In one of his last votes, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks voted against the House-passed continuing resolution this week. The outgoing Huntsville Republican also said he plans to vote against the omnibus spending bill.
The House vote moved back the funding deadline to the end of next week.
Brooks talked about his “no” votes Thursday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“This is a strategy used by special interest groups to diminish the public interest,” Brooks said. “And it’s happened this way every single year I’ve been in the United States Congress.
“The deadline for passing these spending bills is Sept. 30, but the strategy amongst the special interests that run Washington, D.C., is to push these bills until right before Christmas, or right before New Year’s, with the threat of you’re not getting home for Christmas or New Year’s, with the threat of a government shutdown, thereby coercing congressman and senators into voting for legislation that has a lot of bad things in it.”
Brooks said he’s had enough of the bad deal-making that occurs in Washington when it comes to how the federal government is funded.
“[S]o I’ve finally gotten fed up with the corruption that occurs in Washington,” he said. “It didn’t take me long, probably a year or two since I figured it out and so, for the last ten years, I’ve been fairly consistently voting against these bills that are chalk full of bad things.”
Brooks is siding with the upcoming potential Speaker of the House who’s been arguing the incoming GOP majority should have more of a say to how the government is funded.
“Well, I concur with the reasoning of Kevin McCarthy that the Republicans are about to take over the House in a scant three week,” he said. “So there’s some legitimacy to the argument that we will hold more sway that arguably is more consistent to the will of the American people, since they just gave us the House of Representatives.”
The congressman warns, though, that too many Republicans are also beholden to special interest groups in the nation’s capitol.
“At the same time though,” he said, “all the Republicans are doing, to a very large degree, not 100%, but to a very large degree, is switching special interest groups that get the bad provisions in this kind of legislation.
“The Democrats have their group of special interests that fund their campaigns, and the Republicans have their special interests that fund their campaigns.”
Brooks believes the only way to change this corrupt process in Congress is for the American people to wake up and elect better representatives.
“People have to start electing people to Washington who put integrity above their elections,” he said. “When you take on these special interests groups, it doesn’t end with your vote against them, they start marshalling large sums of money, millions of dollars, to try to defeat you cause their sole function is try to promote on behalf of a small group of people in America the special benefits that that small group of people want, and if you’ve got congressmen and senators who don’t kowtow to their dictates, then they’re going to do their upmost to try to take them out.”
He emphasized the need for voters to get more informed on the issues before they cast their ballot.
“The voters have to see past all the attack advertising and try to figure out what the real truth is as opposed to getting all of these brochures in the mail and getting these anonymous phone calls, robocalls, or getting all this internet advertising,” he said “They’ve got to see through that and start doing their own homework or else they’re going to be led like sheep to the slaughter as they have been for decades.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
