Will the US ever actually pass a budget again?

[Unorthodox]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/02/06/republicans-ready-to-reject-obama-budget-facing-spending-fights-of-their-own/

Seven years of budget headaches end today for President Obama. But this year’s spending fights are just beginning for the Republican Congress.

Congressional Republicans have already announced they will ignore the White House budget released on Tuesday rather than engage in another round of fiscal brinksmanship with the president. In an unusual move, they even snubbed Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan, refusing to invite him to give his customary testimony on the president’s budget before Congress.

“This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (D-Wis.) said of the president’s proposal.

But Republicans have their own problems to worry about.

[For more Congress and campaign news, sign up for The Daily 202, The Washington Post’s new political tipsheet]

Republican leaders are facing another conservative uprising over spending that is threatening to derail the two-year budget compromise crafted last year with Obama and congressional Democrats. The spending standoff will test Ryan’s promise to bring regular order — passing a budget and then spending bills — and good governance back to a gridlocked Congress.

Both Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have highlighted moving spending bills through Congress as a major aspect of their 2016 agenda ahead of the November election — and not much else.

“In 2016, we will make it our goal to pass all 12 appropriation bills through regular order,” Ryan said at a December news conference where he laid out his plans for the year ahead. “This hasn’t been done since 1994 — but it’s how Congress ought to operate so that we can better protect the taxpayer dollars and make our place the true representative body that it is.”

But in a reprise of past budget battles, the same group of conservative rabble-rousers that have held GOP leaders hostage to their demands in past Congresses is threatening to rebel over a $30 billion spending increase approved as part of then-Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) last act.




Some conservatives are even looking to the new speaker to resurrect the controversial budget blueprints Ryan drafted when he was House Budget Committee chairman, which would have balanced the government’s books by 2025.

“Why would you vote against the [2015] budget deal, against the omnibus and then vote for this new budget that reinforces the things you already voted against?” asked Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.).

The problem is this: the first step in the promised regular order is passing a budget and Ryan needs conservative support to get that done.

Some hardline conservatives — many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus — are threatening to reject any budget that stays true to the Boehner-era spending agreement. Ryan can only afford to lose 28 Republican votes and many hardliners are already threatening to defect.

“I think folks are very skeptical of the Boehner number,” said Freedom Caucus member Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.).

Freedom Caucus members met last week to discuss their opposition to any budget that adheres to the spending agreement. No one would say how many of them would actually oppose a budget that included the spending increase, but Huelskamp said conservatives were all on the same page.

“There’s not a lot of support [for the $30 billion in spending] in circles I’ve talked to,” Huelskamp said.

[House Republicans are having a ‘family conversation’ on budget]

Some conservatives have said they are willing to work with Ryan to find ways to move forward with votes on the appropriations bills. Many Freedom Caucus members, including Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), said in recent weeks that they are open to hearing what kinds of trade offs Ryan may offer.

But the idea of compromise has been a non-starter for outside groups that hold significant sway in conservative circles. Heritage Action released a memo Tuesday condemning any talk supporting the Boehner-era budget numbers.

“To be clear, there is absolutely no conservative reason to support a Republican budget at spending levels dictated by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats,” the memo read.




The Heritage Action memo encouraged members not to be enticed by “unenforceable promises” of regular order or chances to use the budget to skirt filibuster rules and force votes on repealing Obamacare or cutting Social Security spending.

Unlike in the House, McConnell’s biggest challenge is negotiating with Democrats, not members of his own party.

Regular order has proved difficult to achieve in recent years. Congress has only completed the full budget and appropriations process on time four times since 1977. The task is even more challenging in an election year when many members want to avoid fights that could scare off voters. Spending bills are typically magnets for politically touchy issues, including abortion rights, gun control, immigration and foreign policy.

The budget has evolved into a kind of partisan wish list in recent years. Each party outlines its ideal spending plans and Congress avoids voting on the 12 regular appropriations bills by extending current spending levels through a continuing resolution —  or making some modifications and funding the government through an omnibus.

Budget experts say Republican leaders are now trapped between promises to uphold regular order and unrealistic expectations. Some conservatives expect controversial policy documents that will be impossible to enact — recent Republican budgets, like Ryan’s 2014 Path to Prosperity, repealed the Affordable Care Act and scaled back Medicare to help balance the books.

“I think one of the things that made this politically impossible was picking fiscally impossible goals,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

MacGuineas said Ryan’s balanced budgets  were always ambitious, but ensuring the federal government’s ends meet has grown increasingly unlikely.

Discretionary spending under the annual appropriations process only covers about one-third of the overall federal budget. The other two-thirds comes from mandatory programs, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that are growing far more rapidly. Those programs, along with recently enacted tax cuts, are expected to add $105 billion to the deficit this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.




[Budget deficit set to rise thanks to year-end tax deal]

Despite the noise being made by conservatives in recent weeks, Republican leaders say they expect to stick to last year’s deal — and Ryan has downplayed the severity of the party infighting.

So far Ryan’s solution has been to let members share their concerns, offer suggestions for how to compromise by cutting spending elsewhere and generally give members a chance to vent. Last week, he met with Freedom Caucus members and he plans to continue those talks throughout the week. The speaker will attend budget meetings held by House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.)  and will wrap up the week with a Friday planning conference with all Republicans.

[In address, Paul Ryan pledges a ‘complete alternative’ to the Democratic agenda]

Lawmakers also have a shorter than usual timeframe to finish the budget process this year. Congress technically has until Sept. 30 to pass spending bills, but the November election has forced a shorter-than-usual session.

Lawmakers are scheduled to leave Washington in mid-July to attend party nominating conventions. They will return briefly in September before an extended recess for campaigning.

“It is awfully hard to believe that regular order will prevail,” said Jared Bernstein a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former economic adviser to Vice President Biden.

Bernstein said conservatives are right that Congress should go through the entire regular budget and spending process. In an ideal world, that would allow voters to better understand how government spends money and allow members to individually influence how budget policy is made, he said.

But as budget fights have become more ideological in recent years, hewing to anything resembling an orderly process has gone out the window.

“It hasn’t prevailed for a long time and we still manage to slog through the gridlock with continuing resolutions and various patches,” he said

Budgets and purposely shutting down the gubt was directly responsible for my unemployment, and it hasn't improved since (though I'm a tad more insulated now). 

[vonbach]

“To be clear, there is absolutely no conservative reason to support a Republican budget at spending levels dictated by Barack Obama and congressional Democrats,” the memo read.

Bingo! Now if Republicans actually acted like something other than the Democrats I'd be impressed.
Its the the Republicans failing to act in their bases interest thats getting [Sleezebag] elected.

[Unorthodox]

And the whole there can be no compromise attitude is so effective. 

[vonbach]

Compromise with the left means you become the left. The problem is the left never meets the right in the middle.
They just step up their demands. So compromise is pointless. Hence the current backlash.

[Buster's Uncle]

 

[Dio]

@BUncle I everytime at your responses towards the statements of vonbach that possess hypocritical undertones.

I think we need a political and social revolution to create a new and better state. I perceive the federal system as fundamentally broken and incapable of passing a budget.

[Buster's Uncle]

...The right has been annoying me with school-yard blame-the-other-guy trash-talking since before I was old enough to vote, but this thing they got in the habit of doing when Bakrama got in, accusing him of stuff their own guy was far more guilty of, really sets my forehead veins throbbing...