Vote Alert: Raise Debt Limit by $1.5T and Increase Spending

The Bipartisan Budget Agreement of 2015 (H.R. 1314) represents the convergence of everything that is wrong in Washington and is a prime example of the engendered permanent growth of the federal government. This bill married a blank check of approximately $1.5 trillion in debt suspension with a two-year budget plan that placed the final nail in the coffin of the 2011 Budget Control Act, which cut government spending for the first time in years. At a time when spending is already slated to increase by another $250 billion in 2016, this deal busts the budget caps by $112 billion. In classic Enron-style accounting, the hodgepodge of "offsets" are either notional, intangible, or scheduled to take effect almost ten years from now and in typical Washington fashion, unlikely to ever come to fruition. In addition, this bill bails out the broken Disability Insurance program with $150 billion from Social Security retirement benefits - without enacting any durable and verifiable reforms that address the systemic flaws in the program which have made this program a dependency-inducing Ponzi scheme rife with fraud. Finally, this budget bill fails to exact a single policy concession from Obama on the major issues of our time - immigration enforcement, Planned Parenthood, EPA regulations, the Iran deal, etc. - and takes the power of the purse off the table as leverage against any potential executive overreach for the remainder of the Obama presidency. The bill was passed on October 30, 2015 in a roll call vote of 64-35.

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Conservative position: NO