By Jessica Anderson at Heritage Action For America – March 14, 2022
Congress moved an omnibus through both chambers, but you were defended by a strong group of conservative senators and representatives. Here are the updates for this week:
Congress Passes an Omnibus
With government funding slated to run out this past Friday, the House and Senate scrambled to pass a bill to keep the lights on and avoid a shutdown of Congress’s own making.. We have been warning conservatives for months that an omnibus appropriations bill was likely and would be bad – unfortunately, we were right.Written out of view of Americans and the rest of Congress, an exclusive group of leaders from both parties dumped a bill almost 3,000 pages long and costing an eye-popping $1.5 trillion taxpayer dollars on the House floor with less than 24 hours for members to read the bill before the vote.Heritage Action key voted against the legislation, urging lawmakers to vote no.The bill failed to rescind Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine mandates that have ousted our service members and fired our healthcare workers, advanced Biden’s climate policies, and included over $4 billion dollars worth of earmarks so lawmakers could bring their pet projects to fruition in their home states. Unrelated to government funding, the bill also jammed a version of the Violence Against Women Act which threatens American values such as our Second Amendment rights and fails to protect women from predators who may identify as a woman and gain access to facilities and programs alongside battered women. The bill even gives the Left exactly what they want by dramatically increasing the IRS’s budget to almost $13 billion, the same agency that under the last Democrat president targeted conservative Americans.Oh yeah, and with energy prices at record highs, the omnibus even pushed an earmark tackling racism in our energy system. You can’t make this stuff up.Lots of Republican members who voted yes will point to the national security funding, but the way Speaker Pelosi wrote the rules for this vote ensured that a vote for the national security provisions was also a vote for the whole bill. Read our key vote to see how she did this.It’s never been more clear to Americans that Washington is out of touch and not representing hard working Americans. This trillion dollars plus spending package comes at a time when Americans are reeling from Biden’s failed economic policies that have stuck us with record inflation and gas that tops well over $4 a gallon.Even though this bill passed, many conservative senators and representatives heard your voice and stood up for you. More than half of GOP senators stood with you!Be sure to thank them!
