All Omnibus Bills Are Idiotic

The recent COVID relief bill providing $600 direct payments to Americans is an omnibus bill titled “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021”.

First, some clarification. What is an omnibus bill?

An omnibus bill is a proposed law that covers a number of diverse or unrelated topics. Omnibus is derived from Latin and means “to, for, by, with or from everything”. An omnibus bill is a single document that is accepted in a single vote by a legislature but packages together several measures into one or combines diverse subjects.

In short, it is what legislatures do when they want to pass controversial/ideological bullsh*t but can’t do it through traditional channels. So they bundle it in with other needed items to make it politically difficult to vote “No”.

Want $50 million for a Congress ski resort trip? Well, voting on a bill titled “Congress Ski Trip” won’t look great. So instead they bundle it in under thousands of pages with other needed fiscal items and call it an omnibus.

That’s how omnibus bills work. There is no otherwise good justification for why different fiscal items should be combined.

If legislatures vote no on this 5000+ page omnibus bill, they are effectively setting themselves up for the political retaliation of “Not providing COVID relief to the average American”.

Even though they should vote no. The relief part is a small part of this bill. It’s not even half of the entire bill.

Find the full bill here. Good luck reading the 5000 pages, which our representatives surely did.

If you don’t want to read the full bill, just read this small bit here that describes how this bill will help you with COVID relief:

Oh and in the omnibus covid relief bill they also decry the Belarus election as fraudulent… for the exact same reason our elections are being called fraudulent:

The hypocrisy is hilarious.

Want COVID relief? Well, then you have to declare a fraudulent election in a small country far away.

But wait, it gets worse!

They also sneakily added in an amendment that makes the president unable to use the insurrection act:

H.Amdt. 833 (Escobar) to H.R. 6395: To require certifications be made to Congress when the President deploys active duty military within the United States during civil unrest by amending the Insurrection Act in Title 10, Chapter 13 of U.S. Code.
This was a vote to approve or reject amendment H.Amdt. 833 (Veronica Escobar) to H.R. 6395. The title of the amendment is H.Amdt. 833 (Escobar) to H.R. 6395: To require certifications be made to Congress when the President deploys active duty military within the United States during civil unrest by amending the Insurrection Act in Title 10, Chapter 13 of U.S. Code..

Which makes no sense, other than trying to tie the hands of Trump should they try to forcible remove him.

Other fun items in this bill:

2 million to count fish in Mexico.
An anti-free use provision that lets copyright oligarchs fine anyone up to $30k for posting someone else’s intellectual property content without permission.
Allows feds to import more foreign workers while 17.8 million Americans are jobless.
$10 million for “gender program” in Pakistan
$3.3 billion in grants to Israel
$1.4 billion for an “Asia Reassurance Initiative Act”
$193 million for federal HIV/AIDS workers to buy cars and car insurance overseas, and a feminist museum.
Funding for a commission tasked with educating “consumers about the dangers associated with using or storing portable fuel containers for flammable liquids near an open flame.”

There are 332 million people in the United States. Even if you gave every single one of them the $600 it would only cost a little less than $200 billion. But this bill excludes a whole swath of the population so in actual terms it costs even less than that.

Yet the bill is $900 million. Ponder on that one for a little bit.

Congress can spend $900 billion on extreme emergencies like fish in Mexico and gender programs in Pakistan, but can only offer you $600.

This article should be the only one I will ever need that explains why omnibus bills are completely asinine.

Every single law, spending item, and bill should be voted on alone. Bundling should not be allowed. “Omnibus” should not exist. Every single line item they want to spend money on should be voted for independently. Anything else should be illegal to even consider voting on.

In a time of crisis, why is money going to foreign nations? Why not to our own citizens? Foreign interests have more control over our politicians than we do.

Additionally, these 5000 page laws are clearly not written by the congressmen. Some un-elected bureaucrat, lawyer, or (more likely) corporation are doing the writing. The congress is merely pushing it forward. This should likewise be illegal. All laws should be written solely by the congressional representatives. If they can’t muster up the time to do it, then it isn’t needed.

We are completely backwards.

This entire bill is an economic and political nightmare. Millions of Americans are out of work and shut down because of the government’s stupidity regarding COVID and the best they can offer is $3.3 billion to Israel and $600 to us?

Worthless traitors, the entire lot of them.