The Senate passed a massive $1.7 trillion spending bill Thursday that is packed full of congressional pork and finances federal agencies through September. The spending bill also sends nearly $50 billion in additional funds to Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to the floor Wednesday night, begging for more money in a dramatic address to a joint meeting of Congress.
The bill, which is 4,155 pages long, includes about $772.5 billion for domestic programs and $858 billion for defense and would finance federal agencies through the fiscal year at the end of September.
Most Republicans were not happy about the bill, targeting unnecessary spending hidden in the thousands of pages. Utah Senator Mike Lee compared the lengthy omnibus bill to the Bible and said it was nearly four times as long to read.
‘The Bible is a long book and it’s 12,000 pages long. And so going through [the omnibus bill], reading through this. which – the Bible is actually interesting and full of stories that you can follow, much more interesting than this,’ Lee said.
Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul agreed, posting a picture of the actual bill captioned, ‘I wonder how long it would take the clerk to read this…’
At a press conference on Tuesday Paul detailed that the spending bill is sure to put a bigger financial burden on Americans that are already struggling to make ends meet,
‘The American people don’t want this they’re sick and tired of it. They’re paying for it through the nose with inflation. Adding a trillion dollars to the deficit will simply fuel the fires that are consuming our wages and consuming our retirement plan. It’s a terrible system.’
Paul is correct, the American people do not want the spending bill to pass as shown in a poll conducted by Elon Musk on Twitter where 71% of the more than 3 million people who voted said the massive spending bill should not be passed,
Should Congress approve the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2022
Musk tweeted the results to Mitch McConnel and Chuck Schumer but both ignored the poll.
The bill passed by a vote of 68-29 and now goes to the House for a final vote before it can be sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
The spending bill is supported by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell who faced pushback from his colleagues who say they were rushed and forced to vote with out having time to read the bill,
“There has not been enough time for a single person to have read this entire bill. The bill and process ignores soaring inflation, rising interest rates and our ballooning debt of $31 trillion,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “Enough is enough.”
