Congressional leaders reached a $1.66 trillion agreement Sunday to finance the federal government in 2024, preserving funding for key domestic and social safety net programs in the face of GOP demands to cut the government’s budget.
After months and months of demanding cuts beyond the numbers agreed to in the debt ceiling agreement, they've now agreed to the whole package: $1.59 trillion plus $69 billion in side deals, for a total of $1.66 trillion. Nondefense discretionary spending will be $773 billion, nearly the same as last year. There will be no 1% cut, no sequestration, and no reliance on a CBO estimate that doesn't count prefunded programs. Just an ordinary budget bill that's the same as the Senate bill that's been lying around for months.
Why couldn't we have done this half a year ago? And why did Republicans have to dump Kevin McCarthy?
All that's left now is to write actual appropriations bills. Should be a piece of cake.
Sure, but look at all the time they wasted! All the angst they inflicted on Democrats and Good Government folks (aka "goo-goos") and other spoilsports. While the Maga-repubz got to kick back, rave on social media and their teevie outlets, and mock "Old Joe." Good times!
Lighten up, man! It's not like any of this stuff is important! Right?
Yeah, it's a juvenile, ignorant, and careless attitude. But it's what a lot of voters seem to want, at least in the heavily gerrymandered districts. I blame the news media and the educational system, but admit there's lots of blame to go around.
McCarthy was disliked by a fraction
People and personalities do count, not mere abstractions.
They needed to clear out last year's business so they can get on with important things like impeaching Hunter's dad, grilling university presidents about DEI, and holding aid to Ukraine/Israel hostage in order to scream about the border until election day.
Trump has decided that screwing up Ukraine is the most important objective of budget negotiations, and that being psudo-sensible on the budget wil make it easier to block anything to Ukraine.
Maybe already actually agreed with House republicans that this is what they are going to do.
Without bad faith…
Republicans would have no arguments at all
The process of making sausage is straightforward, but the process of getting hundreds of people to agree on a single way of making that sausage is impossible.
Why couldn't we have done this half a year ago? And why did Republicans have to dump Kevin McCarthy?
Hahahahahahastoppleasegodstop ...
The answer is that they do not care about governing, good or bad. They care about performing for the MAGAt audience. A year and a half ago, it would have looked like they were negotiating -- and even (the horror) coming to agreement -- with Demon-rats. That show would close after one night. And the Kevin thing is just another episode of Survivor: the Speaker, which started back with, I dunno, Boehner?
And again your regular reminder that "moderate Republicans" go along with this, every step of the way. "Oh no no no, we're not those silly MAGA types, but ..."
Perfect!
It aint’s over till the fat lady sings.
Never assume anything with these clowns.
+++
It helps MAGA idols V.V. Putin and Viktor Orban make their case for ‘illiberal democracy’ (i.e. one-man* rule); “see how dysfunctional Western democracy is!”
*intentionally gendered
except that republican dysfunctionalism dates back a decade at least, well before their love affair with vik and vlad the impaler. this is just a party that is inherently incapable of and disinterested in governing.
Oh, of course, the assistance to despots is just a bonus; Trumpism’s one innovation.
before that, it was just the "Imperial Presidency"...but only when a Republican was in the White House....
Because it's an election year and they don't want to look like the party who will strangle the infant in the bathwater every few months.
Yep. Writing actual appropriation bills will be easy peasy....
Lauren Boebert beats up ex-husband in restaurant,
https://www.thedailybeast.com/lauren-boeberts-ex-husband-jayson-called-the-cops-after-physical-fight-in-public
who apparently had it coming.
When toddlers have tantrums, they always burn themselves out eventually, but there's nothing you can do to speed that along. It's the same with far-right congresspeople. They're done when they're done.
Performative assholes are gonna perform. Why pass a budget 8 months ago when you can dick around for almost a year and pass it later on? If you passed it when it was first proposed, government might’ve actually worked well/efficiently over 2023, and the Party of Government Sucks can’t have that.
The performative moralising and virtue signaling pretending to be comment on the why (boiled down to Opposition Bad, Evil, & Immoral, Us Good, Just & Moral) is fairly useless... except maybe for emotional support and self-congratulation (which itself not particularly useful).
Analytically what is more or less evident is that misaimed reforms (as like the pseudo-democracy of primaries) in the USA over the past decades have resulted in perverse strong-weak system in which the ostensible Parties have little control over their own brand (the primary candidates) while thinly attended primaries driven by comparatively radical activists drive selection - while the structural electoral framework is such that the two parties are "strong" in those terms.
As such you have as well congressional power structures that are undermined - most notably on the Republican side by members who are in utterly safe districts in which only the party primary may be competitive but it is competitive only within a narrow and tiny not broadly represenative fraction of the voters. And sans party discipline mechanisms that are really actionable, along with a badly thought through - niavely starry eyed (resolving to the simplistic slogan more democracy always good) reform set , you have the recipe of instablity and break-down.
This has become painfully evident with the Republicans and their soi-disant "Freedom Caucus" (and the ejection of Ms Cheney) but it is an error to think it can not infect the Democrats. It is a structural error not merely Evil Opposition, which as like the absurd smearss from the Right about Socialist Obama, Biden, is mere name calling and partisan blindness.
The answer, of course, is tranferable vote, which gives centrists a good chance when the main parties candidates go off the rails.
Well, this kind of thing is especially frustrating to STEM types who want to do the math, find the solution, implement it, and move on.
However, many people, and not just those in Congress, want to see if they can do better if they are just tough enough or stubborn enough. Democrats seem like wimps after all. It's a central Republican talking point. Biden is senile. We should be able to roll over him.
Sigh. So we need this long, drawn-out process to convince them that they can't get anything better.
If anything, it reassures me that regardless of what Mike Johnson might espouse as his desired policy, he apparently carries out negotiations in good faith. Unlike Kevin McCarthy.