Be sure to check out the new episode of LIBH, it goes live at 11AM ET!

Rather than the spokespeople insisting that "we simply don't have the votes" to lean out the bill, they could go a long way themselves in helping reduce its size simply by asking the elected representatives that contributed to its size to identify themselves, by name; Then give them an opportunity to speak up publicly as to the specific things they inserted into the bill, and to give their reasons for doing so. When such representatives are called out publicly and asked to explain themselves publicly, people might be amazed at how quickly such a bill shrinks! There needs to be a healthy acknowledgement that in fact, many of the projects and schemes that such representatives want to fund are complete unnecessary, often counterproductive, and would not have even been thought of had there not been extra money made available first! Remember the saying of Ronald Reagan: "Government doesn't find the money for what it needs; It finds a need for the money it has."

The very job of elected representatives - all of them - is to read the bills for themselves, and scrutinize them before voting for them.
There is simply no justification for passing a bloated reconciliation bill that proposes the very same spending levels that the republican majority ran and was elected to cut. They have been elected to end the passage of large bills that conceal treachery and waste. The single appropriations bills, which fund each important area of the government on their own, represent more transparency, more direct accountability to the people, the exposure and elimination of waste and destructive, transformational projects. We now have a republican majority in both houses of Congress, who ran on cutting spending, and more honesty and accountability to the voters through small, individual appropriation bills. The fact that some now insist on continuing what is essentially the "old way" and Biden era spending, and that such bills get presented for a vote before ...