Sucky Funding Bill Also Enshrines Legalized Bribery, Kills Fun Dead

It would hurt if we weren't already completely dead inside.

It never fails. Congress needs to pass a big bill. Senators and representatives scramble to sneak in ridiculous provisions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the bill’s purpose and hope no one notices. That’s how one day conservatives will ban liberalism with a clause stuck deep into a bill regulating the communications industry, or something.

So why should the Great Democratic Cave of 2025 be any different? It’s very simple. You’ve got a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through January, along with a couple of appropriations bills, funding SNAP through the end of the fiscal year, and oh by the way, some Republican senators can now extort the government for half a million dollars each and the legalized hemp industry is — pardon the pun — going up in smoke.

First, the GOP senators. In the last few weeks, you may have seen a few of them spitting out their dentures in shock as they learned that Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed some of their phone records as part of his investigation of the January 6 attack. Ignominy! they have thundered. Jack Smith tapped our phones! This is the worst executive abuse of power in the history of the Republic!

And so on.

What Smith and his team actually looked at was “tolling data,” which shows the numbers that called or were called from the senators’ phones and how long the calls lasted. They did not learn the content of the calls.

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There is a pretty simple reason for why tolling data may have been important to the investigation, which is that various mountebanks and charlatans were, among other things, running around in the days before the attack trying to pass lists of alternate electors to various senators as part of their plan to get Congress to throw the electoral votes to Donald Trump. And elected Republicans were not exactly discouraging any of this. If anything, they were leading MAGA numbnuts to believe there really was a way to overturn the election results before Congress certified them.

In short, the Republicans laid down with treason-minded pigs and splattered mud all over their very expensive suits. And now they want to get paid for it:

The language of the bill states that “any senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any federal department or agency.”

The senators can collect a cool $500,000 each, should they choose to sue. And if they sue, what is to stop Trump from telling the Pam Bondi-led Justice Department to cut these guys a check?

Talk about a sweetheart deal! It’s legalized corruption, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune appears to have slipped into the CR without anyone noticing.

As for the hemp provision: Are you someone who enjoys CBD products? Maybe you have been ordering THC-infused gummies online and popping one after work instead of a beer? Or maybe you have a medical condition and these help you manage the pain? Well, tough nuggets:

The provision would close the so-called hemp loophole created by the 2018 Farm Bill that has allowed unregulated THC products to be sold around the country, irrespective of state cannabis laws.

Are you kidding us? The ability to legally get mildly stoned off a gummy or a THC-infused seltzer is one of the only joys left in our rapidly diminishing authoritarian hellscape of a country! It’s one of the only ways we can push that chattering orange sourdough starter of a president out of our consciousness for an hour. What are we supposed to do now, snort some whip-its like animals?

Remarkable. People need THC products to deal with the stress of a Donald Trump presidency, and now Donald Trump wants to take them away.

Oh, and it would blow up a thriving sector of the economy. Hemp is a $28 billion industry with anywhere from 325,000 to 400,000 jobs, according to the estimates we’ve seen. Shoot, it might be one of the only sectors of the economy thriving right now besides gambling websites and government-sanctioned bribery.

On Monday night, Rand Paul offered an amendment that would have struck the language that basically takes an entire industry out behind the barn and shoots it from the bill. It failed, with only 24 senators — 22 of them Democrats — voting for it.

So at the same time the likes of Angus King and Jeanne Shaheen helped Republicans end the shutdown without getting an extension of ACA subsidies, they also helped Republicans end fun. Thanks a pantsload.

On the plus side, the ban does not take effect until a year from the day the bill is signed. So maybe the hemp industry can get a provision unbanning the ban snuck into some other completely unrelated bill. Otherwise, if you are a CBD enthusiast who enjoys your gummies, start stockpiling.

[NYT / NBC]

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