Cromnibus: a winter festival of unrestrained spending

As they had a habit of saying throughout the interstellar empire of “Dune,” the spice must flow. Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives. The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied. Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands. It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way.

Americans with some vague memory of how the system is supposed to work might be wondering what happened to the sober deliberation of budgets, the careful spending of every dollar, and even the basic rules of accounting. Welcome to the new millennium, old-timers! We don’t do things that way any more. Government by perpetual crisis is so much more exciting, and lucrative for the Ruling Class. Now we wait until the hands of the fiscal doomsday clock stand at one minute to midnight, and the political class has to fund everything with “emergency spending bills,” scribbled in blind haste and posted on glitchy websites for public review in a half-hearted ritual of “transparency.” We live in the shadow of the cromnibus, an appropriately clunky word that combines “continuing resolution” emergency tactics with “omnibus spending” irresponsibility. The Cromnibus is a flabby beast a gaping maw and many tentacles to feed itself, but it lacks eyes, ears, and a frontal lobe.

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