One Last Boneheaded Political Move Before We Go

This article says that the outgoing Republican majority in the Great Sausage Factory is putting the onus on the incoming Democratic majority to deal with pork-laden spending bills. Apparently this will "challenge Democrats' commitment to cut political pork."

Are you kidding me? What "commitment to cut political pork"? The Democrats are not so committed and have never been so committed. I don't care if some Democrat somewhere said it, it ain't true, it's a lie. Just because we now know the Republicans, taken as a whole, were lying about their commitment to cut political pork, doesn't change the fact that there is no, and never has been, any institutional desire to cut any type of government spending (except defense spending, which is never actually cut but merely redirected) from the Democratic Party. There is at least a marginally visible battle within the Republican Party between true believers in spending restraint, those that pay lip-service to such, and those who are openly disdainful of the idea. No such battle is remotely detectable within the Democratic Party.

The fact that Republicans think they are checkmating the Dems is astonishingly stupid. The Dems will pass all the pork and say that this is "bipartisan legislation" that they worked on with the outgoing congress, because, 'ya know, they are not sore winners and interested in repudiating 'the good work of our colleagues.' The Repubs should have handed the Dems some spending bills that gutted spending for everything across the board and made them have to come back in January and load up the bills again in front of the public. Once again, the Republicans have shown that they suck at this sort of political chess.