Mike Lee tells Mark Levin: Only voters can stop the next omnibus

It's up to voters to stop the next omnibus spending bill, U.S. Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, told LevinTV host Mark Levin Sunday.

Levin interviewed Sen. Lee on his weekly Fox News program, "Life, Liberty & Levin." He asked the senator about the process leading up to the passage of the 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill last week, noting that it was written in secret and published 17 hours before the vote, and that members of Congress were not permitted to amend the legislation.

"We vote for our representatives to participate in this process, plus we would like to participate in this process; there's supposed to be various appropriations bills that we can look at and so forth. What do you make of all this?" Levin asked.

"These words are negotiated in private by a small handful of legislative leaders, to the exclusion of everyone else. Meaning, most of the American people are effectively disenfranchised from this process, because their elected senators and representatives are outside of that room where this small handful of leaders is negotiating this bill in private," Lee said.

"By the time it comes out into public, there isn't time to debate it, to discuss it, to amend it, to improve it. There isn't time to receive adequate feedback from the American people, and the members themselves who are being asked to vote on this are themselves not fully aware of what's in it. It's wrong. And it will continue until this process doesn't work."

Lee said that the responsibility of ensuring that this disenfranchising omnibus process stops working lies with the American voter.

"The only way we're going to change this is to make this process, this formula, this barbaric mechanism for funding a $4 trillion government no longer work," Lee said. "It will no longer work when the American people call their senators and representatives and make clear to them they do not want them to vote for a measure that's the result of this kind of [process]. They certainly don't want to vote for increased spending, especially when they themselves don't know and by design cannot know where the spending is going."

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