This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 7th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

Lane Duck, Congresses are a regular source of mischief.

It's the longest possible time before another election and

many of your colleagues votes could be easier to get after they, well you know, lost.

Jonathan Bidlack of the R Street Institute details this lame duck session that's coming at the

end of a stunning spending streak by the President.

Based on where we are in a calendar, particularly an electoral calendar, we can have reasonable expectations about how Congress is going to behave.

So we just had an election. The new Congress has not taken office yet and that there's this window. The

lame duck period. What do we typically see with regard to spending during a lame duck period.

Well, let me answer it this way.

I mean, what do you think we're likely to see when we have a bunch of elected officials who just took office or were reelected and they don't

have two years until minimum until their next election. You know you environment where there's a complete lack of accountability.

You are the furthest away from the next flashpoint of accountability or next election.

And so that moment in time is the opportunity to do things that if you

want to think positively, maybe where there's the political will to otherwise

wouldn't be there, but it's also the opportunity to do things

that there might not be, might not actually go and be approved by your constituencies.

And so historically, the lame duck period while we like to talk

about it sort of making it easier to do some of the good things tends to be the time

that it's also the easiest to do a lot of the bad things and so it tends to be that time when we

when we end up going and seeing the biggest of the big spending bills coming down the

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