When news broke last week that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might not even attempt to pass a budget this year, all hell broke loose among so-called fiscal conservatives. A typical comment came from Representative Barry Loudermilk on Georgia who said “They need to change the [Senate] cloture rule, but until they do, the only way we’re going to be able to accomplish anything is through reconciliation. We have to use reconciliation.”
The Senate has already changed the cloture rule in recent years. The majority no longer needs sixty votes to confirm the administration’s nominees. But the so-called legislative filibuster still exists, at least for now. To get around it, the Republicans used an innovative and unprecedented dual budget reconciliation process last year, with one budget dedicated to overturning Obamacare and the other set aside for enacting “tax reform.” To accomplish this, though, the Republicans actually had to pass two budgets. Only with budgets in hand were they able to resort (twice) to the budget reconciliation process that enabled them to pass legislation with fifty votes. Without a budget for the next fiscal year, the Senate is forced back to regular order, meaning that they’ll need nine Democratic votes to pass legislation.
So, when Rep.Loudermilk says that the Republicans “have to use reconciliation” if they want to get anything done, he means anything that doesn’t require a great deal of compromise with Senate Democrats. I don’t know if we can call it McConnell’s decision not to pass a budget as much as it is an acknowledgment of reality. With only fifty-one members in his caucus now, and with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) suffering from significant health issues, it’s probably not possible for McConnell to pass a real budget, let alone one that the House will agree to. It doesn’t seem that he can reproduce the same trick he used to do a budget for repealing Obamacare, because that was a one-time deal that fiscal conservatives agreed to on the premise that it wouldn’t be repeated. They basically passed an empty shell of a budget which meant that fiscal hawks didn’t have the chance to call for spending cuts. They were also using an unused budget bill from the previous fiscal year, which is something they don’t have the luxury of doing again. So, with no budget there can be no budget reconciliation process, and without a budget reconciliation process, the era of operating without the need to compromise has come to an end. This, in most conservatives’ view, means that nothing can get done, but that’s not true in principle.
What is true is that House Speaker Paul Ryan can forget about his ambitious agenda for starving granny with massive entitlement cuts. And it’s appropriate that the government will shut down at midnight on Friday because the Republicans can’t figure out a way to compromise. Dan Holler, the vice president of Heritage Action, told Politico last week that “It’s legislative malpractice to throw reconciliation out the window,” which is reflective of the Republican activist bases’ refusal to deal in the realm of the possible. They will next agitate for the removal of the legislative filibuster rather than accept a new era in which the GOP must cut deals with their political opponents. But McConnell only needs fifty votes (plus Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote) to enact a budget and he can’t get it done.
Trump, of course, understands exactly none of any of this. He’s probably looking forward to a government shutdown as a way to rally his base for more purely partisan political fights. He got almost no wins using that strategy last year and this year it’s going to be much worse for him. McConnell might be the only Republican with a clear view of where things stand, and he knows that he’s gone as far as he can go with the no-compromise strategy. He will have to wait for everyone else to catch up.
Does this mean they’re going to lurch from one CR to the next CR for the balance of this calendar year?
Not if the democrats don’t vote for a continuing resolution. Why couldn’t democrats hold out for, you know, legislators actually doing their jobs?
Because they are democrats and its not polite to hold out for anything, especially when pleasing the “centrists” is at stake.
Exactly. I’ve been raging against this infuriating reality for decades.
Me too. And what’s absolutely maddening is every time they do it, it ends in failure. Every damned time. They think if we just be quiet, keep our heads down, and when we do speak we meekly “me too” GOP policies to death, and for some reason think that will draw voters to their side. Giving voters the choice of a lesser amount of a bad thing versus a lot from the GOP is like thinking someone will appreciate you offering to jolt them with 5,000 votes of electricity versus 20,000.
You’d think they’d learn from that but it seems the lure if “centrist” accomplishments is just to tantalizing. The accomplishment of republican goals — tax cuts, unnecessary increases in defense spending, and yes, even “entitlement” cuts; they even floated during Obama’s presidency of changes in how social security COLA is measured in order to make cuts, even using the shopworn GOP talking point of “saving social security” to cover it.
And now they are befuddled, trying to figure out how they lost an election that was theirs to lose, and how it was that voters actually said the moron in chief we have now represented “change” from the status quo.
If we had even a halfway competent opposition party…
It’s Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football stuff. Why do you think I’m always pissed off here? They never learn, whether it’s intentional or not.
responsible adults, preventable suffering etc.
What good are principles if you can’t kick a couple million kids off insurance for them?
. . . case scenario in the current environment, as it would preserve the spending status quo without GOP spending-cut mischief, which would almost certainly be worse.
Hard for me to imagine any alternative (to a CR) acceptable to the GOP which wouldn’t hurt many people (and kill some), as it would be all cuts on the domestic side, plus maybe some privatization of public goods at taxpayer expense in the form of sham-“infrastructure” spending.
. . . of “the current environment” = GOP control of both houses of Congress and the White House.
Gotta say much of the commentary upthread seems astonishingly naive in ignoring this core fact and the limitations it places on the (currently) politically possible.
In real life I just scream and pout until I get my way, and when it doesn’t work (it never works) I scream and pout some more. My life is a useless waste but I know one thing for sure, and that’s that I’m better than everyone else. Especially the people that get things done without throwing a toddler tantrum. Those people are the worst.
That’s not what I see the ones on the TV machine saying.
Most remarkable in watching the TrumpCut travesty was the extent to which massively substantive changes to existing law could be accomplished via this budget/budget reconciliation scammery. Repubs basically rewrote the federal tax code to destroy Democrats and every Democratic state that has an effective state government. Whoknew?
It does demonstrate the extent to which the Dems could enact countermeasures should they ever be placed in a situation of Counter-reformation. The tax code should now become a political football, being radically revised whenever one party achieves the trifecta. Plus, there is no reason even to campaign on the issue—just do it upon obtaining power.
The Dems, of course, will not have a chance at reconciliation Counter-reformation until the Repubs have brought on American Gotterdammerung, either economically or militarily. The pattern of our country’s politics is that the imbecile electorate desires “conservative” governance until it (quite predictably) results in a national meltdown, and then the Dems are given a couple years to attempt to rectify the situation before the “conservative” Party of Incompetence(tm) is restored to power.
But Repubs and their reconciliation racket have shown the way forward to cramming the shit down their throat for a change.
That sure sounds right. We need a melt down to enable a few changes. And this time around they found another way to screw the dems as you noted:
Republicans basically rewrote the federal tax code to destroy Democrats and every Democratic state that has an effective state government. Who knew?
It does demonstrate the extent to which the Democrats could enact countermeasures should they ever be placed in a situation of Counter-reformation. The tax code should now become a political football, being radically revised whenever one party achieves the trifecta. Plus, there is no reason even to campaign on the issue—just do it upon obtaining power.
You’re talking about the Democratic Party elite here. The party that includes scum like Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel. Why would they rewrite the tax code to stick it to the 1%? They won’t. Stoke City has a better chance of winning the Premier League title next season.
I think you underestimate the republicans ability to live in denial or reality’s ability to let them.
Trump and his supporters are actually relishing a shutdown, to “piss off” liberals, the highest goal of the Trumpanzee right, and in Trump’s “mind” the thought that this will be the leverage to force democrats to vote for whatever the GOP wants. Establishment republicans know the danger of this thinking, however this time they have even fewer options available to finesse this and head these loons off at the pass by mollifying the extreme right while delivering for their wealthy stakeholders, who are not in favor of a shutdown. Trump may not, but they understand the effects that damage to our credit rating caused by a shutdown could mean for the economy and ultimately their corporations.
The chickens have now come home to roost, and actually working with the democrats is really their only option. And doing that may end up being, like Boehner before him, Ryan’s epitaph.
Does a shutdown really affect credit rating much? I thought that is more a debt ceiling/ default issue.
Yes, it is, but the debt ceiling comes up again in about March.
You’re correct in that during a government shut down interest payments on bonds could be halted. But a government shutdown, if it lasts too long, could see service providers and others the government may be in debt to not getting paid.
Sorry, meant to say during a debt ceiling default instead of government shut down.
Excellent stuff from Ed Kilgore.
That essay from Kilgore is superb, inspirational and befits the day.
I’m reminded of Rev. Barber’s decision in an important moment of choosing to speak in support of the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic Party candidates in prime time at the 2016 National Convention. He spoke articulately and uncompromisingly of the clear and wide choice which confronted Americans that year.
Great article. We on the left should be calling out the fundamentalists for their religious and spiritual hypocrisy. To do that, we have to be literate about the real meaning of religious traditions. The tendency on the left to dismiss and ridicule religion undermines one of our most effective tools. Those bastards on the right are not the least bit religious. They deserve to be called out forcefully. They’ll feel no shame of course but there are plenty of folks who would see the hypocrisy if we held up the mirror. Some of them vote Republican.