Did Sneaky Republicans Slip A Pay Raise Into Government Funding Bill

During the last minute attempt to avert a government shutdown (which really just kicked it 45 days down the road), Republican lawmakers slipped an amendment into the bill that many believe is a pay raise for members of Congress. In fact, many in the media reported on the "pay raise amendment" as if it were the truth. But, as usual, the truth is actually far more complicated than that, as Farron Cousins explains.

Don't forget to like, comment, and share! And subscribe to stay connected!

Connect with Farron on Twitter

*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

There's been a lot of misinformation floating around that actually led to this, uh, comment that we got from one of our YouTube community members. It's a YouTube community member, Marcella Gruber, 8 9 7 7, who wanted me to talk about quote, the pay raise the house Republicans snuck into the shutdown bill. That wasn't actually a thing. There were these rumors floating around that Republicans were sneaking a pay raise into the continuing resolution, but that's actually not what it was. Just to be a hundred percent clear, what actually happened is Republicans did try a little bit of sneaky stuff, and they did sneak a resolution in there, uh, or attempted to that did away with the pay freeze that was in place. Now, they would not have been allowed to raise their pay just by getting rid of the pay freeze. They would then, of course, have to put forth legislation to vote on a pay increase for themselves, which does not go into effect until the next legislative session.

So if you want the raise, you gotta win your election next year. But they didn't even get that far. It was just a resolution saying, Hey, let's kind of get rid of that pay raise, because they did want to later on vote to give themselves a raise, obviously, but they did not put pay raise legislation, amendment resolution, whatever you want to call it, that was not actually in the bill. So, uh, uh, again, doing research on this, which I had to do a lot of digging on this one. There's so much misinformation about that. And, and this is unfortunate too, because obviously like you have this coming from the left. So it's one of those things, it's like, people on the left, y'all, y'all screwed the pooch on this. That was dumb. Don't do that. Like, we didn't need to make things up or embellish things to make the Republicans look bad with the government shutdown.

Or the looming almost happened. Government shutdown still could happen, government shutdown, by the way. Um, we didn't need to embellish anything. They looked stupid enough as it is, okay? We didn't need to pile on with, you know, some fake toppings. All we had to do was stick to the facts and we got them cold. They lost this issue. We won, you know, in the eyes of the public. But so when things like this happen, when the misinformation starts flying, it, it annoys the hell outta me. And just to be honest, it annoys the hell outta me because it's not real. We didn't need it. We were already on the winning side of the issue, but for some reason, a lot of people on the left were pushing that anyway. It wasn't real. It didn't happen. Certainly didn't happen the way that, you know, some of these liberal outlets and folks on social,

Social media we're trying to portray it. So just because it's coming from the left, and this is a good lesson for everybody, doesn't mean that you can blindly trust it either. Okay? I know we're a lot more honest on the left than they are over on the right, but sometimes they get it wrong too. So I hope that clarifies things about what the Republicans did and did not do with that continuing resolution.