Lame duck go home

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is
threatening to keep the 111th Congress, also known as the Congress
that wouldn’t go away, in session until the new Congress is sworn in.

The ultimate party guest who overstays his welcome
by refusing to leave after the rest of the revelers have long departed, Reid is
threatening to ruin Christmas and New Year’s for those who support limited
government through his antics trying to pass legislation that he and his
cohorts did not have the courage to bring up prior to the November election.

First and foremost on this agenda is passage
of an omnibus spending bill to fund the government through the end of the 2011
fiscal year. The irony of Reid’s insistence on a nine-month continuing
resolution is that the Democratic-controlled Congress did not even attempt to
pass a budget prior to the past election, because it was too hard politically.

Yet, now that they are freed from the burden
of worrying about what the voters think, Reid and friends are insisting on
inflicting their spending priorities on the nation that rejected them at the
polling places just a month and a half ago.

The price tag of the Reid overreach? $1.1
trillion, an increase of $16 billion over 2010’s grossly inflated budget.

Perhaps Reid did not read the news that
Moody’s bond rating service is threatening to lower the credit rating for the
United States government within the next two years due to massive deficit
spending. After all, Reid’s bill only locks in another trillion-dollar annual deficit,
leading us closer to the brink of economic disaster.

Perhaps Reid missed the part of the election
where the voters were demanding that the government tighten its belt and cut
spending, and is trying to spare those poor, newly elected members from the
burden of dealing with the very issue that most of them pledged to tackle.

Perhaps Reid is unaware that his spending
priorities, including fully funding the overwhelmingly rejected Obama
healthcare law, were roundly rejected nationwide.

Of course, Harry Reid is aware of all of
these things and is using the last gasps of Democratic Party control to impose
spending priorities sabotaging the ability of newly elected fiscal
conservatives to control government spending.

The only hope is that Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (Ky.) and the other 41 Republicans are able to hold the fort against
Reid’s pork power play while waiting for the Tea Party cavalry to arrive in
January.

The inconvenient truth for Reid is that our
nation’s leaders no longer have the option of kicking the can down the road on
the budget. If Moody’s drops our nation’s credit rating, we will be forced to
pay billions more dollars in interest payments to countries that finance our
current deficit. Yet Harry Reid would rather pay billions of additional
interest to China and others tomorrow to finance his last-gasp spending spree
today.

Anyone who has woken up in January buried
under credit card debt from a Christmas spending binge knows that the Reid
budget, combined with the additional debt from the tax “compromise,” will
create a payment hangover that our nation simply cannot afford.

It is time for this drunken party guest to go
home. I’ll even volunteer to drive him.