The Congress is wrestling with a Bill About the Border. You might have heard about it. It is a big deal, and they may get around to telling us what is in it this week, right before they vote on it.

We should just leave it at that, since the idea of Senators and Representatives clawing at nearly a thousand pages of legislation is almost ready to be looked at before passage. Cost? They tell us it is $106 Billion, with an eye to reforming the entire immigration process. We have only heard about parts of of it- and it is complex. There are quotas on the number of illegal and undocumented people who will be allowed to cross the Border without consequences, unless the numbers apprehended between what used to be called Ports of Entry soar past some arbitrary number of thousands.

We mention that number just to provide some context to the rest of the budget. The Commerce Department is an example. Gina M. Raimondo is the Secretary of Commerce and “Principal Advisor to the President on the US Economy.”

She is a former Governor (Rhode Island) and the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Things start to get strange almost immediately, since she was not sworn in by the Chief Executive but by the VP three years ago. Her annual budget is supposed to be $12.3 Billion, or just about ten percent of what is in the Border Bill.

There is an additional $4 Billion in “Mandatory Spending” that is not specified and on auto-pilot to fulfill a simple but vital mission — to “spur good-paying jobs, empower entrepreneurs to innovate and grow, and help American workers and businesses compete.” We are not sure exactly what she has recommended, but with that inconsequential tenth, we can see there are some problems in magnitude and focus.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is a key negotiator on the border deal. He said last week that a text of a compromise bill- the one that makes it “Bi-partisan-” could be ready to go to the floor of the Senate “in the coming days.”

He told CNN that a deal has been made across the aisle and that they are “sort of finalizing the last pieces of text right now. This bill could be ready to be on the floor of the United States Senate next week. But it won’t be if the opposition decides that they want to keep this issue unsettled for political purposes.”

Sitting here on the safe side of the Potomac, it is our position that the numbers should be closer to “zero,” but something unusual has happened and largely without comment. Why are we permitting this? The people who are supposed to be enforcing existing law- the one that was passed and signed by the Chief Executive- should be ignored and accompanied by a plea for more money and new laws.

There has been little commentary about what is in the bill, which tells you how things work these days. Legislation used to be subject to a thing called “debate” under the dome of the Capitol. The media would report on how the process was going, giving citizens the ability to contact their Representatives to let them know that we are not in favor of the mass migration of millions.

Those days are long gone. The entire Federal Budget- the one that racks up $4.028 Trillion bucks- is floating around in what knowledgable people call a “Continuing Resolution.” That is where the dozen regular Appropriations Bills are rolled up into one gigantic piece of legislation. One of them is in effect now, since we sort of blew through the standard budget limits last October and are currently only funded through the next few weeks.

We have enjoyed the quote from a former Speaker of the House about the passage of a Health Care Bill in 2010. That was intended to introduce a new program that would manage close to 20% of the Gross Domestic Product. That number is a little hard to figure, since the Government tries to report by quarter in order to make the number of the deficit seem smaller.

According to one source, adding the quarters together, the total is around $27.36 Trillion a year. 20% of that is a chunk of cash amounting to over $5 Trillion bucks. The relevant quote, evaluated by Fact Checkers at Snopes as only sort of true. Their reading? “Yeah, she said it, but it was without context which we will provide to make this astonishingly expensive item completely plausible.”

But here it was in a manner that explains today’s legislative process: “”We [need] to pass the bill in order to find out what [is] in it.” Snopes provided the necessary punctuation corrections. This is not intended to be critical of the process, since standard operating procedure these days is to wrap things up in what they call “Omnibus” Bills, which is one size fits all. The whole Federal Budget, discretionary and non-discretionary, is rolled up into one bill so vast that the only people who have actually read it are the lobbyists who spent months putting it together.

It is a curious sort of development since it occurred virtually without comment. Things are much more complex these days than they were in the days they framed our Republic. Like many other complicated issues these days, the process has been outsourced to people who actually understand it.

That is similar to the process underway at Socotra House. We try to stay on top of simple technical developments, like “digital toolbars” that enabled us to enter pictures in these missives. Or change fonts. Or make some of the more outré phrases appear in italics. You know, the way things used to work.

Now they don’t. We will spend some time today attempting to get the digits back, so if things look a little simpler in the morning missive, you may see something new. We have found some editors who wish to pay us lavishly if we let them do their digital best while we are working on something else, like soliciting good will and cash donations.

Like Congress. (We could use some italics!)

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com