On his Friday radio program, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh expressed disappointment in the House and Senate Republican leaderships for the passage of the end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill.
According to Limbaugh, Republicans should have long seen this coming and could have averted any impasse months ago. Instead he argued they were using that as cover to pass this bill instead of each spending measure individually in regular order.
“Who runs this place?” Limbaugh said. “Who has the majority of seats in this place? Ditto over in the Senate. What is this? Why does the clock always run out on an end-the-of-the-year budget deal when everybody knows months in advance the end of the year budget deal is coming up? How in the world does any of this happen?”
“Maybe that’s a rhetorical question because this is what the Republicans wanted the end result to be,” he continued. “The proof of that is the excuses they’re offering. They don’t have the temerity to say, ‘Hey we love this. This is what we want. This is great for the country. We have bipartisan agreement here.’ I mean, why aren’t they doing that?”
He went on to question the general mindset of some Republicans, including the party’s presidential candidates in addition to its members of Congress. Limbaugh said the effort to show bipartisanship and the way some presidential candidates, including former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), are handling their presidential campaign demonstrates no desire to win the GOP’s base.
“So if you look carefully, they’re doing exactly what they claim they have to do in order to win the presidency,” he added. “You couple this with everything else we know – such as Jeb Bush starting out his primary campaign by saying he intended to win the nomination without the base – it was going to be a marvel of American politics – first ever candidate to win his party’s nomination without the support of his party’s base. They don’t want it. Perfectly clear what is happening here.”
“And of course when they’re called on it, naturally those of us who criticize it are going to be pointed to as the problem,” he continued. “Why is the only Republican in all of Congress who is complaining about this Jeff Sessions? Well, yeah – Cruz is, Rubio did somewhat. Jeff Sessions is really the only guy standing up and complaining about it, warning before it happened, trying to alert people what’s on the verge of happening. Is Sessions the only conservative left in Congress? What happened to all those that were elected in 2010, 2014? I mean they’re there but clearly the leadership is running the show here.”
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