Yes. The "Nothing to see here, folks!"/tu quoque argument is de rigeur in this type of discussion. Combine that with a little moving of the goalposts? Guaranteed hours of fun for the whole family.

For those who are interested, this type of application is fairly recent. The Reconciliation Act was passed in 74. It hadn't even been out a year before it was being used in ways not anticipated by the sponsors, and the stretching has continued year-after-year. Relevant wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...

IIRC, CORBA was the first big "win", providing continuing insurance privileges to folks when they left their job. A great idea, no doubt, but not a damned thing to do with the budget.

Also more information: https://www.votetocracy.com/blog/what-is-reconciliation

Interesting historical quote from the second article. President Clinton attempted to use reconciliation to pass his 1993 health care plan, but Senator Byrd, according to Wikipedia, “insisted that the health care plan was out of bounds for a process that is theoretically about budgets,”

Times have changed. Each year these things get easier and easier.

It's all normal! Schoolhouse Rocks guys!

I am sad.

CISA was probably the least controversial part of this bill. The real controversy was the budget itself; the bill involves Ryan surrendering the ability to freeze the government with future budget bills until almost after the next election. The GOP has been using that ability on and off for the last 6 years.

In message board land, the fact that the bill was finalized in the middle of the night is evidence that The Man is trying to sneak CISA past us. In reality, nobody in Congress cares about CISA; that's a done deal. It's the budget they're being sneaky about.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that CISA (and a bunch of other random stuff in the budget bill) had been scheduled to go through on the budget bill for weeks.