Not much has changed since this story appeared in The Hill in December 2010:

Senate Democrats have filed a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that would fund the government through fiscal year 2011, according to Senate GOP sources.

"The attempt by Democrat leadership to rush through a nearly 2,000-page spending bill in the final days of the lame-duck session ignores the clear will expressed by the voters this past election,"[Sen. John] Thune said in a statement. "This bill is loaded up with pork projects and should not get a vote. Congress should listen to the American people and stop this reckless spending.”

Four years later, conservatives are rightly dismayed by the passage of the $1.1-trillion CRomnibus bill, in a lame duck session, that “ignores the clear will expressed by the voters this past election.”

The Wall Street Journal, nominally conservative on its editorial pages, ran an article in the “objective news” on its front page, praising the deal.  The story was titled “A Rare Bipartisan Success for Congress:

Republican leaders in both the House and Senate shepherded the bill over the objection of their disgruntled conservative wings, an assertion of power by the party establishment after years of heckling by the back benches…

“Most Republicans agreed…that this wasn’t the right time for them to flex their new political muscles—that will come next year when they control the entire Congress,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic organization. “They’d rather go home for Christmas than join Ted Cruz in a crusade to shut down the government.” […]

Even though the transfer of majority power to the GOP doesn’t take place until January, the lame-duck session showed early signs that the tea-party wing of the GOP is waning in influence as the party prepares to take more responsibility for running the government.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) said Sunday on CBS. “Republicans should know, unless we can show the American that we can govern, then we’re not going to elect a Republican president in 2016.”

The WSJ reporter and Republican establishment figures like John McCain assume that “governing” means negotiating a bipartisan compromise.  What it really means is abandoning the interests of voters.  Bipartisanship is not admirable when the opposing party is a pack of jackals and weasels intent on using unscrupulous means to push a leftist agenda that expands government spending year after year.  Bankrupting and destabilizing the country, possibly inspiring a socialist revolution, is not what American voters said in November that they want.

Harry Reid, described by Peggy Noonan as “a small-town undertaker who never gets around to telling you the cost of the casket,” has been Senate majority leader for the past eight years.  His tenure, supported by Obama, is characterized by parliamentary strong-arm tactics, sneaky late-night votes, and a refusal for nearly four years of his term to fulfill the Senate’s legal duty to pass a budget resolution.  Reid allowed the Senate to vote on the budget only as funding deadlines approached – the dreaded “fiscal cliff,” when the government supposedly would run out of money and be forced to shut down.  Instead of following the budget process defined by law, the federal government has been funded by a series of continuing resolutions – temporary budgets – negotiated in frenzied last-minute showdowns.

The process was deliberate, forcing weak Republicans to compromise, resulting in the largest federal budgets in history.  Under President Obama’s regime, the federal budget has been consistently above $3.5 trillion, and the federal debt has exploded from $10.0 trillion in 2008 to $18.2 trillion in 2014, a 45% increase in six years.

When Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and others made a stand in the 2013 budget negotiations, the repulsively vindictive Obama administration expended extra money, posting federal agents to block access to open-air monuments and overlooks where tourists might dare challenge the Stasi by snapping a photo of Mount Rushmore.

Elizabeth Warren made similar threats, but instead of being demonized for trying to shut down the government, she was praised in the press for her “feisty economic populism.”

One result of the confusion sowed by the Reid junta is that talking heads repeat the $1.1 trillion figure without any knowledge of what it means.  Some even emphasize, “1.1 trillion with a T!”  For one, the CRomnibus funds only nine months of federal spending, which would be  $1.47 T annualized.  Under a normal budgeting process, we would be able to compare the current budget to previous spending.  The 2014 budget request was $3.77 trillion, and the actual expenditures were  $3.5 trillion.  Dozens of articles fail to mention that $1.1 trillion represents discretionary spending, around 29% of the federal budget, which is projected to rise to a record $3.8 trillion in 2015.

On the Laura Ingraham show, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) got it right:

We just had an historic election where the Harry Reid Senate was completely repudiated by American voters. … That new Senate freshly endorsed by the American people will convene in just three weeks. Why in the world we decided to negotiate with Harry Reid and Barbara Mikulski a spending plan to lock in their priorities for the first nine months of the new Republican Congress is absolutely beyond me. If there had simply been a short term continuing resolution to put it into January and then we’d be negotiating with the Republicans, the newly admitted Republican Senate, not Harry Reid. Now we’ve allowed the cold dead hand of Harry Reid and Barbara Mikulski to steer the first nine months of the new Republican Congress.

Far from being a “bipartisan success,” Republicans in Congress unnecessarily ceded power to lame-duck Democrat reptiles.