Cromnibus and My House GOP All-Star Team

Via Rand Paul

Walter Jones: Washington's idea of a Christmas present: a 1,603 page, 289,861 word, $1.013 trillion spending bill. 

Merry #CRomnibus

House GOP via the Blaze

First of all, I'm sure there are individual legislators in this group who would vote against my preferences on any numbers of issues, but there is a small subset which tends to vote my preferences: Justin Amash, Massie, Jones (NC), Labrador, Rohrabacher, McClintock, and Sanford. Worthy of future note: Sen-elect Cotton and Cantor successor Brat.

Probably the most notable kerfuffle is economic illiterate anti-bank demagogue Cherokee Lizzie Warren who is on the warpath over a post-Dodd Frank fix which would allow the use of derivatives to hedge against loan portfolio. Let's use this year's massive oil market correction (as I write, the WTI benchmark is under $60/barrel). As late as early summer it was selling north of $100/barrel; many shale producers lose money at current prices. Imagine if you are a banker who has written a loan backing  a shale project; you might want to hedge against just such an oil price collapse. Cherokee Lizzie doesn't want banks making use of FDIC guarantees to be "gambling" with derivatives (a type of hedge); the problem is in practice it's difficult to distinguish between hedging and speculation, and so to prohibit the latter, the central planners/economic fascists throw the baby out with the bathwater. Banning hedging basically discourages lending. Don't get me wrong; I don't want taxpayers propping up failed banks. Banks that are badly managed should fail, and I find the whole concept of government-provided deposit insurance morally hazardous. As usual, the populist whores pick the wrong battle; Cherokee Lizzie is trying to blame banks for problems resulting from bad public policy.

There are lots of lobbyist perks to the cromnibus (e.g., see here). The one that particularly annoys me is the funding of OPIC, which is a type of inverted Ex-Im Bank. I obviously dislike the lack of transparency of the process, and some of the lobbyist-influenced reforms treat the symptoms vs. the disease of bad policy, like ObamaCare. I think the Ryan/Murray budgetary benchmarks aren't tight enough; for example, I think DoD should be significantly cut.

Peter Roff has an interesting op-ed in US News, where he argues that the cromnibus is a skillfully drawn bill that cuts enough to be serious, but not deep enough that the Dems can't accept it in lieu of what might happen in the new Congress. In my judgment, not enough to win my endorsement.