Ben Shapiro: $100 billion of disaster relief funds is “overkill”
Shapiro was discussing negotiations to prevent a government shutdown, including disaster relief funds in part for states like Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee that were hit by hurricanes in 2024
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From the December 19, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): So what is the actual position right now with regards to the continuing resolution?
Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board suggests correctly, in lieu of passing a real budget, the House and Senate have agreed on another continuing resolution or CR that will extend through March 14th in the New Year. The only virtue here is the government won't shut down if the continuing resolution passes, and it will give the new GOP Congress a chance to use budget rules to pass a reconciliation bill next year with 51 senate votes, which means Chuck Schumer won't be able to extort more spending if Republicans want at least some of their priorities to pass. But Schumer is going out with a CR bang, and the GOP is once again forced to take it.
Some Republicans want to blame Speaker Johnson for getting too little in exchange. But as long as they refuse to vote for a continuing resolution, then the Speaker is gonna have to go to Democrats in order to pass a continuing resolution or you get a government shutdown. And this is how Schumer likes it.
The GOP House actually passed nearly half of all of their appropriations bills this year. Susan Collins and Patty Murray passed almost all the Senate bills through the Appropriations committee, and then Schumer refused to bring all that to the floor because he likes these giant omnibus crammed down packages. That's how you end up with these giant omnibus packages.
Now what is actually in this package? Well, yes, a bunch of pork. So they could have passed a clean CR, a clean continuing resolution, which just continues the discretionary spending at prior levels basically up until Donald Trump takes office. We've gotten us through the next few weeks. That's what they could have done. They didn't do that. Instead, they decided that they were going to load in a bunch of stuff, including about a $100 billion for disaster relief funds, which is overkill, and $10 billion in farm pork.
And by the way, this is something that many Republicans wanted was this farm pork bill, including Donald Trump, JD Vance. They both wanted that farm bill spending in there.