects of Democrats in 2016. Obama had easily shrugged off two disastrous midterms where his party suffered for his betrayal of voters' expectations. CRomnibus II is Obama's law, as much as anything he has signed since he started losing Congress to Republicans in 2010.
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