Your correspondent is always up for – and 99.44% of the time sides with Freedom Caucus types in favoring – a principled shutdown of the federal government. 

But conservative complaints about this year’s Trump-Musk-Vivek-derailed “cramnibus” legislation – and the slimmed-down, Orange Man-endorsed alternative they decisively deep-sixed – ring hollow here.

Dudes (and Dudettes). These pages provided the playbook to avoid this mess – or at least avert blame for it – coming out of a similar holiday dramedy two years back. 

Remember that joyous season’s $1.65 trillion, 4,155-page “omnibus” appropriations bill, described on these pages as “stuffed like a Christmas goose not only with 7,500 earmarks totaling $16 billion but also with stealth substantive statutory changes?”

This virtual ink-stained wretch rightfully encouraged enraged House Republicans – betrayed hours in advance of reassuming the majority by 18 of their Senate party brethren – not to get mad, but to get even. By engaging in a long-abandoned responsibility of the legislative branch: oversight.

Where have these conservatives been since, say, 1997? That was the last time all 12 appropriations bills were passed in time for the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. Much less following the “regular order” regularly promised – in the breach – by Republican leadership, including in-depth program-by-program reviews, hearings, public markups, and subcommittee, full committee and floor votes.

Someone please tell this hardened cynic – and veteran of eight years in congressional offices who ultimately fled Capitol Hill declaring he couldn’t write one more speech about balancing the budget – what single focus is more important than responsibly fulfilling this basic constitutional duty?

Any imaginable response other than “none” is 70-times-7 percent the wrong answer.

Yeah, yeah. This scribe has suggested that the top priority for government in general should be to promote traditional family formation: to Make America Married Again (MAMA). (The key to Making America Wealthy Again and Making America Healthy Again.)

But much of the work in achieving that objective is to clear out the permanent Potomac perversion-pushers and social engineers whose main agenda consists of federally funding the destruction of the entire social order in favor of sexual aberration and civic anarchy.

Case in point: over multiple decades, conservatives have failed to defund a single government contractor that has played a singular role in the perpetuation of a social contagion that has not only snuffed out 60+ million lives in the womb but also helped hollow out the institution of matrimony. Planned Parenthood, with all the stench of scandals from marketing baby-murder to minors to peddling fetal parts, still stands, and rakes in hundreds of millions a year from your government.

Day, night, weekends, holidays over the past two years of this 118th Congress, conservatives – if not all House Republicans – could have been calling every such contractor, agency honcho, foreign-aid funneling and illegal-immigrant-coddling NGO, rent-seeker and corporate welfare queen before every conceivable House committee and subcommittee. 

And making them justify, under oath and on-the-record, why taxpayers and other everyday citizens in far-flung corners of the empire are being taxed, regulated, audited, investigated, censored, canceled, inconvenienced and otherwise afflicted for their financial benefit and power trips.

Had this process taken place every possible hour since the January 2023 omnibus(t), the case for a “clean continuing resolution” or a shutdown would have been made by now. So why hasn’t it? 

Because Congress’s dirty little not-so-secret secret is that its main business isn’t the people’s business, and hasn’t been for a long time.

It’s getting reelected. 

Commentators complaining about the cramnibus’s meager proposed congressional pay raise missed the point entirely in claiming that Congresscritters don’t work many days. In fact, they toil and travel from pillar to post almost daily, from early in the morning till late in the evening.

When lawmakers aren’t barnstorming their districts in a continuous effort to stir up support before the local Kiwanis or at town halls, they’re sitting for or calling into endless interviews with every 250W radio station in every burg or elbowing each other to get on Fox or Newsmax. 

And even more so, those days, nights, weekends and holidays that should be devoted to overseeing spending and making tough policy calls?  They’re spent instead poring over donor lists and making tiresome fundraising calls – a task said to take up 50% or more of legislators’ time, often in cramped cubicles in nearby party headquarters. 

There wouldn’t be a need for a DOGE if Congress, and even just conservatives in its lower chamber, had been as dogged and diligent about daily dishing the details about an increasingly omnipresent Nanny State as about their desperate “dialing for dollars.”

Government “efficiency” isn’t the issue here. It’s about, to repeat, downsizing Uncle Sam to the point where the appropriations process gets manageable again – and where the stakes get reduced – by dumping programs and dollars down to the states for a reasonable transition period, and then taking away the punch bowl for good.

Until congressional conservatives get down and dirty on a daily basis about the business of whittling the bloat or simply blowing the whistle, spare this commentator the annual grandstanding. He’s heard – and written – it all before.

Bob Maistros, a regular contributor to Issues & Insights, is a former speechwriter to three U.S. senators, the 1984 Reagan campaign and numerous high-profile executives. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.