If you get the feeling that Congress is stuck in the past, "you're right," says political consultant Dick Morris.
"The way this works is if Congress were a football team, it would specialize in punting. It is constantly delaying this reckoning," Morris said during an appearance on Newsmax's "Saturday Report" hours after a government shutdown was averted when the Senate rushed through final passage of a bipartisan plan that would temporarily fund federal operations and disaster aid.
Not included in the package were President-elect Donald Trump's demands for a debt limit increase into the new year.
"What we're looking at now is like an astronomer looking at the sky as it is now, but as it was a few light years ago before the light reached us. We are absolutely living in the past here. The debt ceiling, which was at issue in this bill, is a totally phony document," Morris told Newsmax.
"It was started, I think, 20 years ago; and it says you have to keep the same spending as you had last year in the budget. But the problem is we didn't have a budget last year, and we didn't have one the year before, and we didn't have one the year before.
And we haven't had one, I think, in 13, 20 years. And what Trump said was stop this facade about the debt limit," he said.
"It's just being used as a cudgel for Democrats to make Trump clear his new spending with [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and give the Democrats a role that they shouldn't have. The fact that Trump navigated this with a five-vote majority in the House is really great," he added.
"It's a tribute to his diplomatic skills and to the power that he's wielding, and he's wielding the power very effectively. But this is such a travesty."
But "it masks the real problem Trump has," Morris said, which is "that he has got to get his spending and his whole budget approved, like a few weeks after he takes office, because it's only at the beginning, really, that he has the reconciliation power, which is the ability to pass legislation without a Senate filibuster."
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