There is an old saying: Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  That came to mind as I pondered President Biden’s so-called Jobs Bill (formerly known as the Infrastructure Bill).   It is neither.

The Democrats in Congress had already passed the $1.9 trillion so-called Covid Relief Bill.  It would more appropriately have been labeled the Democrat Pork Barrel Bill – with a small amount for actual Pandemic-related expenses.  “Small amount” as in about one out of every ten dollars – or $190 billion.

Burying unrelated budget expenditures in a Bill with a good sounding name is nothing new.  It has been the way of Congress for generations.  It was once said that you could pile on almost any spending on a Bill with the words “education” or “defense” in the title.

Though both political parties have played this game of legislative hide-and-go-seek, Republicans have been more likely to object  and Democrats more likely to abuse the scheme.

What made the so-called Covid Relief Bill so noteworthy was the SIZE.

This was not about a ten – or even a hundred – billion dollars shoved up the rear of this particular legislative Trojan Horse.  No no no.  We are speaking in the trillions – an amount almost beyond the grasp of the human mind.  Except maybe the minds of astrophysicists.

Democrats and their media allies kept beating up on Republicans for opposing money for more vaccination centers, grants to suffering businesses – such as restaurants – and help for schools, so kids can get back in the classroom.   That is NOT what Republicans were opposing.  They were opposing all that money to the Kennedy Center for the Preforming Arts, National Public Broadcasting, more congressional staffing, etc., etc., etc.

And above all, Republicans objected to the billions upon billions to be given to Democrat-controlled cities – such as Chicago and Detroit – to bail them out of their decades of the fiscal and financial mismanagement that preceded the Pandemic.

The Covid Relief Bill was passed and signed into law –thanks to the biased media – we got fooled.  Shame on them.

Weeell … now we have the first part of Biden’s so-called Jobs Bill.  It is another astronomical $1.9 trillion.  It should be addressing our crumbling roads, bridges and water treatment plants.  That is what it is being marketed as by Democrats and the usual media outlets.

But like the so-called Covid Relief Bill, the so-called Jobs Bill is about everything but our crumbling infrastructure.  It is mostly a social and cultural pork barrel bill.

To make the second great congressional scam work, Democrats could no longer defend expenditures that seem totally unrelated to what we common folk think of as infrastructure – those highways, bridges and water treatment plants.

Rather than exclude them, they have concocted new definitions for “infrastructure.”  Some call it “human infrastructure.”  It essentially makes education and welfare infrastructure projects.  As Brit Hume of FOX News observed, “Baby diapers are now infrastructure.”

Education and welfare are both worthy topics of congressional debate and action.  But they are NOT infrastructure.  If you follow Democrats’ thinking to its logical conclusion, the national budget would have two parts – military and infrastructure.

This is also another opportunity to bail out those Democrat-controlled cities.  It is a sub-rosa effort to finance the economically unsustainable Green New Deal projects.  You could even add National Public Broadcasting in this Bill, too, as part of American infrastructure.  A better debate would be whether government should be subsidizing news and entertainment in the first place.  But that is another story.

More recently, Biden has started referring to this terrible piece of legislation as a “jobs bill” even though it would take the most corrupt, politically biased or incredibly incompetent economist to make that case – the kind of economists hired by the Biden team.

They are about to fool us a second time.

Democrats and the left-wing media will again put forward roads, bridges and treatment plants as the sales points – and again accuse Republicans of opposing such much-needed and worthy projects.  They will ignore and distract from the bulk of the expenditures that do not belong in the Bill – the things to which the Republicans in Congress oppose.

Even as we anticipate the outcome of the so-call Infrastructure Bill, they are about to fool us a third time.

You may recall that Biden initially was proposing a $3.2 trillion Bill to cover a lot more ground – a lot more pork in the old barrel.  But that was too big.

So, the Democrats split the projects into two bills.  You are likely to soon discover that the whole is greater than the parts.  The price tag on the severed second and third bill will likely exceed the $3.2 trillion.

Unless Democrats can abolish the filibuster, it is likely that Republicans and a couple semi-responsible Democrats – such as West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin – will force some cost-saving compromises.  At this point, Manchin appears to be the vote that will keep the filibuster.  But do not expect a lot of trimming.

The Biden spending plans are a fundamental change in American governance.  For over 200 years, there has been a reluctance to increase the size, scope and power of the federal government.  The foundation of American personal freedom is limited government – so sayeth our Founders.

The big-government authoritarian forces on the left now unashamedly promote the glories of big government elitism  — massive spending and more usurping of those rights and powers reserved to the states by the Constitution.  If they fool us on that one, the Republic – and individual freedom, as we know it – will have ended.

So, there ‘tis.