Peter Suderman reminds us today that the congressional budgeting process is in tatters:
Since the 1990s, Congress has consistently failed to follow its own budgetary process rules, which call for writing, debating and passing a dozen single-subject appropriations bills over the course of each fiscal year.... Instead, Congress has relied on continuing resolutions, which are essentially deadline extensions, and omnibus spending packages, which bundle all or most of the nation’s discretionary spending into a single, giant spending bill. From time to time, lawmakers have combined these two into something that sounds like a horror movie monster — a “cromnibus.”
Like many of his predecessors, our new Speaker of the House has promised to restore order and transparency to the budget. Good luck with that. But if everyone on both sides of the aisle hates the current broken process, how come it never gets fixed despite endless promises to do so? Suderman is no idiot, so he knows perfectly well why Mike Johnson will be unable to meet his promised budget schedule:
To meet that ambitious schedule, Mr. Johnson will need to unite a querulous and unruly House Republican caucus behind a single budgetary agenda.
The only reason Johnson is speaker in the first place is because Republicans rebelled against Kevin McCarthy. And why did they rebel? Because they couldn't even agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government muddling along, let alone a dozen complicated funding bills. So McCarthy did a deal with Democrats and sealed his fate.
With this level of chaos, there's no way to agree on a budget except for leaders to do it behind closed doors. Even that's a dicey proposition, despite giving leaders the latitude to horse trade between agencies, not just within them. If the key to a deal is a billion dollars less for HHS and a billion more for Homeland Security, you can do it in an omnibus bill.
Right now, of course, House leaders are presumably still planning to break the promise they made earlier this year about spending levels, which puts them on a collision course with the Senate even if they miraculously agree on a budget among themselves.
This is no secret. Budgeting isn't chaotic because there's not enough time or because the government is too complex. It's because the wingnut wing of the Republican Party refuses to ever agree on anything.
"It's because the wingnut wing of the Republican Party refuses to ever agree on anything."
Well, there ya go. The House won't pass anything that can't pass with only Republican votes; the Senate can't get 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. For the past 20 years, both parties have simply averted their eyes and voted for a black box of a CR.
This time is different. This time, the lunatic caucus threatens to primary any Republican who won't go scorced earth with them.
Suderman can suck a bag of dicks. He knows damn well why everything needs to be crammed into a single bill after several CRs.
"A bog of dicks", again. I have lot of great "bag of dicks" pics. Too bad I can't show them to you here on Word Press.
Started drinking early this evening, Austin?
Like!
Will this insanity ever end….Are there enough sane voters to deep six t-Rump? Please gawd, let this be so.
15 days until the end of the current CR.
Johnson, being of MAGA mindset, seems very unlikely to do what McCarthy did. The "moderates" who caved and voted with the party to support Johnson may regret their actions when the whole world blames them for the total fuckup that causes chaos to spread.
If I'm being honest, hodge-podge single appropriations bills is fucking insane and I don't care if it's the old-fashioned way. That doesn't make it the right way.
Passing continuing resolutions to continue with the currently appropriated budget for the next year is the goddamn logical way to do it. Budgets should be continuous but living. You pass new legislation without an expiration date and it's added to the budget forever, unless/until it's repealed. You pass legislation with an expiration date and it's added to the budget until it expires, unless it's extended. Doing it any other way makes it harder than it should be.
Sorry brother, but this is one area where corporations (of all types: small, large, profit, nonprofit) have it right. You review your budget for the entire year and you do a thumbs up or down. If there are parts you don't like, you work to get them removed from the budget. If you want stuff added, you work to get it added. But you don't reauthorize the HR department's expenditures in January, and the accounting department's budget in February, and so on. You reauthorize the entire organization's budget at one time.
Isn't Suderman-- indeed the whole budget discussion in general-- leaving out the initial budget resolution that's supposed to provide the framework and parameters for the dozen appropriations bills? According to the CBPP, the resolution's targets-- which are supposed to be agreed on by both houses because it's a joint resolution-- are actually enforceable in the Senate but the House manages to evade them most of the time. For whatever they're worth, anyway, and if a joint resolution does get through.
The broader point is that "regular order" doesn't just mean committees working out what's spent where, it means doing so within the constraints of a joint budget resolution. And I believe there may have been some controversy about achieving those joint resolutions.
This is one area where Westminster systems do it better, because they actually can set overall spending levels and break them down effectively. Omnibus spending bills are really our system's equivalent and we've needed them. They're the kludge that allows two very different houses to pass identical spending laws, and we don't have them just because leadership is too self-aggrandizing. It's at least as much because omnibuses (omnibi?) are the only way the grandstanding rank-and-file cats can be herded into the same corral.
oh, get this,
social conservatism at it's finest,
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bk00giq0fa
They're not responsible for the poor people, that's for charities and volunteerism.
Could Hamas be more like Republicans, getting their hostages to vote for them with a great story about how they're entitled to hate somebody, and nothing else matters, and it's all a conspiracy of blue states, and gays, and, you know, Jews.
Don’t feed the Likudnik thread-jacking troll.
Can't see the forest for the rake you stepped on but the stars you see are pretty.
You're a Zionis, full stop. So no one needs to waste time listening to you.
That's all you have, using Zionist as a racist smear?
No good will happen while Hamas or anything like it is in place there.
Chuckle. Thank you, I'm bookmarking this one.
I'm all for not feeding trolls, especially off-topic. But can you address the quoted comment, independent of who brought it up? It is a real quote.
https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-mousa-abu-marzouk-tunnels-gaza-protect-fighters-%20not-civilians
Since you claim to not know what Zionism is all about, why should I care what you have to say? You also seem to think there are more Palestinians alive today than there were three weeks ago, so you're either flat-out delusional or just shamelessly dishonest.
I thought that quote was so striking and illustrative it needed to be shared.
Why would we WANT to pass a budget the old fashioned way? Is there some advantage to passing twelve bills as opposed to one or two?
Well, there's a chance that the many congressional staffers actually are able to read each of the twelve.
Admittedly, this was useful back when individual congresscritters could be given money for certain "projects" in their state. It was a way to overcome stubborn oppositonists. But Newt outlawed that back in the 1990s, and the Congress has worked less effectively since,.
Earmarks were inefficient and an obvious source of corruption. But at least budgets got passed.
Earmarks are back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/14/earmarks-are-back-members-both-parties-are-loving-them/
Please reconsider next time you accuse me of not knowing my history. 🙂
It seems to me that the business with defunding the IRS is an outfront crime. "Campaign contributions" are given in trade for a tangible benefit: lower taxes for the finaglers. Merrick Garland should appoint a Special Counsel to investigate collusion between wealthy campaign donors and their demand that the Repugs get the IRS off their backs. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Also, is there anything more shameful than linking foreign aid to a formal ally to that IRS defanging?
Concerning the investigation: the facts are pretty clear, so there is not much to investigate. The problem is that currently in the US, as long as you follow some rules, bribing politicians (and judges) is legal.
Supporting someone that wants to destroy democracy in the US is more shameful.
Yes there was a landmark Supreme Court case involving the former governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell who received a Rolex, free vacations, shopping sprees for his wife and other goodies but it wasn't deemed bribery because there wasn't an explicit quid pro quo. UGH. Of course they ruled that way, they are ALSO accepting bribes!!!!!
Don Siegelman on line 2.
I guess the problem for moderate voters is that too many representatives from the Democratic Party are too liberal and want to run the country "into the ground," and too many representatives from the Republican Party don't want to run the country at all. If you're a moderate independent, how do yo choose between two parties like that?
It's easy to blame the whole GOP for this, though, because the moderate members of the House could align temporarily for some bipartisan rule making, BUT THEY WON'T, because they are as careerist as the rest of their cowardly party members.
That's a clown take on the state of things. The GOP wants to burn the house down, even the so called moderates. Hakim Jeffries reached out to the GOP multiple times in the past few months signalling a willingness to work with the GOP on a compromise budget and then a compromise house leadership but nope, GOP wants to burn down the house.
You can only pass separate appropriation bills if both sides trust that the bargains they agreed to will be honored, and one side won't rat fuck the other by having "their" appropriations bill passed (like for more border walls) and then screw you over on the bills that you believed were agreed to later on. Given that cheating, lying, chaos, and rat fuckery is sole core competencies of today's MAGA GOP, I think this type of budget procedure is dead in the water.
Budgets are a basket of revealed preferences. The GOP would prefer that we all go to hell, but leave them our money behind forst.