Mick Mulvaney Blasts GOP Budget Chicanery

LAWMAKER ACCUSES GOP OF THROWING SPENDING RESTRAINT “OUT THE WINDOW”

|| By FITSNEWS ||  It’s been a rough year for U.S. Rep. Mick Mulvaney.  After standing up to liberal U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner in 2013, Mulvaney punked out this go-round and supported Boehner’s reelection.

It was a tremendously disappointing move … and he’s been getting considerable grief for it (as he should).

This week, though, Mulvaney is back on the side of right – blasting his fellow “Republicans” (Boehner included) for the super shady spending plan they passed last week.  And he’s not just venting his spleen via press release, Mulvaney actually got his lamentations published in The Wall Street Journal.

“Republicans in the House and Senate passed budgets that took the Budget Control Act of 2011 and threw it out the window,” Mulvaney wrote.  “Many defense hawks think this was a win.  The truth is that the GOP lost.”

We agree ..

For those of you who’ve already forgotten, in 2011 “Republicans” and Democrats in Congress approved an immediate ramp-up in deficit spending ($2.4 trillion – which they blew through in seventeen months) in exchange for $2.1 trillion in so-called “spending cuts” over the next decade.

The deal was a joke – and we said so.  Not only that, we predicted Washington, D.C. politicians would never actually implement these promised “cuts” (which again, aren’t really cuts – just reductions in excess growth).

And we were right …

But “Republicans” pretended to stick to their word by shoving billions of dollars in new defense spending into an “emergency” fund – one that doesn’t show up as new defense spending.

“With fiscal concerns no longer in vogue, House Republicans broke the statutory caps of the Budget Control Act and did so in a way that wasn’t honest,” Mulvaney wrote.  “Instead of making the arguments for changing the law, the House budget used an off-budget fund, the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, to increase military spending.”

Indeed … and not only that, this is precisely the same budget gimmick GOP leaders rebuked as recently as last year.  Which makes House “Republicans” about as consistent in appropriating this money as warmongers John McCain and Lindsey Graham are in doling it out.

Astoundingly, Mulvaney was the only member of the South Carolina congressional delegation to oppose the budget … so-called fiscal conservatives Mark Sanford and Jeff Duncan joined middling GOP lawmaker Trey Gowdy and liberal “Republicans” Tom Rice and Joe Wilson in supporting this nonsense.

Ah, the war propaganda really is working, isn’t it?

“Until this budget, Republicans were beginning to convince people that they were serious about reducing spending,” Mulvaney concluded.  “GOP budgets in recent years have made hard decisions on everything from defense to Medicare to food stamps.  Republicans had begun making the argument that all spending is subject to scrutiny.  Now there is a new message: Republicans will cut things they don’t like, but they lack that same conviction on things they like.”

Well …

We’d dispute Mulvaney’s contention that the GOP ever “got serious” on spending restraint (see what we mean HERE),  but he’s absolutely right about the GOP “lacking conviction.”

Once again … why did people think electing “Republican” majorities in the U.S. Congress was going to change anything?

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