Congress has made lots of us angry with its spending bill

As Congress adjourned for the year, it gave us a reminder of the old proverb that Bon Jovi put to music for us:

“Ah, is it just me or does anybody see

The new improved tomorrow isn’t what it used to be

Yesterday keeps comin’ ‘round, it’s just reality

It’s the same damn song with a different melody”

The GOP in control of both houses promised changes in the way Washington works. That didn’t happen, so conservatives decided to toss out their leader in the House of Representatives.

They installed a new guy proclaiming to run things in a way that would allow members to deliver what they had pledged to the voters back home.

They had been elected on the promise they would do something about runaway spending and suffocating national debt.

They also promised to stop President Obama’s use of unconstitutional powers of making law with his pen, applying it to executive orders and achieving measures that Congress would never have authorized.

So with the fear of a government shutdown looming, we get a $1.1 trillion budget bill containing just about everything the left wanted, quickly signed by the president before departing for another taxpayer-funded lavish holiday in Hawaii.

While everyone in the White House heralded it as the best Christmas present ever to advance the policies of liberalism, the rest of us just looked on wondering if there was anything at all to the concept that “We the People” are supposed to be in charge.

The notion that it was possible to stop the growth of the federal government had again been dashed with the very successful way that conservative principles are now systematically stymied by the left.

Outgoing — and many would say “failed” — House Speaker John Boehner, together with his counterpart over in the Senate, had declared the government would never again be shut down.

Such a declaration has the effect of giving the power of Congress over to the minority, so it really doesn’t matter that voters across the country had intended a very different outcome than what has occurred.

It is truly amazing how a Democrat president and the members of his party on Capitol Hill, with the full support of national media entirely friendly to them, have managed to make it the fault of Republicans if the president doesn’t sign popular legislation that reaches his desk.

Amazing because it is actually the minority party that is shutting down the government.

So how does any of this change? The answer is staring us in the face every day now as we head toward elections in the New Year that will ultimately make it possible for the old adage I started this with to be proven wrong.

A Republican president will not veto legislation representing the public will, and maybe — just maybe — we will see the country back on the right track.

But, make no mistake, this is heavy lifting. Hillary Clinton’s confidence in carrying all the states that elected Barack Obama was in full view at the most recent debate that almost nobody watched.

“I am probably still going to pick the flowers and the china for state dinners and stuff like that …” she declared, and then she said she would send Bill on “special missions,” clearly certain of their preordained return to the White House.

In the end, the last thing Congress did this year with the omnibus spending bill could be just the thing that sends the electorate into the mode of taking the advice of Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network.

“I want you to get up right now … stick your head out and yell, I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

This story was originally published December 24, 2015 at 4:57 PM with the headline "Congress has made lots of us angry with its spending bill."