Some Republicans have serious concerns with the COVID relief legislation coming through Congress, and they have good reason to.

The relief is coming through the $1.4 trillion government funding bill that is making its way through Congress as we speak. The package, yet another omnibus spending bill, is roughly 5,400 pages of legislation that no one will read all of but everyone should read all of. At least, everyone in Congress should.

Omnibus bills are one of the worst failures of the legislative branch that allows for parties to slip in unrelated spending for the sake of getting pet projects done at home. They are nice little ways for legislative members to get some love from the folks back home, for special interests to get back some of what they’ve spent lobbying money on, and for politicians to pander to certain groups all so they can say they’ve done something.

It’s an unhealthy practice because Republicans and Democrats know that there is a spending problem – they love to preach about it when the opposite party is in power. Neither side wants to address it seriously when it comes down to actually voting to reduce spending, but they love yelling about it.

COVID relief should be its own bill, or even series of bills (one for individual relief, one for small business relief, one for state and local government, etc.). The government funding bill should also be piecemeal, with Congress voting on and debating each government agency’s budget individually.

None of this will happen, however, so long as the same broken politics of Washington D.C. continue to go on unchecked.

This was, by the way, something the current/outgoing administration was supposed to put a stop to. The stupid behavior of politicians doing what they always do with no accountability is exactly the type of swamp-like thing Trump was supposedly elected to put a stop to.

Alas.