There are at least 5 things Congress calls “spending.”
1. Budgets from budget committee.
2. Authorizations to spend money from various committees.
3. Appropriations from approps committee.
4. Entitlements/nondiscretionary spending by law.
5. Debt limit.
BUDGET
It’s an aspirational guideline that typically covers 10 years. It’s reported from the House Budget committee. Years 2 thru 10 are routinely ignored. It considers discretionary and non-discretionary spending. Ironically it’s not very relevant to Congressional spending.
AUTHORIZATIONS
An example would be the Science committee authorizes $5 billion per year for 6 years to be spent at NASA. This makes it legal for Congress to spend UP TO that amount of money.
Surprisingly many government departments are not authorized, and operate on waivers.
APPROPRIATIONS
This is where most of the action is.
Don’t like something? Don’t fund it! Congress is supposed to pass 12 separate approps bills, but most often devolves into passing an omnibus or CR. These bills are due Oct 1, and if not passed, the government shuts down.
NON-DISCRETIONARY
These are government programs like Social Security and Medicare that are not affected by annual appropriations bills. They do not stop during a government shut down. Historically, they constitute about 3/4 of government spending, and they are rarely modified.
DEBT LIMIT
When the prior statutory debt limit is reached, Congress, in order to keep spending money it doesn’t have, typically authorizes debt to be incurred for which Americans will be liable. The debt limit can be raised a certain amount or suspended for a certain time.
If you have followed my thread to this point, you now understand more about the ways in which Congress spends money than I did when I first got elected.
Unfortunately the mainstream media and my colleagues frequently conflate these different methods Congress uses to spend money.
In order to simplify, I’ve left out some details of Congressional process, and in doing so have opened myself up to valid critiques of my technical correctness, but I hope at this point to have established a framework for now conveying my message:
Conditioning an increase in the debt limit upon opaquely negotiated concessions from the President is one way to get things done.
But we can and should control spending more transparently and precisely using powerful Congressional tools such as the upcoming appropriations bills.
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🧵 How does Lucy pull the football from Charlie Brown in Congress?
This $100 billion bill that moves us to the brink of war around the globe…
began as a House bill to help VETERANS get reimbursed for emergency care!
🧵 The Veterans’ bill, HR 815, passed the House as a Veterans’ bill and went to the Senate.
The Senate stripped every word from it, inserted the foreign aid supplemental, and sent it back to the House.
The House will vote on 4 separate bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, +other).
🧵 After the 4 separate bills pass the House tomorrow, a tricky Rule that passed in Rules Committee last night converts them into amendments to the Senate supplemental… HR 815, the bill that started in the House as a Veterans’ bill !
There was a vote on a resolution that would have allowed FISA, as well as 6 amendments to it, including a warrant requirement amendment, and three other pieces of legislation to come to the floor.
On partisan procedural votes like this, Democrats reflexively vote no and Republicans typically vote yes.
19 Republicans voted with all the Democrats to stop everything from coming to the floor today, including the warrant amendment to FISA.
Many of us who are adamantly opposed to warrantless surveillance voted for the resolution, wanting to get a recorded vote on warrants, and recognizing the Speaker can otherwise suspend the rules and bring anything to the floor without a resolution, like he did with the omnibus.
🚨 CDC discloses they have at least a dozen medical industry LOBBYING GROUPS, officially SERVING alongside 15 voting members, on ACIP, the supposedly independent vaccine board that just approved the 9th booster shot.
Here is CDC’s list of “liaison members” serving on the vaccine advisory. I will include publicly available lobbying activity from these organizations in subsequent posts. But pick any one of them and search for their name + lobbying, and you can research this yourself.
BTW, @CNN has the temerity to call these folks independent vaccine advisers. Let’s see about that…
We just scored a big victory against the woke takeover of American financial organizations. After Chairman Jordan and I called them out for potential violations of antitrust law, major corporations dropped their involvement with an Environment, Social, and Governance ESG group. reuters.com/sustainability…
Chairman Jordan and I (as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust) wrote
@BlackRock, @Vanguard_Group, @StateStreet, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero about their ESG coordination.
This is one of the letters:
.@Jim_Jordan, @RepDanBishop, and I warned these companies that their ongoing efforts "coordinating their members' agreements to ‘decarbonize’ their assets under management and reduce emissions to net zero" were potentially illegal under the Sherman Act.
The Judiciary committee passed my bill (HR 6824) requiring FBI to provide demographic data of persons ruled ineligible to purchase a firearm by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
False denials disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities.
The complete debate over my bill, the amendment discussion, and the roll call vote on passage are shown here unedited.
Thank you Chairman Jim Jordan for advancing this legislation and thank you Ranking Member Nadler and Representative Jackson Lee for supporting this bill.
As of 2024, the FBI reported over 2,000,000 denials of firearm purchases under the NICS background check system, but the vast majority of these denials were false positives. Research indicates NICS produces false denials for black males by a factor of 3-1 compared to white males.
On 6/7/23 the House Judiciary Committee interviewed Steven D’Antuono, former FBI Assistant Director in Charge of the DC field office.
Most of the interview covered topics such as the warrant served at Mar a Lago, but I asked questions about the J6 pipe bombs.
If you are just becoming familiar with the rapidly collapsing narrative of the J6 pipe bombs, I suggest reading @DarrenJBeattie’s comprehensive and insightful coverage of this topic.
The purpose of this thread is to post the original transcript of my interview with the FBI ADIC.
In addition to reading this transcript, you might want to watch my questioning of the ATF director and the FBI director. I also suggest watching the video of the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb.
I’ll post those three videos at the end of this thread.