Fox News host Laura Ingraham said Thursday night on “The Ingraham Angle” that the federal swamp’s $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that President Donald Trump backs is “an embarrassment to the president” and makes her “embarrassed tonight as a Republican.”
The House passed the bill in a 256-167 vote Thursday just hours after lawmakers first received the 2,232-page package, sending it on to the Senate.
The Senate, just after midnight, passed it as well, by a 65-32 vote — averting a government shutdown.
The bill doesn’t defund Planned Parenthood or sanctuary cities and only provides a tiny amount of funding for border fencing, not a border wall — one of Trump’s most iconic campaign promises.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) all backed the omnibus bill.
“The GOP just cannot get its act together,” Ingraham lamented. “My friends — I hate to say this — but as I see it right now tonight, the wall is never going to happen.”
“If the Republicans lose the [2018] midterms, the Democrats will never fund [the wall], and we’ll be reliant on Paul Ryan’s sensors and a few drones and replacement fencing to protect America,” she said.
“This is not what the American people voted for. And you know what really gets me? It’s an embarrassment to the president. He knew how to win this election, and the Republicans — the swamp — want to take it away from him,” Ingraham said.
Ingraham noted that congressional Democrats “are thrilled because they’re about to secure runaway spending that was out of reach even under [former President Barack] Obama.”
“At the end of the day, as the minority party, we feel good about being able to succeed in so many ways,” Schumer said Thursday at a news conference. “We don’t have the House, we don’t have the Senate, we don’t have the presidency — but we produced a darn good bill for the priorities we have believed in.”
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Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a House Freedom Caucus member, told Ingraham on Thursday night that the bill’s passage in the House is “unacceptable.”
“It’s really an insult to get a 2,200-page document and get 16 hours to read it,” said Norman (shown above right). “If you do the math, I have to read 137 pages an hour and digest it. And now we’re on a two-week vacation? Really? The system is broken.”
“We’ve got to make a change, and I’m tired of it,” Norman added. “We simply were not elected to bankrupt this country.”
Richard Goodstein (shown above left), a former adviser to President Bill Clinton and to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, said that Trump “knew how to win the election by saying things that everybody who knew policy knew he couldn’t deliver on.”
Ingraham disagreed, insisting Trump and a GOP-led Congress could deliver on their promises to the American people if they remained firm.
“I’m embarrassed tonight as a Republican,” she said. “The American people demand real accountability. What bang are we getting for this buck here? Is it really going to make all the millennials safer and more prosperous and happier?”
Related: Jubilant Dems Toast GOP’s ‘Freddy Krueger’ Spending Nightmare
“We are saddling the next generation with ever-growing debt. And for what?” Ingraham continued. “If we truly cared about the millennials, we would firstly keep them safe by immediately funding the border wall. Then we would find real cuts throughout the federal budget to offset these radical expenditures so they wouldn’t be stuck with the bill long after that military hardware and that flimsy border fence we’re buying have all rusted away.”
Republicans should be ashamed of themselves and their failure to live up to the sweeping promises they made to the American people, she said.
“We can do better. We must do better, or Republicans do not deserve to be in the majority,” Ingraham said.
PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.
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