With the recent passage of Congress’ latest omnibus monstrosity, the government avoided a shutdown, and all it cost taxpayers was $1.7 trillion. What a deal, right?

Despite Republicans being just days away from taking control in the House, and with it, the power of the purse, a group of GOP senators joined hands with Democrats to sign off on Joe Biden’s agenda for the next ten months. It was just the latest betrayal of their voters, preceded by the passage of a gun control bill and a flawed bill to federalize gay marriage.

It wasn’t just the topline cost that was outrageous, though. Dives into the content of the spending package revealed mountains of wasteful spending, from funding LGBT “pride centers” to paying for pointless studies into whether Thanos could snap the universe out of existence (yes, that Thanos).

But this is the federal government we are talking about, and as ludicrous as things already were, you could always count on things getting dumber. According to Ed Lawrence of Fox news, because no one was willing to adjust their schedule, the physical copy of the omnibus bill will now have to be flown to Joe Biden, who is currently vacationing in St. Croix, so he can sign it.

A White House Official tells me the Omnibus Bill is in possession of the White House. It has to be signed by Dec 30th. The Official says at some point it will be transported to St Croix for POTUS to sign to make the Dec 30th deadline. #POTUS

— Edward Lawrence (@EdwardLawrence) December 29, 2022

If you were writing a Saturday Night Live skit, you couldn’t come up with something better than that. Our government is so incompetent, bloated, and wasteful that it passed a bill that wasn’t ready to be signed and is now having to fly it to the Caribbean because our do-nothing president refused to wait a day before heading out on his umpteenth vacation since taking office.

And that’s all going to happen on the dime of taxpayers. Think about that. The omnibus bill, which is just 4,000 inanimate pages, is going to have a better, more expensive winter vacation than you are. If that’s not the perfect description of everything wrong with our government, I don’t know what is.

Sure, you can barely afford groceries, but could we really expect Joe Biden to stay in Washington an extra day in order to fulfill the duties of his office? All he had to do here was wait one extra day, and he couldn’t even do that. We’ve often joked on this site that we don’t have a president, but really, we don’t have a president.

Try to imagine the outrage that would ensue if Donald Trump took a Caribbean vacation during a deadly winter storm (which is bad enough) and then had a $1.7 trillion boondoggle flown to him to sign because he couldn’t be bothered to move his vacation back a day. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the legacy press would have been overwhelming. There would have been dozens of stories written about how elitist and wasteful such a move is. CNN would have lost its ever-loving mind.

The current political moment we are all suffering through is just so parodical. It’s like our leaders go out of their way to flaunt their excesses while doing their utmost to waste taxpayer money, and that has a very “late-republic” feel to it.