Sam Graves: We need regular order, real spending bills and balanced budget built on bipartisan agreement

(From Sixth District Congressman Sam Graves)

On January 20, 2021, millions of Americans watched as Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America. While the President spoke of unity and healing at the time, his actions since have failed to live up to his lofty words. 

Instead, we now have another politically motivated impeachment and we’re in the process of getting a hyper partisan $1.9 trillion spending bill rammed down our throats. 

The last Administration talked about promises made and promises kept. The hallmark of the first month of the Biden Administration has been promises made, promises broken.

We were promised unity. Instead, we got a partisan spending bill like we’ve never seen before. It’s a $1.9 trillion monstrosity that’s chock full of handouts and bailouts for special interests, along with a few measly crumbs for American citizens that work for a living. 

The bill includes some $350 billion to bail out states that have mismanaged their budgets for decades, and while liberals like to talk about the need to “get shots in arms,” less than 9 percent of their bill goes towards vaccine distribution.

We were promised President Biden would stand up for American workers. Instead, we got job-killing executive orders on day one. His edict abruptly cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline has already cost thousands of union jobs and it will hurt millions more American consumers and reduce funding to school districts that stood to benefit from property taxes from the pipeline. 

His more recent push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour through this spending bill is estimated to cost 1.4 million Americans their jobs. While they can’t pinpoint where those jobs will be lost, it only stands to reason that places with a lower cost of living are going to be hit harder, particularly in rural America.

We were promised the Administration would “follow the science” and return children to schools. Instead, we’re sending billions to schools with a weak promise that President Biden hopes to have 50 percent of schools open for at least 1 day per week within his first 100 days. That’s in direct conflict with the advice that the CDC has given for schools to reopen safely. 

While I’m proud that many school districts across Missouri have already responsibly and safely reopened for in-person education, I’m deeply concerned about the millions of American schoolchildren that haven’t seen the inside of a classroom in over a year.

There’s no silver bullet bill that’s going to save America, but there is one answer that’s proven successful time and again: getting back to the basics. 

Instead of an ever-growing government bureaucracy, we need to empower Americans to make their own decisions. We need regular order, real spending bills, and a balanced budget built on bipartisan agreement. We simply cannot afford more “my way or the highway” governance built on political theatrics.