Bill Lee: “here we are again: another year of legislative dysfunction capped by an undemocratic, unrepublican process that uses the…”

“here we are again: another year of legislative dysfunction capped by an undemocratic, unrepublican process that uses the threat of another manufactured crisis to impose on an unwilling country the same broken government policies that have repeatedly failed the people they are supposed to serve. The bills moving through Congress today and tomorrow, made up of the omnibus spending bill and the tax extenders package, and the process that produced it are an affront to the Constitution--to the very idea of constitutionalism--and an insult to the American people we were elected to represent. I am not even talking about the substance of the bill, which is bad enough and which I will get to in just a moment. I am talking about the way it was produced. A small handful of leaders from the two parties got together behind closed doors to decide what the Nation's taxing and spending policies will be for the next year. Then, after several weeks, the negotiators emerged, grand bargain in hand, confident the people they deliberately excluded from the policymaking process would now support all 2,242 pages of the legislative leviathan that they cooked up. This is not how a self-governing--or a self-respecting--institution operates, and everyone here knows it. The leaders who presided over these negotiations were elected, just like the rest of us, to represent the people residing in their State or congressional district and not the entire population of the country.…”