“Let me tell what you you do. You pass each bill that funds the government separately and in those bills if you object to bureaucratic regulations of one kind or another, or presidential actions of one kind or another, you literally write in to the spending bill restrictions” he stated.
McConnell explained “if you do each bill separately, you take away from the president the argument that you’re shutting down the government. Because if he vetoes a particular bill, you haven’t shut down the government. You may have entered into an argument about a portion of the government and its activities, but you haven’t brought the whole government to a halt. In recent years, with Democrats in control in the Senate, we haven’t passed individual appropriation bills. So we’ve ended up balling them all up into one big bill, which gives the president all the power to make the argument that you’re shutting down the government.”
He concluded “what we intend to do next year is to pass each of the 12 bills that fund the government separately, put them on his desk separately, and in each of them, where there is bureaucratic overreach, we will be writing into the bills what’s called riders that restrict the activity. Now, he may veto the bill, but, if he does, it doesn’t have cataclysmic impact all across the entire government.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.