Cloud speaks to Gonzales GOP about changes in Congress

Congressman Michael Cloud updated constituents about changes that have happened in the U.S. House of Representatives since the Republicans regained the majority in January during a visit to Gonzales on Thursday, April 13.

Cloud, who represents the 27^th Congressional District, met with members of the Gonzales County Republican Party at the Alcalde Hotel and also visited with students of the Patriot Academy prior to the meeting.

One big change is that Cloud was placed on the powerful Appropriations Committee — a move that took him away from his previous positions on the Oversight and Agriculture committees.

“I was fully planning and I had talked about a lot during the campaign of what I was going to do on this two committees heading into this term,” Cloud said. “I had planned on staying on the Ag Committee because we have a lot of ag interest in our district, so we’re just going to still do what we can to represent ag in Texas because it is important, we have a lot of people and … literally… our industry is under attack and we have the Farm Bill coming up this year.”

Cloud said he did not seek a spot on the Appropriations Committee, but said he was chosen because “we need conservatives who can work on the front end of this instead of expecting them to put stuff on the floor and expect them to vote on it on the tail end.”

“If you understand the appropriations bill, and how committees are done usually in Washington, you have people begging, pleading, clawing, raising money, doing everything they can to try to get on the ‘Props’ committee for a year or two and then some still don't make it,” Cloud said. “I was asked to consider being on the Appropriations Committee. And I told them the same thing I did when I was running. They would ask, ‘Why do you want to go to Washington?’ I'd say “I'm not wanting to go to Washington, I'm willing to go to Washington.’

“I'm not wanting to be on the Appropriations Committee,” Cloud added. “That does not sound like fun to me, to be dealing with all these massive spending bills, but I'm willing to be on it because I realize we need a lot of work done when it comes to having somebody on the committee who cares about fiscal responsibility.”

Cloud noted that most bills passed in Congress are “what they call authorizing bills, which means like, they'll pass a bill, for example, the NDAA — the National Defense Authorization Act — and all that does is when they pass it, they're not actually funding anything. They're authorizing the funding of things.”

“They're saying, ‘Yes, we can buy ships, we can buy tanks, we can do all these things.’ But then it takes an appropriations bill to actually fund it. So basically, all the money flows through the appropriations committee,” Cloud said.

“One of the things we've been working on is getting the appropriations committee  — and specifically the appropriations committee staff — to act like conservatives and to think like conservatives. Their high mark of thinking as conservatives was to get the fiscal numbers where they needed to be. Does that make sense? Like, ‘yes, we need to spend less.’ That, for them, was a huge, huge step.”

Cloud said the big change in thinking he is trying to bring about is by having Appropriations look at what the money is being spent on — even before looking at the fiscal aspect.

“We are funding evil, every single day, taking taxpayer dollars to fund the demise of our own country, and to prop up evil all over the world,” Cloud said. “Let's stop doing that first. So let's go through our spending and take that part out, then let's see where the numbers are and then let's get the numbers where they need to be.

“That's what we're trying to bring to the appropriations process. They are used to flowing this one way, and it's like rerouting a river almost in the sense of just trying to get them to think differently about these sorts of things.”

Cloud said he will continue to fight against government “wokeness” and the use of funding by bureaucrats for such training through “tools” such as the Antideficiency Act.

The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services, according to the Government Accounting Office.

“There's a law that basically says that a bureaucrat cannot use taxpayer funded money to do something other than what it is specifically designated for. It’s called the Antideficiency Act,” Cloud said. “And as we go through the appropriations process, one of the things we're looking to do is to get all the woke lecturing out of every agency, and to implement antideficiency training into every single agency to where every federal employee in the agency who's making these types of decisions will have to be trained to remind them that if you use taxpayer dollars for something other than they've been obligated by Congress to use them for, you are personally, federally liable for it.”