‘Tis the week before Christmas and plenty is stirring. I don’t know why we persist in telling ourselves, every year, that the lead up to the Christmas holiday will be some sort of dead-time where not much will happen because everyone, in and out of politics, will be more concerned about getting things together for Christmas than getting actual work done. You know you’ve thought it too.

And that is precisely why each and every year this week is so busy in our world. No one wants to be in D.C. on Christmas. So what a fabulous motivation to get big things rushed through!

The big thing getting rushed through in Congress of course is the omnibus spending bill, a 4,155-page behemoth that spends $1.7 trillion dollars just like that. In their zeal to outdo themselves, this omnibus bill comes in at 1,500 pages more than last year’s.  This is actually a rather remarkable feat for a Congress that was already the most profligate in history.

Now as always, there is some good mixed in with a whole lot of bad. The good part is defense spending, which the federal government really ought to be dedicating most of its resources in the first place. This increased 9.7% to about $858 billion, more than President Joe Biden asked for. And thank goodness. There is no question that increase is necessary, given the erosion of America’s overall military capabilities, particularly of the air force and the dilapidated naval fleet, in the face of emerging, developing and evolving threats in the Western Pacific and Eastern Europe.

This also marks a singular, lonely victory for U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s minority Republicans, in reversing the long-held and insane policy of any defense spending increase having to be matched by a dollar-for-dollar increase in non-defense discretionary spending – though how big this victory is depends on who you ask. The GOP says they managed to hold the line on non-defense discretionary spending at $787 billion, a 7.9% increase. House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro says the number is $800 billion, a 9.3% increase. I’m venturing a guess that the Appropriations Chair knows that some additional money has been tucked away somewhere in those 4,155 pages. In either case, can we acknowledge wherever the non-defense spending number lands it is cumulative to the – where are we at – $4.6 trillion this Congress has spent in the last 48 months?

I don’t know any more than anybody else on the planet where all that money is going to, but some of the figures are trickling out: The Wall Street Journal, for instance, reports some $25 million in additional funding for the nation’s premier corporate bullying organization, the National Labor Relations Board, and a 30% increase to the next big federal entitlement, the Child Care and Development Block Grant Program. Some sources are reporting the bill includes in the neighborhood of $16 billion scattered among some 4,000 earmarks.

But really, the most offensive part of this is the process – all of this spending, the bulk of Congress’ work for the year, is tossed into this giant salad of a bill released to the House on Monday night, and expected to be voted in the Senate by Thursday, in time for everyone to make their flights back home. And this is not simply a spending bill, as enormous and critical as that is – this bill includes some pretty hefty policy changes that deserve, indeed require, full examination and debate on their own. It is among the more distasteful elements of Congress that so much of its work is done in this manner. And we wonder why so few people turn out to vote in midterms.

There is something to be said about how we do it in Colorado. The last election may have cemented our status as a one-party state, but there are institutional mechanisms that help to restrain even the most radical of impulses, at least to some extent. Our constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, for instance, prevent a great deal of the D.C. style chicanery. The constraints of TABOR, however much they may be detested by the activist left, do the same thing.

Earlier this week the state released its quarterly revenue forecast. There is a little room to maneuver, though not much. This economic reality, coupled with the structural limitations in the State Constitution, encourages a level of restraint and prudence that is clearly absent in Washington, mores the pity.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.