Crashing To The Ground With A THUD

Brian Beutler details the rapidly disintegrating "House GOP budget plan" to force Senate Democrats and President Obama to the table to talk about just how much austerity Americans will be facing.  There's only one problem with the plan, and that's the fact that Republicans are stuck in an increasingly uncivil war among themselves and can't pass anything in the House when it comes to Paul Ryan's budget.

Indeed, Paul Ryan’s entire reputation rests upon these kinds of abstractions. His budgets imagine huge cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and Medicare and so on, but they have no binding force. His allure to the conservative movement as a vice presidential nominee was that he’d be uniquely suited to turn these abstractions into reality.

But many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.

Today’s Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion. Republicans don’t control government. But ahead of the deadline for funding it, their plan was to proceed as if the Ryan budget was binding, and pass spending bills to actualize it — to stake out a bargaining position with the Senate at the right-most end of the possible.

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218. 

And the fact of the matter is when it comes to taking full responsibility for cutting trillions of dollars from already crumbling bridges and roads, already strained schools, already overloaded SNAP food benefits, and of course Medicare and Medicaid, House Republicans don't want anything to do with the plan.

So pull up a chair, kids.  The House GOP is about to come crawling to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in order to get yet another spending extension passed, and it will be on the Democrats' terms.  The Republicans have nothing, and they now know it.  And now, so does everyone else.