The Huffington Post reports that the congressional operations budget has been increased to $4.4 billion “because Senate Republicans wanted to retain previous staff levels” — despite losing 20 percent of their seats last year and railing against government spending recently. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) discussed the issue at a press conference today:
We had a situation — you should direct that question to Senator McConnell because we had trouble organizing this year. He wanted to maintain a lot of their staffing even though they had lost huge numbers. And the only way we could get it done is to do what we did.
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