Food safety and GITMO included in spending bill

  While reading this article about the end of the year “catch-all” spending bill which the House passed yesterday I noticed two aspects of this bill that captured my attention. It turns out that this bull is a little more than just a spending bill as Democrats look to push through a couple of controversial issues unbeknownst to the American people.

  The first issue I would like to write about is GITMO; the Congress blocked Barack Obama’s plan to close GITMO and bring the terrorists held there to American soil for imprisonment and trial by denying the regime the funding to do so. (The same can be done to defund healthcare reform next year.) This could signal the death blow to Barack Obama’s campaign promise to shut down GITMO.

   Barack Obama and the Department of Justice were not happy with this provision in the spending bill, claiming that the Congress is interfering with the administration’s attempt at bringing these terrorists to justice. Many times while on the campaign trail Barack Obama promised to close down GITMO because it was a recruiting tool for the terrorists, and one of the first thing that he did when he took office was to sign an executive order that called for the closing of GITMO.

  But this executive order was only a symbolic gesture aimed at the far left because the order never included a plan on how to close the controversial detention center. Many people doubted that GITMO would be closed, but this executive order managed to take GITMO off the center stage, and what was once a huge agenda item of the far left was relegated to distant memory.

  So now GITMO will remain open and the Democrats in the House managed to ensure it stayed open without drawing national attention to the fact that they have denied to keep one of Barack Obama’s campaign promises. Barely a word of this was mentioned in the media, and nobody is happier about that than Barack Obama.

  Okay, that was the good news which I read about in the spending bill. Now onto issue number two; the bad news:

   Earlier this lame duck session, Harry Reid and the Senate passed a controversial “food safety” bill called S510. They silently tried to pass this bill before the American people could find out what was in it. (sounds quite a bit like the healthcare reform bill, doesn’t it?) This bill gathered little to no attention in the media and that is the way that the Democrats wanted it, but it was controversial nonetheless and it was met with stiff opposition all across the blogosohere. The Senate managed to pass the bill, but Harry Reid and the Senate forgot that the constitution requires all revenue bills to start in the House–the bill was technically unconstitutional and the House rejected it and sent it back to the Senate.

  Harry Reid’s total lack of understanding of the constitution appeared to be fatal to S510 because it looked as though there would not be enough time for the Senate to fix its bill and then reconcile it with the House bill, but that is where the spending bill comes in. In a slick move, Democrats in the House attached the food safety bill to the spending bill in an effort to expedite the process of passing the controversial bill. It now looks as if S510 will pass into law in the same manner this bill was debated–stealthily and without the knowledge of a majority of Americans.

  This was a very sneaky move on a bill that has been dealt with quietly from the get go, and it is a perfect example of why the American people threw the Democrats out of the Congress last month. In my opinion they can’t adjourn fast enough. These were two controversial issues which should have stood separately to be judged on their own merits, but the Congress was not interested in letting the American people see what they were up to.

  Depending which side of the political aisle you are on, you probably have a problem with either the GITMO aspect of the spending bill, or the S510 aspect of the bill because this is one last example of the Congress being unwilling to fulfill one more of Barack Obama’s campaign promises–transparency.

  They have done everything they can to hide these two issues from the American people before they head out the door. When that door opens again many of these members of the Congress will no longer be there, and that won’t be a minute too soon.