On Friday, December 23rd, I voted against the $1.7 trillion dollar omnibus spending bill. Why? Not because we didn’t have time to read it. That’s a lame excuse. We have methods to digest large bills, and most of the stuff in these bills is expected. Staff within each office and within committees are pouring over the changes to give members a clear picture of what’s in it. Pretty quickly, one can assess whether there’s too many negative aspects of a bill to vote yes. That’s a threshold we consider for every vote. Is there more good than bad? Can we digest the bad stuff or is it too much? That threshold is a bit different for every member. This bill had plenty of bad stuff, not to mention the top line was simply too high. It’s hard to justify an increase in non-defense spending after these same agencies have received trillions in spending since Biden took office, within the “American Rescue Plan,” the infrastructure bill, or the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s plenty more bad things, which you’ve probably already seen all over social media. This should not have passed. The Senate should have blocked it and allowed a GOP House a chance to do better in January.