When President Trump was elected, I promised that I would call things as I see them and support him on an issue-by-issue basis.  For the most part, I feel that Donald Trump has done a good job of advancing conservative policy, but I view it as my duty to criticize him when he is wrong.  For instance, I was part of a group of conservative students who criticized his response to the white supremacist rally in Virginia last summer.  I publicly stated that I believe that Dreamers should be protected from deportation (now the issue of DACA as an executive order is different), and I have criticized his trade policies on numerous occasions since he became a candidate for President.  Unfortunately, this omnibus spending bill is another situation in which I have no choice but to criticize the president.

President Trump, like most Republicans, campaigned on generally reducing spending. He also campaigned on defunding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions.  However, even with Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, and with a Republican president, Congress just passed and signed an omnibus spending bill that continues massive levels of spending and does nothing to stop the flow of money to Planned Parenthood. Students for Life calculated that 94% of the organization’s pregnancy-related services are abortions, and that contrary to popular belief, some federal money actually can eventually find its way to funding abortions despite a federal prohibition on directly funding abortion. This is because funding other services at Planned Parenthood frees up the money that they would have used on those other programs to be spent on abortion instead.  

Additionally, the passed bill was a whopping 2,232 pages released the night before the House was to vote on it, so conservative lawmakers had no time to read the entirety of the bill and clearly formulate additional objections.  What conservatives did know by the vote, we did not like. The conservative Heritage Foundation tweeted that the bill was “everything that is wrong with Washington” and that it increases our spending by even more than any “Obama-era spending cap increase.”  Between funding Planned Parenthood, not reigning in spending and being too long to read, this omnibus spending bill was a total disaster, and President Trump should be ashamed of having signed it.  He knows it himself and promised to “NEVER sign another bill like this again.”  With all due respect, Mr. President, if you know how bad this bill is, you never should have signed it in the first place.