Members of Congress Supporting the Spending Bill Would Rather You Not Know What’s in It for THEM

We’ve seen this circus before: There’s a looming Friday deadline as Congress scrambles to pass a Continuing Resolution to avoid a government shutdown. 

Conservative Republicans, Rep. Chip Roy among them, have been hammering the bill and what it contains:

CAVUTO: “Is Speaker Johnson jeopardizing becoming speaker again?”@chiproytx: “It is not something that is going to earn favor with the conference…What this has now become, is a Christmas tree bill, and it should NOT be moving forward!” pic.twitter.com/8aRwzPDHXG

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 18, 2024

.@chiproytx: “When you get transparency on a bill like this, the American people see it. Now @VivekGRamaswamy and @elonmusk are exposing it. Suddenly, these guys can’t hide. The emperor has no clothes.” pic.twitter.com/RJ4XESKVdB

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 18, 2024

Conservative Republicans don’t like all the spending in the bill, and House Speaker Mike Johnson said he doesn’t either but supports it anyway because it’s the best that can be done: 

During an interview on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning, co-host Steve Doocy pointed to Musk’s response and noted that the only way to pass the bill will be with Democrat support. 

“Well, I was communicating with Elon last night. Elon, Vivek and I are on a text chain together and I was explaining to them the background of this,” Johnson explained. “And Vivek and I talked last night about almost midnight. And he said, ‘Look, I get it.’ And he said, ‘We understand you’re in an impossible position. Everybody knows that.’

“Remember, guys, we still have just a razor-thin margin of Republicans,” Johnson continued. “So any bill has to have Democrat votes. They understand the situation. They said ‘it’s not directed at you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ And I said, ‘guess what, fellas? I don’t either.’”

In one of the above videos Rep. Roy said that there was previously a 72-hour rule to give lawmakers time to read and scrutinize bills, but not this time. For some reason though, there are many in Congress who would rather drop a 1,500-plus page bill and not give members, media and Americans in general time to read it before a vote occurs. There are many, many reasons for that, and among them is what’s in the for members of Congress.

Apparently the authors of the bill are trying to sneak themselves a pay raise:

Congress gives itself a pay raise and opts itself out of Obamacare in the new, 1,547-page, House continuing resolution to keep funding the central government. pic.twitter.com/wLzXWgK9aK

— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) December 18, 2024

Via Politico: 

Hoyer, a former House Democratic leader, acknowledged that some in his caucus are “not happy in some instances” but he expects general unity in voting for the stopgap. 

Rank-and-file lawmakers in both chambers earn $174,000 annual salary, with those in leadership earning more. The maximum potential member pay adjustment in January 2025 under the stopgap spending bill would be 3.8 percent, which would result in a salary of $180,600, an increase of $6,600.

 Must be nice to vote to give yourself a pay raise, especially if the place you work is nearly $40 trillion in debt.

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Editor’s note: We had some tweets in this story indicating that the bill would give Congressional members a 40 percent pay increase when that doesn’t appear to be the case. Those tweets have been removed from this story.